User-friendliness is a term that should never be overlooked when it comes to websites. It should remain one of the ultimate goals you should adequately look into when designing your website. It is not about how fancy your website is. You can have a beautiful website with beautiful graphics and designs; however, if the website proves to be a maze to navigate, then the website could be of no greater use.
Creating a user-friendly website carries as much weight as creating a website with a unique design. Most website owners now understand the essence of creating a user-friendly website. However, most of them do not know some of the features that they should be looking at when determining if their website is user-friendly or not. This article explains some of the key features you should look at when checking if your website is user-friendly.
What It Means by A User-Friendly Website
Website usability refers to the ease of using a website, from reading the website content, navigating through the website, completing a task on the website, making a purchase, selecting a product on the website, successfully loading a page. All these are the elements that refer to the usability of a website.
An important concept that relates to website usability is Accessibility. It focuses on the skills and limitations of your potential website visitors and how they impact how your visitors use your website and consume the website content. For instance, how someone with a visual impairment uses a website is not similar to someone with how someone with proper eyesight will use the website. These are some of the things that you need to put into consideration when creating a user-friendly website.
Why User-Friendliness Matters to Your Website
A user-friendly website stands head and shoulder above all other websites. The more user-friendly a website is, the better chance it stands to get more visitors to engage with the website and learn. It will be pretty hard for a user to shop through your eCommerce website, sign up for a program or read your blog articles if the user cannot figure out how to complete these actions or the user gets frustrated in the process of completing these actions.
From the accessibility point of view, it is not about thinking about a few users with different abilities. The thing is, when you aim to make your website more accessible, you are doing everyone a favor. What is good, user-friendly, and accessible to one category of users will also benefit all your other visitors.
Determinants of a User-Friendly Website
1. Mobile Compatibility
The number of smartphone usages has significantly increased in the recent past. A great majority of the world is now using mobile devices to access the web. This trend has had a significant impact on websites. The traditional websites that were not mobile-compatible have become almost irrelevant in today’s era of mobile usage. Although many industries have mobile-friendly websites, some industries are yet to realize the significance of a mobile-compatible website to its users.
Ensuring that all your visitors have a great experience, regardless of what type of device they are using to access your website, is very important to your business. If your website takes too long to load on mobile devices or has some compatibility issues, then your website visitors might leave the website and use your competitors’ websites. At this point, you notice how much weight a mobile-friendly website will have on the general success of your business and your website.
Apart from having significant advantages to your users and driving in more traffic, mobile-friendliness also improves your search visibility, enhances user experience, increases lead generations, and improves brand identity.
So, how can you tell whether or not your website is mobile-friendly? That’s pretty simple. You can determine whether your website is optimized for mobile devices by checking whether the website scales to display content that fits even smaller screens. The simplest way to check whether your website is mobile-friendly is by using Google’s Search Console mobile-friendly test. You need to paste your URL into the search bar, and you are done.
2. Website Accessibility
According to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), “the web is fundamentally designed to work for all people, whatever their hardware, software, language, location, or ability. When the web meets this goal, it is accessible to people with a diverse range of hearing, movement, sight, and cognitive ability. When websites, applications, technologies, or tools are badly designed, they can create barriers that exclude people from using the web.”
A good website should be accessible to all categories of people, including those with visual impairments, the old, and the disabled. Usually, these categories of users will use screen users to access your websites. You must make your website available to all users by adhering to the 508 website accessibility guidelines.
The W3C has provided clear and extensive guidelines that you can follow to ensure that your website is accessible to all individuals.
3. Website Security
Just like having your car get safety approval, you also need to perform a security audit for the safety of your users. A secure website is a user-friendly website. Today, the issue of website security should be taken seriously. This is following the recent surge in data breaches that target small and big businesses. There is no point in running an insecure website that could easily compromise the users’ data.
To ensure that your users’ data remain safe and secure on your website, you will have to put in place proper security measures and protocols. The SSL certificate has been a great player in matters about website security. To ensure that your website is safe from the ill-work of hackers, you will have to buy SSL certificate and install it on your website.
The SSL certificate is an encryption tool that protects the data transfers that happen between your users and your browsers. The certificate converts raw data into the gibberish and indecipherable format. It will be useless for an intruder to access encrypted information.
So, how do you know whether or not your website has an SSL certificate? You will have to check the URL of a website. Generally, a website with an SSL certificate will have its URL starting with HTTPS and a padlock symbol next to it. A website without the certificate will have its URL starting with HTTP and would not have the padlock icon. To ensure that your website users are protected from security vulnerabilities, you must acquire and install the SSL certificate on your website.
4. Fast Loading Speeds
Loading speeds and website user-friendliness are birds of a feather that must always flock together. You can not mention one and leave out another. Most web visitors will show a great sense of satisfaction to those sites that load quickly. Their intolerance will begin to manifest in bold when a website starts taking too long to display its content.
Most web visitors prefer websites that load faster. This explains why websites with incredible loading speeds are associated with low bounce rates. To make your website more user-friendly, you will need to reduce the loading time to the utmost 5 seconds. You can use page speed tools such as Pingdom and Google PageSpeed Insights to determine the speeds of your website.
5. Effective Navigation
All the content on your website should be easy to find. The website should have clear calls to action and navigation bars that will direct your users to move from one point to another. You should adequately silo your website to determine its navigation. The most important thing here is to ensure that your users find what they are looking for. If it is an eCommerce website, they should have an easy time going through the entire purchase and payment procedures.
6. Well-Organized Website Content
This last bit takes more than just a tool to create a user-friendly website. You should ensure that your web pages, content, and resources on your websites are well-organized. After that, your website will qualify to be termed as user-friendly. You should ensure that you adhere to the 3-click rule where your web visitors should not be allowed to make more than three clicks before they find what they are looking for. A well-organized content will impact your users’ experience and help create an excellent website impression that can help build a reputable brand.
Conclusion
Having a user-friendly website will significantly impact the success of your website. A user-friendly website will provide a seamless user experience to web visitors and improve the chances of your website’s success. As you think about designing a website, always have your users in mind. This article has clearly explained some of the considerations you should make when determining whether your website is user-friendly.