che Usability?

Usability is an attribute relating to how easy something is to use. More specifically, it refers to how quickly people can learn to use something, how efficient they are while using it, how memorable it is, how error-prone it is, and how much users like using it. If people can’t or won’t use a feature, it might as well not exist.

That’s a lot of fancy talk for: can users quickly and easily do what they want to do and want you want them to do on your site without hurting their think bone?

No? Your site is not usable.

Why is usability important?
From the user’s perspective, usability is important because it can make the difference between performing a task accurately and completely or not, and enjoying the process or being frustrated.

From the developer’s perspective, usability is important because it can mean the difference between the success or failure of your web site.

In all cases, lack of usability can cost time and effort, and can greatly determine the success or failure of a web site. Given a choice, people will use web sites that are more user-friendly.

How do you achieve a high level of usability?
The first way is to comply with usability standards. Complying with standards gives you a head start when developing a web site. Some examples of usability standards are:

• using web-wide conventions
• writing the content in plain language
• not having pages of dense and unscannable text.

The second, and best, way to maximize usability is to conduct user testing throughout the design of your web site, because once you discover how people interact with your design, you can make it better.

How do you do this?
Users from the target demographic use your web site while an evaluation team records the user’s actions and their comments.

Changes are based on what difficulties the users had and a new round of testing begins.

This type of testing progressively refines the design by evaluating the web site from the early stages of design. The evaluation steps enable the designers and developers to incorporate user feedback until the system reaches an acceptable level of usability.

An example of usability

A web site’s home page
Users expect a lot from web sites today, and they are less tolerant of bad design.

Recent studies show that users with low web experience spend an average of 35 seconds on a website’s homepage.

Users with high web experience spend an average of 25 seconds.

What does this mean? You have approximately half a minute to make a good impression. If your web site is not usable you have lost that repeat visit.