Here are our top ten tips for making your business website more intuitive to use:
- Usability is all about your customers – and making things easy for them. Keep them at the forefront of your mind from the start of the design process – creating ‘personas’ (fictional characters representing a particular market segment) can help with this.
- Navigation needs to be clear, well-labelled and present on every page. It shouldn’t be possible to visit a page and get ‘stuck’ there – you should be able to easily return to the section you’re in, or to the home page, from any page of your site.
- Bear in mind that most users skim-read web content. Make it easy to do this by being concise, highlighting important points, and breaking up content with useful subheadings.
- Familiarity is key – most online visitors will expect company websites to have a separate page for contact information, for example. Putting this key information elsewhere – even if it is clearly signposted and easy to find – will go against customer expectations, reducing usability.
- Styles, colours and brand image should be consistent throughout your website pages – this helps provide a smooth user journey through the site.
- Remember that most website users don’t want to have to learn how to use your website. Although unusual or minimalist navigation may look interesting from a design standpoint, it’s a disaster for usability.
- Visitors to your site, as in life, will make errors. For good usability, it should be easy to recover from these – eg to change an entry in a form without having to start from scratch, or to remove a product accidentally added to a basket.
- If your aim is to guide users towards a particular action – such as a purchase – make the steps and choices clear and unambiguous – for example, ‘Add this item to your basket’, not ‘Buy this’, or even ‘Click here’.
- Don’t forget accessibility for users with disabilities, as well as for people viewing the website on different devices, such as smartphones. Your website should comply with W3C build standards.
- Finally, testing and measuring are vital to keep improving your website’s usability. User focus groups and ‘customer experience’ surveys can give you valuable insights.
