Critical factors to design more usable website

There are many basic factors for having great website in designing a website and some of these factors are more important than other factors. But one of the key factors that always forget by the people is usability. Yes, of course usability. You build website for people to work with it so what is the benefit of a complicated website with high resolution pictures when people can’t work with it.

If you take a look to most popular website in the world like Google, Facebook, twitter, YouTube, yahoo, amazon, ebay and… they all are using a user friendly and easy to use interface, none of them use the large amount of pictures with a complicated design because most important thing for a website is visitors and what happen if visitors can’t work with your website or can’t find their visit's purpose in the website. For example, when you visit google.com to search, first thing that you see is search box not too many menus or a slideshow.

If your website is complicated or hard to use for visitors they like to go to other websites to doing their business, its simple factor, but it can make a huge difference in your website visiting counts. Having a usable website design includes many details, but for having a usable website never forget to take time for the following factors when you design your website

Layout: It must be simple and easy to use and it must give people tools or information that they want easily without taking much time or effort.

Navigation: Navigating in your website must be easy and simple for example contact menu or your home page must be very simple to find and it is very important to don’t use menus with sub level of 5. Maximum sub menu level for your website must be 3, these factors also can effect on google rank because for google a web page in 5th sub level has a low amount of importance. So, please take time to design a great sitemap and navigation plan according to your website audience needs while you are designing your website.

Content: The other important factor is the information that you provide in your website, your information must be informative and engaging and the information that you provide must be aligned with the purpose of web page, just give people information that they want in the shortest and simplest way that you can.

Overall Design: please don’t use heavy graphics, logos, unnecessary animations and transitions they just make your web page clutter and make it hard for user to find his way through your website. I don’t say to don’t use graphic but don’t over use it, the problem with some of designers is that they think if you don’t use much graphic website is not professional but what is the benefit of a heavy graphic website when it take 5 or 10 second to load, according to researches 9 second is the time for a user to spend to evaluate your website for work in first visit and what if you waste it with load time, but it is not just about load time it is about user experience and it must be functional for user.

As we said in beginning many factors slept in website design for having great website and one of them is usability, maybe a website with high graphic pictures and animations look cool and very professional at first look for you but what is its benefit when people can’t work with it. In other words people come to your website for taking an action so design your website more user friendly and easy to use as much as you can.