User: “If something is hard to use, I just don’t use it!”
E-Marketing consultant: “On the Internet, the competition is always just one click away, so if you frustrate users they’ll head somewhere else.
On the Internet, the competitions always just one click away,so if you frustrate users they’ll head somewhere else.”
Steve Krug: “Making pages self-evident is like having good lighting in a store: it just makes everything seem better. Making pages self-evident is like having good lighting in a store: it just makes everything seem better.”
The initiator of this post are various web design challenges I am facing for several years. How to design readable content? How to code neatly? Which layout would fit best this site? How to appear on search engines? How to convert visitors into more engaged actors(members, customer, supporter)? Should we create a community of interest?… Among the many possible answers, there is a concept which provides some starting points I would like to share from my experience.
Usability is the ease of use and learnability of a human-made object. The object of use can be a software application, website, book, tool, machine, process, or anything a human interacts with.
What does it mean? Let’s see…
In order to use the Bottle Bank Arcade, people had first to learn and understand the game and the scoring system. From this point on, they started to play to appear on the dashboard. And as you may have noticed the satisfactory effect made the device be used way more then its less responsive counter parts.
Jakob Nielsen, in his book about Usability Engineering, presented some characteristic a tool should have I collected from the experience we just shared:
Learnability
The purpose of the tool should be intuitive and very fast to learn.
Effectiveness
Using the tool, one should perform one tasks better and with greater outcomes.
Efficiency
The ideal tool should allow extensiveness, evolve with user experience, and be customisable.
Satisfactory
The users should be pleased by the tool and the reached outcomes using it.
These elements and few others are also very important for the Internet as a normal web user visits over 30 web sites a day (36 I visit every day).
Contrary to what people think, this is how we navigate through the web:
Either we pop up to the site for a specific content, either we search and the engine redirect us more or less according to our wishes. We don’t visit every page of a site because we don’t have the time, we are interested to only a fraction of the content and because we are good at scanning (newspaper, street signs, menus, people on the street,…).
Here are some elements I would suggest for you to improve your website that will ameliorate the user experience and help them in finding your content more easily AND thus staying longer.
Feel free to share your inputs and let’s make the web a more usable and fun place to be!