Good Website Design Needs Usability

There is no denying the importance of the internet in business operations. Good web presence is a huge requirement if you want your business to be productive. Poorly designed websites may leave your visitors confused and cause them to click away from your pages, thus, causing you to lose potential sales. It is for this reason that usability has fast become the most important aspect of web design. After all, no matter how aesthetically pleasing your pages are, they will be useless if people don't understand how they work. Web sites are not only supposed to be readable—they should also be easy to navigate and use. Here are some tips on usability that you could use when designing your website:

• Ecommerce websites that aim to sell products must be tested for usability because if consumers are having a hard time figuring out how to view, select, and purchase products; it would definitely result in lost sales. Make sure that your website identifies—clearly—each product including its details and contains clear instructions on how to order, pay for, and have their purchase delivered.

• Your website must also detail your business, especially when you offer a service instead of a product. It must clearly define what your company is all about, the services you offer, your fees, and how to contact and hire you. Easy navigation and readability—both of which are important aspects of usability, must be kept in mind while designing this kind of business website.

• Good website design should clearly define contact options and other important information about the business so consumers won't have trouble accessing your products and services. An intuitive design also makes it easy for consumers to send information and details about your company to other people looking for the same service as referrals.

Card Sorting - What is it and how can it Improve Your Website Usability?

Card sorting is one of the most efficient ways to measure a website's usability. It mainly helps evaluate and design a site's information architecture. During this process, participants are asked to organize topics into different categories that make the best sense to them. Categories may be pre-determined or labeled by them to help you determine the most appropriate tags/markers to use for the actual web design. Traditionally, actual cards and pieces of paper are used to conduct a card sort, but professional usability researchers and UX experts now use card sorting software tools to make the job easier. Seeking the help of professional usability experts will help you formulate the best card sorting strategy to use that will yield the best results for your site's information architecture and design.

Card sorting, like other usability experience research techniques ultimately help you understand what users expect from your site and how they understand your layout and your topics. It is most useful when you have already done your homework to find out about your target users and the kind of content that is relevant to them. Know how typical users sort information can help you label categories for proper navigation, build the structure of the website, and decide what the most important things to put on the homepage are.

Depending on the needs of your website, you may choose to do an open or closed card sort. In an open card sort, participants organize topics from the content within your website into groups and name each of the groups that they have created in a way that accurately describes the items or the topics in each category. A closed card sort, on the other hand, uses pre-defined categories. Researchers also use a combination of these two techniques, using an open card sort to identify content categories, and then a closed card sort to see how well the labels work.