A website is a portal into who your business is and what you do, if you cut corners with your website most users will assume you do things in a similar manner as it is a representation of yourself and your business. When a user feels delighted or smart on your website they tend to stick around a lot longer, when users don’t feel comfortable or confused this starts damaging your brand almost immediately.
For the reasons above usability should not be a last second process when designing and building your website. Making sure your website works after it is built is a very inexpensive method and could save you a lot of dramas down the track. It is also known bad usability will produce negative outcomes and a bad experience.
There are plenty of reasons to include usability into your website that will benefit you greatly. Some of them are:
- An increase in user satisfaction, this will translate directly into you receiving loyalty and a good brand name.
- An increase in the user productivity which will lead to completion and will give a feeling of success. In return this will produce the sales you are looking for.
- Usability is going to save you a lot of trouble down the track if it is done right the first time, why is this important ? It eventually starts saving costs from not having to fix the design issues in the future which may put you out of pocket unexpectedly.
- Simplifying usability is going to make things and objectives easier to understand for the people that need to know the information. This is good as it will bring down the time and costs of training and support when the information is needed.
- Word of mouth and social media are something that gets spread around when a customer or visitor enjoys something and finds the experience rewarding, if you can enable this to your clients, it will ultimately lead to free advertisement, this is a win – win situation for everyone.
- It will also bring a higher rate of returning visitors which is a main goal as it gives you a higher level of competitiveness.
So with all of these bonuses why would you not want to make sure your site is more usable and pleasant to function when someone visits it? Here are some tips on how you can implement more usability into your website. We also suggest doing some more research on the topics to give you a more full in depth understanding.
- Layout meets the industry standards of web design. This includes Headers, Footers, Navigation Bars etc.
- Making sure different browsers render your website correctly is very inexpensive and could save you a lot of embarrassment when internet explorer fails to load your webpage.
- Making sure your content is easy enough for your clients and visitors to understand is a very important factor. Not every visitor has a masters degree nor do they understand new age texting acronyms. So making sure at least a large percentage understand what the message is you’re trying to get a across will produce huge bonuses.
- Take the time to make sure your grammar and spelling is correctly written, as incorrect grammar can look extremely unprofessional and give a bad impression.
We hope this article has really helped you understand the importance of usability and implementing it to your site, as it can save a lot of time and money!
SEO and Web design go hand in hand, find out why here!