Do you want users to spend more time on your website and come back more often when they leave? Before rushing to spend large sums on advertising campaigns, try improving your website’s usability. In this article, we will explain what usability is and how to make it as appealing as possible to users.
What Is Website Usability?
Before improving website usability, it’s recommended to understand the meaning of the term. The answer to the question “What is usability?” is “ease of use” in English. In our context, it refers to the ease of using a website. To make visitors stay on your site and find the information they’re interested in, it’s necessary to improve the website’s usability, increasing its chances of ranking at the top.
What is the usability of a good website? It’s when a user gets what they need from the first view or click. By understanding visitor’s needs, arrange important elements logically to enhance the website’s usability. Structuring and organization are some of the key indicators of what makes usability truly effective and well thought out.
How to Improve Website Usability?
There are several areas where you can enhance user interaction with the website:
- Loading Speed:
- Eliminating excessive information.
- Proper structuring.
- Navigation elements.
- Form design.
Some of these aspects can be implemented relatively easily and can immediately elevate the user experience. Let’s break down each area:
1. Loading Speed:
A few simple actions by an experienced developer can make your website load in 0.5-2 seconds. This may seem insignificant until you look at the statistics. If your competitors’ websites load faster than yours, even by just 250 milliseconds, you could be losing up to 80% of users. The sooner you optimize your website’s loading speed, the sooner you’ll realize how much of an impact usability has on retaining visitors.
2. Eliminating Excessive Information:
Overloading a page with information is not user-friendly. Display only what’s genuinely interesting to your target audience, avoiding excessive content. For example, if a customer visits your portal to order pizza delivery, there’s no need to distract them with articles about the history of the Italian dish.
Are you guided by the need for SEO promotion? Then, place products with images higher up on the site, and at the bottom, publish text content. Hide the majority of the article under a “Show More” link, making the page length more compact—another way to enhance website usability.
3. Improving Usability through Proper Structuring.
Pay maximum attention to the skeleton of your page. Consider the specificities of your niche, study competitor resources, and analyze visitor queries. Position essential elements in more prominent and noticeable areas, following eye-tracking guidelines. Users spend over 60% of their time viewing the first screen of a website, with particular focus on the left part. Utilize this and other data to construct a page with ideal conditions for your audience.
4. Navigation Elements
What is usability without convenient means of moving from one place to another? It’s usability that diminishes the user experience. You can enhance it with navigation elements:
- A header menu with links or anchors leading to key sections.
- Breadcrumbs that enable quick returns to previous pages.
- Internal linking within articles, on buttons, and banners.
- A “Back to Top” button leading to the page’s first screen.
- A footer with hyperlinks.
5. Form Completion
It is crucial to guide the customer effectively from clicking a button to completing the process of submitting their request for your product or service. The shorter the path and time gap between the initial interaction and the final submission, the less likely you are to irritate the user. Reduced irritation leads to a higher conversion rate in the end. The higher the conversion rate, the better the website’s usability.
How to Track Usability Improvement?
If you’ve put in the effort to enhance your website’s usability, you might be wondering how to gauge if usability has genuinely improved. Tools for tracking your portal’s statistics can assist in this.
Google Analytics
This service from the globally recognized company allows you to monitor all user actions, from the duration of their visit to text copying, form submissions, and button clicks. You just need to analyze everything. It’s a convenient monitoring tool that understands what usability is and how to work with it.
UsabilityHub
A comprehensive tool for online research on websites and applications. You can prepare a collection of screenshots of your resource and formulate questions for respondents. Users will view and assess the usability of your website.
Hotjar
This system is excellent for gathering feedback. Its most effective use is in combination with the aforementioned services. Hotjar can be easily integrated into your website and is suitable for a thorough audit. Examine the monitoring results of key indicators, and you will understand how to improve website usability.
Thank you for reading! We hope we’ve satisfied your curiosity about what usability is and how to make it better. Do you have any remaining questions? We have knowledgeable experts ready to answer them. Just leave your questions and receive a free consultation.
