Does your website make visitors stay? How can you get them to spend a little more time on your website? Well, a good website design or engaging content work; however, this isn’t enough to make visitors stay. Your site needs to satisfy the user’s needs and offer a great experience and easy functionality.
Here, in this blog, we will discuss 5 crucial website usability or User Experience principles that can aid in making your site easy to use, boost the average on-site duration, and better bounce rate. Besides, we will also talk about how to develop a website that’s user-friendly.
What is the meaning of Website Usability?
Usability refers to the simplicity and convenience of using any website. It describes how effortlessly users can browse a website. Some of the basic usability tips include:
- Easy navigation
- Proper utilization of taglines
- Strategic utilization of visuals
- Clickable buttons and links, and
- Concise and interesting content
To develop a user-friendly site, ensure that it matches the needs of your target customers or audience. Determine who your target audience is and what aims or goals they bear. Did they get everything they need after browsing your site? It’s important to understand your customer’s needs and know their behavior online to make a good website design and maintain the usability principles.
Why is Website Usability significant?
As per a study by HubSpot, 76% of the respondents said they find ease or convenience of finding information the most significant factor in website design. If your website’s UX/UI design is complicated, visitors might find it difficult to navigate, might not find the desired link or button, or even may not be able to make any purchase. All these factors will eventually lead to users leaving your website.
So essentially, what’s a user-friendly site? Well, it’s a website that is as convenient and easy to navigate as possible. Everything on the website should be simple and transparent.
Let’s now discuss the essential usability principles to make a user-friendly website.
Logical and Easy Navigation:
You should maintain a simple and clear navigation structure throughout the website. Good navigation focuses on intuitive and quick use, which means that visitors should be in a position to recognize as well as understand the menu structure on your website without any difficulties. The navigation menu should be easy to use, with short, concise links. You can implement a drop-down or mega menu if many links are to be used. That will help visitors navigate the website with ease and find the information they want.
Consistent Style:
It’s not possible to make a user remember your site’s structure, so it’s highly advised to make everything as per the convenience of the user. An effective UI/UX design suggests you develop a guideline for consistency of app structure or website. The style or colors should follow a common theme and be recognizable.
In addition, the principles of usability state that all web pages should have a well-balanced and structured layout. The content of your website should be distributed evenly. Longer texts should be separated with titles and paragraphs. All of this lets users navigate your website with ease, making them stay longer.
Industry-Specific Design:
It is significant to maintain the industry-specific standards during the website design process, depending on the sector your business caters to. A website template for a medical website won’t fit a travel agency site. Supporting the industry standards will aid in improving the user communication process and offer better website usability.
Nowadays, the majority of people have experience in interacting with a website. They hold certain expectations about a site’s interface that define an element’s location. If you think of changing an element’s location, that might negatively affect user experience. Hence, following the common standards and concepts is recommended while developing a user-friendly website.
Use Visual Information:
As the human brain can process visual data much faster, using illustrations and pictures will help attract the attention of users towards your site and develop a website that’s user-friendly. It’s significant to use high-quality pictures that integrate with your website’s structure efficiently. If you select incorrect content, it might confuse your users.
Besides, illustrations are a great way to attract a user’s attention. These help to display a site’s subject and theme and enhance the site’s UI\UX design. On the other hand, trying out playful animation as well as other gimmicks may also help separate you from the herd and work in your favor.
Device compatibility:
Your website should be compatible with every modern-age device. For this reason, platform accessibility and independence are crucial for web presence. That enables users to access a website from any device, regardless of what OS they are using. However, as a major portion of the users browses websites through smartphones, it has forced website developers to develop a mobile-friendly version of websites.
As per a report by Statista, the number of smartphone consumers worldwide in 2024 is likely to increase to 7.41 billion. In that case, the significance of mobile-friendly web design only rises.
There are specific suggestions for mobile UI/UX design:
- Try avoiding the use of large text. It’s best to break a text into tiny portions with an additional ‘Read More…’ section.
- Include as much line spacing as possible in order to make your text readable. As per the usability principles, the ideal font size is around 16px, while a bigger font size should be used for headings.
- Ensure that your site’s web forms are mobile adaptive. That will help enhance the user experience while entering data into your website.
These tips can help deliver a mobile variant of your site that can be easily used on all smartphones and loads fast.
Conclusion:
All the factors mentioned above in this blog will help you to develop a website design that is more user-friendly. These will make your customers feel welcomed and get them to engage more, visit the site again, and even recommend it to others in their connection. That will eventually help increase the influx of visitors and your target conversion rate too.
Hope this information was useful for you and has convinced you to have a user-friendly website. Connect with RP UXCollab to get a fantastic and user-friendly website for your company.
