In our last edition we told you how having a user-friendly website may help improve your business. But how do you know if your site is easy to use? Usability expert Keith Instone (http://www.usableweb.com/) says it’s simple to evaluate your site by answering three short questions. If you are dissatisfied with any of your answers, you know something is wrong.
Choose a random page on your site and ask yourself:
Where am I?
What’s here?
Where can I go?
1. Where Am I?
Can you tell where you are?
Remember that users may not necessarily enter your site through the homepage, but rather through a search engine, bookmark or link from another website. Let them know where they are. This is critical. If you have ever been lost in a new city, you know that feeling of being disoriented -- you look for street signs, landmarks, anything that will help you get your bearings. The same thing is true when your users land on a new page. Even though the browser displays the URL and title of the page, it is essential that the page have some form of branding to let your users know they've found you. Use your logo, prominently displayed on the top of the page to tell them. At the very least, restate your domain name so that it is easily recognized.
2. What’s Here?
Can you instantly determine what the page is about?
Like a treasure hunt using a treasure map, people need to know that they've found what they are looking for. Your web pages need to have a clear sense of purpose, and display information in terms your users can easily recognize. Use navigation that has an obvious visual hierarchy and appropriate page labels. Provide basic information that can be scanned easily so that people coming from anywhere will know that they're in the right place.
3. Where Can I Go?
Does the user get a sense of where they can go if they keep surfing the site? What other things do you want them to know about your company? Once your users have determined that they are in the right place, they will then look to see what else is there. Generally, they will check the navigation to find this out. (Note that this evaluation occurs in an instant and at a nearly subconscious level.)* Let your site's structure act as free advertising for the rest of your site by clearly distinguishing what on the page is navigation.
Remember what we wrote in our last edition?
Mark Hurst of Good Experience (www.goodexperience.com), defines a user- friendly website as the tiebreaker when all other things are equal. If two sites are offering the same services or products, the site that is more usable will be successful. In other words, you can prevent your customers from going to your competitors' site by designing your website around their needs.
Now that you have evaluated your site, take a moment to look at your competitors' site and try answering the same three questions.
* Jeffrey Veen: The Art and Science of Web Design
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