Usability is an essential component of successful, quality, professional website design.

What is usability?

Most of us intuitively understand what usability is - in our day to day lives, we don't really notice something that is usable but we certainly notice when it isn't! Think about it; when you encounter a door that doesn't open in the way that you expect it to. You turn the handle and pull, but nothing happens. For an instant, you're stumped. Then you try pushing the door and… it opens! You're in, but that short delay, that instant of confusion and frustration means that the door is not highly usable. The same thing applies to websites; how frustrating is it when you click around and around in circles on a website trying to find the information you want?

The International Organization for Standards (ISO) offers us a formal definition of usability in the ISO Standard 9241: A somewhat simpler definition is offered up by Dr. JoAnn Hackos:

The good doctor makes a very important point about usability, particularly in the context of websites: there is not point in creating a great looking, flash website if your intended audience can't use it.

If the people who visit your website can't use it, can't find the information that they want and can't take appropriate actions on your website then, to all intents and purposes, it's broken. An appropriate action could be buying something, making an enquiry, subscribing to a newsletter, leaving their details, downloading information, booking an appointment, requesting further information, asking a question, leaving their details, ordering tickets or whatever.

Whatever it is that visitors are supposed to do, or want to do when they visit your website, if they can't do it, then your website is, to them at least, unusable. In short, what makes your website usable is the extent to which somebody can achieve what they want to do and the extent to which it provides them with satisfaction in the process.

The fact is that most business websites fail to guide the visitor through a series of pages which conclude logically in one or more prescribed actions which increase the chances of the business gaining more sales and/or enquiries.

Our Approach: We seek to make every website that we build for our clients as highly usable as possible by following some simple usability principles. Use this short list of principles when thinking about your own website to ensure that it is as usable as possible:

• Provide effective menus and navigation
• Provide appropriate functionality
• Provide access to help and support
• Minimise (or better yet, eliminate) errors
• Give control to the visitor
• Support the visitor's preferred way of using websites
• Speak the visitor's language
• Keep the visitor informed
• Be consistent
• Implement a clear visual design