Summary of Website Usability Concepts

"Usability" refers to the ease with which people can use a website in order to achieve their goal. Principles of usability help people of all abilities, using any web browser, to make the most of the content provided.

Review Your Site's Usability: Ask yourself these questions as you look again at the pages of your site.

Usability Testing

Rocket Surgery Made Easy is a fantastic resource for learning about and running usability tests. It’s amazingly powerful to watch people try to use your site. With frequent usability tests, you can often catch (and fix) the most glaring errors.

Don’t argue. Test. When egos or ideas conflict during the process of building and maintaining a website, it’s invaluable to refer to test results—or more powerful yet, video—of people utterly failing at some critical task—or succeeding at something that everyone thought would be just awful. Find out what works instead of speculating about it!

Measuring user engagement on a larger scale than is possible with in-person usability tests can often be helpful. Running Content Experiments with Google will let you compare the performance of different versions of a page to see whether one of them performs quantifiably better than the other.

Usability Tips

Links

Tips for writing great links really covers it all.

Sidebar Content

Headers and White Space

Fonts

  • Limited Bold (bold text causes eye fatigue)
  • Plain Links (underlined text is already harder to read)
  • Lower Case (don't "shout" at your readers while reducing their comprehension)

Images

  • Best Images (some images lend themselves to web use better than others)

"Under Construction"

More Information