How to improve usability: what points to pay attention to when developing the website
When designing a website, two main factors must be taken into account – technical characteristics for search engines and comfort for users. By making the resource clear and convenient for people, you increase traffic and conversion rate, which is one of the main objectives of the website. Ergonomics, ease of use, and clear structure of the resource – all include the concept of usability.
To understand what points to pay attention to when prototyping and developing a website design, it is necessary to carry out an analysis of competitive resources. This will highlight their strengths and weaknesses, introduce better solutions and interesting details, as well as avoid annoying mistakes.
An important point for an effective website is the use of SEO tools. First of all, it is worth checking page load time. There is serious competition in the market – after entering the resource, the user will not wait for all the pictures and text to load, he will go to a faster site. Therefore, loading time should be controlled within 1.5 to 3 seconds. You can check the parameter with the help of Google Pagespeed Insights, in addition, the tool will point to other problems of the site, which slow down its work.
Certain rules apply to the design of the website. For example, the format of the logo, its size, optimizing pictures to reduce their volume, reducing the number of scripts, and other points. The header should contain brief information about the company, which will allow the user from the first seconds of visiting the page to understand what services the business provides. You should also fill out the mandatory pages – “About Us”, “Shipping”, and “Contact Us” – where the visitor can immediately find the necessary information. In addition, these pages are necessary for the website’s ranking by search engines – their absence makes it impossible to launch Google Shopping.
An established trend in the market of online and offline services is customer focus. Businesses are doing everything possible to become closer to their consumers, to provide them with better service than their competitors. One of the key principles of this is the company’s communication with the customer. Business for its part should provide a variety of options for communication and rapid response to a request from the consumer. Now there are a huge number of tools for this: IP telephony, feedback forms, chatbots, clickable phone numbers, and links to the business’s social media accounts. Ideally, by clicking on the appropriate icon, the user goes directly to the messenger.
It is also important to pay attention to the structure of the site, its sections, and subsections. Searching for the right category should be intuitive for anyone. You should not overload the navigation with a huge number of small subsections, they are easy to get confused. It is better to combine similar types of products in one group, but on the condition that they are faster to find the user. For a quick selection of a particular product, you need to introduce the option of searching by name or product description.
