Making a website ‘usable’ is a bit of a no brainer but it is surprising how many sites are designed and built without going through any sort of checklist to ensure usability standards are met.

Below are simple points which if adhered to will go a long way to ensuring websites are usable and therefore, useful.

Technical 

1. Site Speed

There is nothing more likely to increase your bounce rates than having a site which loads slowly. Web users are impatient and will leave quickly if there required content does not load fast. Optimising images, content and the structure of web pages combined with decent servers will help keep your site nippy. As a rule of thumb, aim for pages that are no more than 100k in size.

2. Use Alt tags

A few years ago only SEO people would bang on about alt tags, but with the increase in visually impaired users going online they have become a vital part of how people browse with aids such as screenreaders.  Ensure all images have alt tags associated with them with content relevant to the image.

3. Custom 404 pages

The one thing you don’t want to do when a user gets lost on your site is lead them to a dead end. A custom 404 page should provide useful links to popular pages or a sitemap as well as a search form to get them back on track. 404 pages are also a great way for designers to get creative and produce a page which is a little bit quirky.

4. Flash

There are a million reasons not to use Flash on a website...but we’ll stick with 2. Firstly, mobile phones really struggle with flash and secondly, you can do everything you could do with Flash and more with HTML5.  Just don’t use it!

5. Site colours and contrast

Being able to read the content clearly on a website is clearly a fundamental goal. It’s worth remembering that not all screens are the same, so what might look fantastic on your designers Mac may look awful on your target audiences standard PC. If you keep the contrast high between text and background everyone should be able to view it.

Content

Pretty much all usability guides from a content point of view could be taken straight out of a ‘how to make your website SEO friendly guide’.  SEO and Usability often cross over, after all, Google basically wants to rank the best sites first, so it makes sense they incorporate usability as an important part of their ranking algorithm.

1. Use text

Keep text as text on a web page, don’t store it all within images. Screenreaders will work correctly and search engines will be able to understand the theme of the page.

2. Use correct formatting

When you format a page in word you would most likely use formatting so users can easily read the document and segment it where necessary. Web pages are no different. Make use of the formatting tags such as using <H1> for the main page title, <p> tags for content, bullet points and user of italics and bold etc.

3. <title> tags

One of the first port of calls for SEO’s, optimising the <title> tags are a fundamental part of both SEO and usability. This tag is the title of the webpage you see within the search results and therefore is the first opportunity a site has to stand out from it’s competitors. Keeping these tags unique and informative to the page they relate to is a key part of usability.  Don’t just stuff them full of keywords!

4. User friendly URL’s

A URL which is full of question marks and numbers is clearly not going to be memorable to the user on the site. Try to ensure each URL is descriptive about each individual page.

Site structure and Navigation

Being able to navigate easily around the site will help to ensure users end up performing the desired conversion, whatever that may be. Optimising navigation is often not as easy as you would think but there are several points you can follow to ensure users can click around the site happily without getting lost.

1. Use breadcrumbs

A simple line of text showing the users whereabouts on the site they are and links to go back a few steps is an easy way of reassuring the user they are in the right section of the site.

2. Links are obvious

Linking to other pages within content is a great way of guiding users around a website.  Ensure the links are clearly identifiable as such, use underlines, different colours etc.  Also, where possible use anchor text which describes the page they are going to - limit the use of ‘click here’s’.

3. Search

Include a search form on every page so users have that option always available to them. If there are no results for a given term, try to offer other alternatives such as related pages or popular searches rather than showing them a big fat ‘0 results’.

4. Understand users like to start at home

Even if your site navigation flows beautifully, there are still going to be many users who will want to start from the homepage each time they look for something on your site and if that person want to look for 3 things in one sitting, they are likely to visit the homepage at least 3 times. Including a ‘home’ on every page is a must. Most users these days also expect the company logo to point to the homepage as well so make sure this is linked.

5. Learn and adapt

Use Google Analytics to understand what people are looking for on a site and how they are finding that content. From these learnings it is much easier to put in place or adapt the current navigation to make it much more user friendly.

Pretty much all of usability is common sense but is also very easily, and often neglected. Ensuring a site complies with basic usability guidelines will have far reaching consequences such as helping with Accessibility, SEO and of course increasing conversion rates on the site.