Usability tips for Web Designers

Simply put, usability is making your website easy for your visitors to find the information they need when they need it.

A common misconception about usability amongst web companies is that usability is expensive. Yes, there are multi-national companies that spend thousands of dollars on usability tests and research, but for an everyday company usability is achievable without the knowledge of usability experts or without expensive equipment for testing.

Web designers have an even easier job to do, just by reading usability articles they can accumulate a fairly good knowledge about usability basics and how to implement them on a website.

• Always include a tagline which should be the most obvious element on a web page.
• Implement a 27 characters wide site search and place it on top of your website.
• Don’t use extensive graphics and design elements.
• Include a site map page and register a sitemap XML document in search engines.
• Don’t break a user’s workflow. Allow every action to be canceled if necessary.
• Create easily scannable web content and place the most important information on top of your web page.
• Don’t design graphic elements that looks like a button, but is not.
• Present meaningful feedback and don’t forget that feedback works both ways.
• Use unobtrusive Javascript and graceful degradation.
• Avoid CAPTCHAs, use more usable methods instead.