Basic Usability Principles For Layman

Businesses create a website with some basic purpose, which is either to increase brand awareness, grow sales or inform about a product. Whatever the purpose is, a website must be created with this purpose in mind. If a website is not able to achieve its purpose, it is as good as it is dead.

To achieve the purpose, designers must ensure the usability of a website. In simple terms, usability refers to how easy and simple it is to use the interface or UI. There are some basic criteria to judge the usability of a website. If a business wants to ensure the usability of their website, these quality criteria must be fulfilled first.

Ease of Use: How easy it is for users to complete a task when they visit a website the first time?

Efficiency: How quickly they are able to perform the task once they understand the user interface?

Memorable: How easy and quick it is for users to perform a task when they revisit a website after some time?

Mistakes: How many mistakes users have made when performing a task, the severity of these mistakes and how easy were they able to recover from it.?

Satisfaction: Were they satisfied after using the website?

Ensuring usability is necessary to survive in the market. If a user is unable to perform a task and achieve his purpose, then he will quit. This is because there are several other similar websites, so there is no need for them spend time on figuring out a design. To retain users, usability must be ensured on your website.

Usability Guidelines

To improve usability, businesses need to work on improving a website to fulfill the criteria mentioned above. This can be done by creating a usability guideline before the design process has even started. The usability guidelines must be based on the above-mentioned criteria. Once the guidelines are established and implemented, next comes the testing part.

Usability Testing

Even after following the guidelines it is highly possible and most likely that your website still doesn’t meet the above criteria. To ensure usability, you need to conduct usability testing. The basic method of conducting a usability test is to ask a customer or user group from your target market to try out your website. Set out some basic tasks for them to perform and observe as they do that. Note down, how they interact with a website, where they succeed and where they make mistake. Get feedback from your customers. Now use the data you have collected to improve the usability of your website.