Increasing Your Website’s Usability
In the Web design industry, one of the most important pieces of the website puzzle is a website’s usability. Usability takes into account how well a visitor can navigate around a website and find the information he or she is looking for. If a website can be traveled through without the user having to stop and ask for directions, usability is pretty darn good.
If you’re looking to increase your website’s usability so that your end users can find what they’re looking for with the least amount of searching and hassle, here are a few steps you can take.
Add a Search Box
When users first visit your website, they might want access to something they can’t find on the front page. So how do they find it? By searching categories or tags? By clicking through every menu option until they land on the item they’re looking for? Of course not. The first thing users will do, if a search box is available, is search. If your website doesn’t have a search box, get one.
Contact Page
Nothing is more frustrating than when you need to contact someone at a company, and their website has no contact page. Bridging the gap between the online and offline world is crucial if you want to provide a good customer service experience. After all, there are some people who are just more comfortable talking to another person on the phone than they are emailing or talking to someone in a chat box. Provide your users with a contact page containing your company’s address and telephone number to make part of the experience less frustrating.
Use Images or Videos to Illustrate Concepts or Organize Information
Words have their place, but in certain cases, nothing tells a story like images, videos, or sounds. Instead of talking about certain features of your product, show them off in videos or images. Instead of describing what one tier of your service offers over another tier, put together a comparative image table displaying pros and cons. If you can create the type of visual imagery your visitors would otherwise have to imagine for themselves, you are increasing usability on your website.
Have you worked on increasing website usability on your site? If so, feel free to share some of what you’ve done in the comments.
