UX/UI Design Guide: Top 10 Web Usability Tips
Web usability is as significant as the design itself. A great design is not only visually attractive, but it is functional and easy to follow. Apple products’ success relies on the ‘simplicity’ design philosophy.
Usability is something that must be reviewed periodically to ensure that your website is not becoming increasingly complex as over time more information is added. And, for this reason, we have prepared a list of 10 simple and practical web usability tips that you can follow to enhance the user experience.The “usability” basically refers to the ease with which an average user can navigate and get what they want in a web interface. The fewer steps you require and the less time it takes to find what you are looking for, the better the usability you will have.
10 effective web usability tips
- A quality design that provides confidence
Elegant web design consists of attractive and relevant images, a simple logo, efficient content structuring and the use of a coherent color palette. Good read: How to use images on your website
Example: Careerfoundary web page with simple design and minimal information
- Web accessibility and usability standards:
Design the website by following the current web accessibility and usability standards. It benefits your visitors who find a faster and lighter site, and it also gives you an advantage when it comes to positioning on the search engines.
- Call to action buttons (Call to action)
It is recommended to use warm colors such as orange, red, or scarlet. These colors incite action, and there are studies that associate them with compulsive buying. In addition to the colors, it is important to take care that the call to action message is as clear and simple as possible.
- Standard colors for links
The color of the links of a website must be appreciated and clearly differentiated from the other contents. Using the standard blue color for links is a great idea since users associate any text painted in this color with a link. If, for example, we use the same format and color of the links to highlight simple texts, it could lead to confusion among visitors.
- Know a user’s end goal
Understanding the user’s behavior and what they want to achieve helps in designing a less distractive pathway. Amazon would be a great example. We decided to order Apple headphones with the lightning connector, it took us 1 minute 46 seconds on a slow desktop with only 6 pages that followed quickly to buy the headphones. Of course, it would take more time if you were still in the process of deciding but the pathway is quite straightforward.
Good Read: 5 Lessons UX Designers Can Learn From Psychology
- Internal and external links
A reference website should mention within its contents to its related pages, as this is facilitating the browsing of the internal sections. In addition, it is important to mention websites with authority that have relevance and provide useful information to our users.
- Navigation menu: “Quality before quantity”
Before having hundreds of menus, sub-menus and sub-sub-menus, which normally make visitors disorient in navigation. In short, it is better to present a quality navigation menu (with the most important and relevant information), rather than an endless menu.
- Optimum load time and size
A 2012 Google study suggested that a user will wait for about 5 seconds for a web page to load before abandoning it. Every additional second a website takes to load, increases the possibility of abandonment of the page. Therefore, it is advisable to take care of these details when starting any project.
Check web loading time: https://tools.pingdom.com/
- The popular “scroll” in usability
Although today users and technologies have evolved in the way of navigating, both in computers and mobile devices, it is still useful to have the most relevant information about our project in a first glance, without needing to scroll down.
- Support for different browsers and devices
Ensure that the website is compatible with the different browsers and the different resolutions of screens of the computers and mobile devices for its best usability and accessibility. More and more users access through mobiles, so the HTML5 code is the best option to make our web design adaptable or responsive web design.
