A good web design can leverage the overall usability of a website. No matter what platform you are using for your web project, make sure that you follow a determined web design standard to give rich experiences to your web visitors. A design of your website should appeal to the eyes of a web visitor. It should leave a long-lasting impression on their minds. You can achieve all this by improving the usability of your site.
What is usability in web design?
Web usability is all about making your site accessible so that web users can find what they are looking for quickly and easily. In simple words, it means creating a user-friendly website. Both the design and development processes are executed with the ultimate goal of rendering a navigating experience to their end users. A usable website not only drives potential web visitors but also helps you generate quality leads for your business.
But the problem normally occurs when web designers make silly mistakes while designing a website. They overlook the practicality and usability of a site and thus keep on losing their potential visitors. In order to boost the conversions of your site, you need to address the blunders you made during web design and development process. This will take your website to the new heights of success.
Here, in this post, we will encounter the seven common usability mistakes that most of the designers do while creating a website.
1. Messy and confusing content layouts
The content of a website reflects your business goals and messages to your target web audience. It means you should focus on creating quality, engaging and relevant content if you want to drive more traffic towards your site.
Apart from quality content, make sure you structured them in a well-organized manner. Most of the web designers create a mess while structuring the content on the site. They just add a block of text on the web page and forget about using headings, sub-headings, paragraphs, keywords, bullets, etc – this gives annoying experiences to those who read content on your site.
If you want to boost your site’s usability, use a well-structured content layout, add page title for each of your web pages, make a use of whitespace, add headings, sub-headings, etc to encourage visitors to read your content, without any distraction.
2. Too small clickable areas
As a web designer, you should always concentrate on making usable hyperlinks that can easily be clicked by the web visitor, without any distraction.
A good web designer always focuses on making usable hyperlinks that can easily be clicked by a web visitor, without any distraction. But, sometimes, they create tiny clickable areas – that are harder to understand and click by a user. Instead, you can add a link with a larger clickable area to make it easier for web visitors to hover the mouse cursor over the link.
In order to get a larger clickable area, then you can either make the entire link bigger or increase the padding across the link by making the use of CSS “padding’ property. Consider the following coding for this:
<a href=”http://www.mysite.com” style=”padding: 5px;”>My Site<a>
Tip: Add the above styling to your CSS file by rendering the link a class or id and targeting it with your styling.
3. Issue with search box
A search box is one of the most crucial parts of a site or a blog that allows visitors to search for the information they are looking for within your site.
Instead of spending hours to find a relevant information, they just type a word or a keyword in the search box to get the desired results instantly. But while setting up a blog or a website, most of the designers create complex search box, which directly affects the usability of a site – this creates problem for people to enjoy rich experiences on your site.
Well, you can fix this issue by integrating the Google Custom Search. It is a clean, simple, and effective way that helps you improve the search functionality of your site. It allows visitors to find your site in a matter of few seconds. For that, you need to copy the HTML code from the control panel and paste it on your site- this will take the search functionality of your site to the next level.
The best part is that you don’t need to create a code for your default search feature because most of the popular search engines, such as Google have already indexed most of your web pages (if you submitted the XML sitemap of your site). If some of the web pages are not being indexed, you can choose the one you want to use and add in a search box. Use the following code for using Google as your search engine platform:
<form action=”http://www.google.com/search” method=”get”>
<fieldset>
<input type=”hidden” name=”sitesearch” value=”mysite.com” />
<input type=”text” name=”q” size=”31″ maxlength=”255″ value=”” />
<input type=”submit” value=”Google Search” />
</fieldset>
</form>
4. Poor Navigation structure
There are many beginners who create complicated navigation on their sites in order to make them stand out from the crowd. But this can badly affect the usability and accessibility of your site.
Although there is no determined standard for navigation structure, make sure that you provide simple, intuitive and consistent navigation experience to your visitors. Allow them to stay longer and explore more pages of your site by creating a neat, clean and user-friendly navigation. Also, try to be consistent while designing navigation structure for other web pages. Consider the following tips:
- The text in your navigation should be clear and concise.
- Never add dead links
- Use textual descriptions for your web pages links
- Create user-friendly navigation
A smooth and quick navigation encourages visitors to browse more web pages of your site, which directly improves its usability and readability.
5. Using duplicate titles for web pages
Web page titles hold a great importance when it comes to creating a usable website. They are basically the chunk of content we write between the <title> tags right in the <head> section of the HTML code.
Most of the times web designers forget to give a unique title to the web page while working on a site’s template and then reuse it across all web pages. This creates a mess not only for web visitors but also for search engines such as Google, Yahoo, etc.
Therefore, it becomes essential to create a unique and relevant title for each of the web pages. Make sure your title gives the relevant information about your web page.
Since the title of your web page is the first and crucial aspects, ensure that you create a page title that can leave a long-lasting impression on the web audience’s mind – this will improve the CTR (Click Through Rate) of your site quickly and efficiently.
Also, make sure you optimize your page titles for search engines. For that, you need to add the main keyword in your title and improve the visibility of your page across the web.
7. Getting tricky with registration forms
A registration form can help you convert your web visitors into potential customers and subscribers. But most of websites use a resignation form where they make most of the fields mandatory and even validate too many fields which encourage visitor to abandon your site, without even completing the registration process.
Instead of creating complicated and tricky forms, focus on creating a simple, clean and intuitive registration form that allows visitors to fill out the form, without any abandonment.
Bottom Line
Keep the design of your site simple, clean, and user-friendly. Rather than going for complicated web design, consider basic principles to make your site usable and accessible. Try to focus on giving top-notch user experience to your potential visitors as this can boost the conversions and revenues of your website.
Author Bio:
Lucy is currently working for WordPress Web Development Company and handling all major development projects along with her team of developers. While she is not coding, she enjoys reading and writing techy articles.
