Tips for improving your website's usability

Usability is one of the most powerful features of any web design. It plays a fundamental role before designing the website since the web designer has to identify what the users want before creating the website. Be it an e-commerce website or a professional website that provides essential information, usability guides the web design process. A usable website offers a good user experience resulting in happy clients. When you satisfy your customers, you create a loyal customer base, benefit from referrals, and increase your sales.

A competent web design agency understands the significance of usability in their work. Smart web design decisions delight and satisfy the web visitors by providing them with an intuitive navigational path. After the website goes live, usability testing is imperative to determine what enhancements you should make to improve its usability. Check simple tips to improve your website's usability.

Enhance readability

Lack of readability symbolizes a usability problem. Some ways to improve readability on your site include integrating good typography such as proper paragraph formatting, an adequate amount of white spaces, and displaying bullet-pointed lists. Also, place design elements such as banners, text-boxes, and sidebars in a way that they don't distract the user as they browse through the page. That improves the readability of your site.

Background color, contrast, and texture

You should spend enough time deciding on the color you should use on your website's background. That is because the background color connects to the user's psychology and experience. Put yourself in the user's shoes and think about what background color they would prefer. For instance, if ecologists are your audience, your website's background color should include colors associated with nature and the earth, like green, brown, or ocean blue. Then contrast between the background color, texture, and font color.

User navigation

These days, many web users access websites from their mobile phones. That is not to say they don't use laptops and desktops, but smartphones offer more flexibility since they can access the website from anywhere, even when queuing for food at a cafeteria. Make a simple layout of your website to enable the users to navigate your website easily on their smartphones. Also, get rid of the horizontal scrolling that tends to frustrate users no matter the device they are using.

Images and their placement

Before you use an image on your website, ensure it is of high quality and relevant to your users. You should put more emphasis on selecting your images carefully so that they can impact the user positively. If yours is a food blog, have in mind that there are many food blogs out there so, select images that make your blog stand out. Also, ensure you place the images strategically on your site to not appear out of place.

User experience

Offer your website users a good web user experience. You can achieve that in different ways:

• Ensure that the user can easily spot links and call to action buttons.
• Please don't ask them to fill unnecessary forms.
• Highlight new services or arrivals on the page so that the users can find them with ease.
• Limit horizontal scrolling.

The final words

Whether you are designing a website, or re-evaluating an existing one, focus on improving the website's usability to provide a great user experience.