Avoid these usability mistakes
One of the components to building good websites is usability. So what is usability? Wikipedia defines usability as, "a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool (in this case a website) or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal." Usability should be part of the planning process and ultimately a user should be able to answer these types of questions, "How can I find what I am looking for?" "How much does this cost?" "What would you recommend?" or "What do other people think of this product?" Usability can take many forms. You want your website to be standards compliant, you want it to have enough content to be findable in search engines, you want it to function well on different browsers and you want to have a goal or call-to-action. Here are some usability mistakes you'll want to avoid:
- Lack of calls to action - Your website should have some objective that you want visitors to achieve. Whether that is buying a product, filling out a form or making an appointment.
- Broken links - Keep a clean house. Doing the maintenance on your site to keep it running correctly is essential. No one will keep coming back to a broken product. There are many link checking programs you can buy.
- Hidden or hard-to-navigate navigation - Make it easy for people to read the story of your website. Careful with drop-downs and having to move your mouse it just the right location. Make it easy!
- Small text sizes - Make it readable for everyone.
- Splash pages - These have long gone out of style and with good reason.
- Flash - Using flash wisely is just fine. Key takeaway here: don't use flash for your navigation.
- Horizontal scrolling - Commonly rated one of the worst usability experiences.
- Layouts - Use a layout grid and wireframe your site out. Don't make it too busy and cluttered.
- Contrast - Both extremes are bad with contrast. Don't use light text colors against light backgrounds and avoid too much severe contrast as well.
