10 Tips for a Better User Friendly Website

Web design is about making the website easy for visitors to navigate through and find what they’re looking for whenever they need it.

The usability of a website for some companies is so important that they spend thousands of dollars to make sure that it’s friendly for users.  It’s achievable without needing to hire an expert nor spending huge sums of money.  This can be easily achieved by web designers if they read more about usability and how to create designs that meet visitors’ requirement.

Here are few steps on how to apply such usability to your website:

1. Tagline is important

It is a sentence formed from few words that best describe the company/website’s mission. This should always be obvious and that’s why lots of companies add it along with their logo.  Just like for instance, Nike “Just do it” or Nokia “Connecting people”.

When a visitor lands on a page, they only got 8 seconds to decide whether they want to continue browsing or not.  That is why a tagline that describes the website should be placed obviously enough for people to see.

Here are 2 examples of good taglines:

 

2. Avoid too much graphics

Excessive use of graphics and design tools is always bad, this will make the visitors quit the website before even reading its content the first line.  The less is always the best – it’s all about using the right colors and themes of the pages that make it look good thus attracting visitors every time.

3. Don’t interrupt users

If a user is filling out a form or registering, don’t interrupt them by a pop-up Ad or make them take complete a survey. Don’t break such work flow and let the user continue filling the form to smoothly complete the process.

 

One of the most common annoyance are the JavaScript links that, when a user hovers over, sends out a small popup.  It’s not recommended at all to use such links especially for business websites because it may drive the user to close the page while filling out an inquiry.

4. Site search engine

Adding a search engine in your website is one of the most common features users look for if they are in a hurry and don’t want to browse the whole website for a specific piece of information.  Try to make the search box fit for up to 30 characters because users may want to see what exactly they wrote.

Place this search box in the top right hand side of the page plus the search button beside the typing box should be called “search” and not any other word.

5. Create readable webpages

The easy to read web pages provide the best optimization for the users’ eyes.  It will make them stay and read the rest of the content of your page.  Most of internet users just scan web pages to see the titles and bold texts.

- Visitors won’t read the exact page word by word at first, they’ll just scan it for important texts which are most likely highlighted.

- Place the most valuable information in the first 2 paragraphs because this will make the visitor continue reading the rest of the article.

- Lists and sub headings are important as well because they let the user know that it’s the beginning of a new part therefore, the title word is important.

 6. Excessive usage of JavaScript

With the evolution of technology and the increase of JavaScript and Ajax usage, many web designers and developers preferred to use them now to provide more dynamic websites but it may annoy the users because it may not work perfectly due to an error or a compatibility issue with the user’s browser.

 7. Customized 404 Pages

If a user is browsing a website and clicked on a link that’s not working, or even landed from another website to a page that’s non-existing – Error 404, it’s important to use a customized 404 Page. 

A customized Error 404 page is much better than the default 404 Error page.  You can create a page that appears when a visitor clicked on a broken link and this page may include the main links or sections of your website. Such page may encourage the user to click on one of the links to the sections of your website.  With this, you’re back on the track and got yourself another visitor from a non-existing link.

 8. Misleading icons

Navigation menus are always designed as a list with adding some colors to it, but there are some designers who prefer to add icons beside each link to make it easy for the eyes to recognize what kind of link it is.

 9. Use Site Maps

Google, Yahoo, and Bing are all now using site maps to index websites.  This also improves the search engine optimization and for better results when a user searches for something.  It can be created in a form of a webpage or list.

The site map is formed in an xml file and it could be made by tons of site map generators that index your website and create the sitemap for you to submit it to search engines.

10. The Annoying CAPTCHA

CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to distinguish Computers and Humans apart. There’s no user on the internet who hasn’t faced it before, it’s purpose is to separate humans from computer bots whenever registering or submitting data.

The problem of the CAPTCHA is the weird, distorted letters and numbers that are written in different styles and fonts while others use distorted images.  Users then have to find out correctly what exactly the images are.