Are you looking to improve web usability but don’t know where to start? Web usability is about trying to make sure that your website is as intuitive and easy to use as possible. Trying to decide on a course of action isn’t clear when there are so many things to work on. If you know that your website needs an overhaul, here are some areas that you can change to yield big changes in your results.
It’s always a good idea to work on your accessibility issues. Ensure that your website loads quickly and is compatible with the major browsers. To cater to the ubiquitous mobile device usage, you also want to set up a mobile version of your website as well. You want to focus on all the possible things that can prevent users from using your website to start with.
The next logical step is to clean up your communication which is your content. Go through your content and break it up into manageable chunks. Use a font that has high readability and make sure that it is laid out in a way that makes your content easy to read. Finish up by going through your images to optimize their placement, file size (to decrease loading time) and alt tags.
Getting rid of all the technical issues is very important as well. Technical problems can prevent your website from being displayed properly or displayed at all. That’s why you want to go through your javascript and Flash usage and test it against the major browsers to see if everything runs smoothly. Scripts and other add-ons can also slow down loading, so make sure you specifically check the loading times on the pages they’re run on.
Finally, you want to work on your UI (user interface). Your UI is basically the navigation menu on your website. A big part of making your website “usable” is making sure that it’s easy and intuitive to browse through your site. That’s why you want to structure your navigation in a meaningful way, categorize your pages as best as possible, and design the navigation as simple as possible.
Working on these areas will give you a big start on improving your site’s usability. Using specific tools like website heat map readers, readability scoring tests, and loading speed optimizers will help you gauge how effective your changes are. There are many tools out there that provide you significant information for free. There’s no need to invest in an expensive software suite, so you can get the data you need even if you don’t have the budget to invest heavily into improving your website. The only thing left to do is to get started by focusing on one area at a time.