By now, all good designers and developers realize the importance of usability for their work. Usable websites offer great user experiences, and great user experiences lead to happy customers. Delight and satisfy your visitors, rather than frustrate and annoy them, with smart design decisions. Here are 9 usability problems that websites commonly face, and some recommended solutions for each of them.
1. Tiny Clickable Areas
Hyperlinks are designed to be clicked, so to make them usable, it makes sense to ensure that they're easy to click.
Why would we want a larger clickable area? Simple. Because our hand movement with the mouse isn't very precise. A large clickable area makes it easier to hover the mouse cursor over the link. To ensure we get a large clickable area, we could either make the whole link bigger or increase the padding around the link using the CSS "padding" property.
2. Pagination Used For The Wrong Purpose
Pagination refers to splitting up content onto several pages. This is often found on websites that have long lists of items; for example, products in a store or pictures in a gallery. Using pagination for this purpose makes sense because displaying too many items on one page would make the page slower to download and process.
But there is another way that pagination is used on the Web today. Content pages, like blog articles, are sometimes split into several pages. It's unlikely that the article is so long that it requires pagination; in most cases, it is used to increase page views.
While this may seem like an easy way to squeeze more money from your ads, it poses two main problems. The first is that having to load several pages just to read one article isn't fun.
The second reason has to do with SEO (search engine optimization). Search engines use the content on your page to make sense of what it is about and then index it accordingly. If the content is split into several pages, it is diluted, and so each page makes less sense on its own and holds less keywords about its topic.
3. Duplicate Page Titles
The title of each Web page is important. Page titles are the pieces of text we write between the <title> tags in the <head> section of our HTML code. Sometimes people create a generic title while working on their website's template and then re-use the same title across the whole website. This is wrong because it robs each page of a couple of key benefits.
A good title communicates to your visitors a lot of information about what the page is about. And a title doesn't just show at the top of the browser window; it's also shown on the search engine results pages.
Search engines need different information to rank the results of a particular query. Page title is one of the more important pieces of information they use to gauge how relevant your page is to a particular search term.
4. Content That Is Difficult To Scan
To ensure that your website is usable, you cannot only have a good design; you also need good copy. Copy is a term used to describe all of the text content on a website. Yes, good design will guide your visitors around the website, focus their attention on the things that matter and help them make sense of information chunks; but visitors will still need to read text to process information. This makes copy an essential part of your overall website design.
Before you can write good copy, you need to understand how people will actually view your website. Don't assume that your visitors will read everything from top to bottom. People tend not to read websites top to bottom; they start reading whatever pops out at them first, and then move to the next thing that captures their interest.
5. No Way to Get In Touch
User engagement is important if you want to build a successful community, and communities are important if you want to build successful websites and social Web apps. User engagement is also important if you want to build loyal customers. Quickly answering people's questions and fixing their problems doesn't just mean that you have good customer service - it means you care, and your customers and visitors will appreciate it.
But many websites still don't give visitors an easy channel for getting in touch with the company. Some websites don't even have an email address or contact form on them.
The favorite solution is putting email addresses on the Web. You could also use contact forms to bypass the problem of showing your email address on a page.
Online forums are a great communication channel that can be an alternative way for users to get in touch. A public forum is better than a simple contact form or email because your customers can help each other on a forum.
6. No Way to Search
A lot of people start looking for a search box as soon as they arrive on a page. Perhaps they know exactly what they're looking for and don't want to spend time learning the website's navigation structure.
Whether you run an online shop or blog, you need search. People may come looking for a particular product or for an article they remember reading a while back, and chances are they'll want to find it with a quick search.
7. Too Much Functionality That Requires Registration
Your website may have some content or features that require visitors to register before using. That's great, but be careful how much content is put behind this registration shield. Very interactive Web applications, such as email, document editing and project management, restrict 100% of their functionality to registered users.
When you implement a log-in barrier, be careful that you don't lock away features that don't really need user identification. Some blogs require people to register before posting. Sure, that will significantly decrease spam, but it will also significantly decrease the number of comments you see, too.
8. Old Permalinks Pointing Nowhere
A permalink is a link to a page that isn't meant to change; for example, a link to a blog article. Problems occur, though, when a website moves to another domain or has its structure reorganized. Old permalinks pointing to existing pages on the website become dead unless something is done about them. That something is called a 301 redirect.
301 redirects are little instructions stored on your server that redirect visitors to appropriate pages. So, if someone arrives on your website using an old link, they won't see a 404 error page ("Page not found"): the 301 redirect forwards them to the right location, provided that you've set it up correctly. The number "301″ designates the type of redirect that it is: permanent.
9. Long Registration Forms
Registration forms are barriers. They are barriers because it takes effort to fill them in, and the task itself is no fun. People have to invest time and effort to register, and then they have to invest even more time and effort in future to remember what user name and password they used.
Less Thinking
Usability is all about making things easier to use. Less thinking, less frustration. A website should do all the work and present visitors only with the things they're looking for. Usability is also about the experience people have using your website, so attention to detail matters, as do the presentation and feel of the page.
As Disual we aim to provide flawless websites and try to fix former usability mistakes. Call us to get impeccable web sites.