If you aim to design a successful website, you need to consider several aspects. What many webmasters forget or don’t consider as an important feature is usability. Let’s have a look at the topic so that you don’t end up making easily preventable mistakes.
What constitutes website usability? What is the definition of usability and what impact does it have on your users? After reading this post, you’ll think about some things differently and might want to make some things right away. Our tip for you: Give it some time and thoughts about the adjustments you can make to quickly improve the usability of your website.
What Does Usability Mean?
If we had to give a definition for usability, we would describe the term as follows. Usability includes everything that is necessary for a comfortable use of a homepage. This makes it obvious that there are various aspects that need to be scrutinized for a great usability.
These include both technical aspects and content aspects. For your website to be user-friendly, it needs to be intuitive at best. That’s why you should give a lot of importance to the menu and general navigation on your site. After all, it is unfortunate to change it again at a later stage. The menu is usually the first thing a user notices. This can be positive or negative. Depending on how easy it is to find the way around.
Usability and SEO – What Should Be Considered?
The term SEO or search engine optimization has surely crossed your path before. Since all internet users use search engines, your goal should be to rank your homepage as high as possible in the relevant searches. You should optimize your website for the search terms that are relevant to you. However, you should not overdo it.
The artificial intelligence of search engines can now recognize whether a keyword only occurs particularly often in a text, or whether the page really deals with the topic and offers the reader added value. The structure of texts is also analyzed, and it is recognized whether it is an endlessly long text with many words or a structured text with good reader guidance and therefore an adequate usability.
You should pay attention to this if SEO is not meant to lead to limited usability of your site:
- Don’t use an unnatural structure just so you can accommodate a keyword.
- Avoid too much advertising to generate sales.
- Use meaningful subheadings to guide the reader through the text.
The Connection Between Usability and User Experience
Many people believe that usability and user experience are one and the same, and they are utterly wrong. There is a clear delineation of the definition of usability and user experience. Usability is understood to be the user-friendliness of digital products, which includes apps as well as websites and online stores. It is particularly important for a user-friendly homepage that the user quickly and effectively obtains the information he or she is looking for. Clearly structured menu navigation, a pleasant font size and the avoidance of annoying pop-ups are measures for good usability.
The term user experience goes one step further. It encompasses all the perceptions of a user during a visit to a website. This also includes, for example, the color and graphic design of a website, which would be secondary to user-friendliness. Examples from practice for a good user experience are, for example, the cooperation with well-known companies that are considered secure in an online store. This could be payment service providers such as PayPal or shipping service providers such as DHL. To achieve a good user experience, the user’s emotions and perception play a major role.
The User Experience on Mobile vs. Desktop Websites
Since a large part of users no longer sit in front of a PC but use their mobile devices to browse the internet, you definitely need to keep the user experience of your mobile website in mind as well. Unfortunately, there are still examples of well-run desktop websites that are completely unusable as a mobile website because their display in the mobile browser is anything but user-friendly.
There are even experts who put more importance to the user-friendliness of mobile websites than to the usability of classic desktop websites. The technical effort to achieve a customer-friendly presentation on both devices is worth it. For the maximum success of your web project, you should create the greatest possible user-friendliness in both areas.
What Are the Criteria That Make up a User-Friendly Website?
In addition to presentation and content, there is another area that is enormously important for the user-friendliness of websites. It is the technical area, which many webmasters completely disregard and rely on the default settings of their hosting provider. In doing so, you will surely have been annoyed by long loading times of a homepage. Thanks to tools that test the performance of your website, you can identify possible places for adjustment. How much data you present in the form of images or videos also has an influence on loading times. Check whether you can do without some of it without changing the desired presentation.
A topic that is becoming increasingly important is the accessibility of a website. When you think about building a project, keep people with disabilities in mind. An accessible website is basically considered to be very user-friendly and the perception in search engines could be increased by it. We have written a separate article concerning accessible websites, which can provide you with a lot of valuable information and inspiration.
Friendly Captcha Increases Website Usability
If you want to increase the usability of your website, you should also take a look at Friendly Captcha. From your own experience, you surely know how annoying it is to complete small tasks before sending a contact request so that you can prove you are not a computer. These tasks, known as captcha tests, help to ward off unwanted requests, known as spam. However, for all human users who want to send a message, this little task is a nuisance.
At Friendly Captcha we have developed a captcha test that runs completely unnoticed in the background. While the user fills in the necessary fields, a cryptographic puzzle is solved, and the homepage recognizes that the user is actually human. User-friendliness and user experience are increased by our captcha test because no time-consuming tasks must be completed. And you don’t have to live without effective protection against spam messages from bots.
