In the era of digital marketing, visualizing your business in the best way may be the sole motto of any e-business retailer. However, designing beautiful web-pages and allured users with its appealing features is not the whole thing that can be game-changing action. When thousands of similar websites are competing in the market, no doubt, users won’t be ready to sacrifice in terms of user experience. Thus, making an ‘effective website’ is a need. What do we mean by ‘effective’ here? It means the website usability, which can enable a user to complete his desired task accurately. Additionally, handling the website must be a pleasant experience for the user.

Website usability is not only an important factor from a user point of view, but it is also an equally important factor for the developers too. It determines the success of a system. Besides, from the managerial aspect, poor usability can greatly impact the business’s productivity and financial health. Unless the usability is good, people will not buy your products.

From small features like text layout to making the website a responsive one, website usability is the core of a website that describes how you will promote your product and how your audience will respond to it. To make your project high-value, search engine optimization and visibility are key aspects that ultimately depend on website usability.

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What is website usability?

Now come to the technical definition of website usability. It is all about the actions which can be performed effortlessly and perfectly. This describes how easily one can use the website without any issues or big concerns, in a simple term, how user-friendly a website is for its target user. Interestingly for the developers and webmasters, it is a big concern today, and it needs a lot of research on how the target audience uses a website, their goals, how they consume it, etc.

Common principles of making good website usability

1. Responsive design

Business today is accessible from all types of digital mediums like desktop, laptop, mobile, tab, and what none! So, the thumb rule of making today's website is it should be responsive, which means the website should be usable irrespective of digital media, whether it has a larger display or a smaller one! A responsive design makes your sites more accessible and user-friendly to a wider range of visitors.

2. Design with best practices

Following design best practices like the use of proper font size and color and proper designing of content so that it can be scanned on a nonlinear basis are common practices acknowledged by web designers. In this context, website usability testing makes a difference.

3. Availability and accessibility

What if your site is down for most of the time? Or it returns a 404 error for a request? No doubt, this is a strong negative notion against your business. Thus, availability, along with the accessibility of each page, is a serious concern for website usability. What are the loopholes here that you must check to prevent such unforeseen incidents? Here are some of them -

• What is your server uptime – Onboarding of your visitors must be hassle-free, which is the first impression of your e-business. So, there must not be any error while loading your site. Investing in good hosting is probably the right solution that will never cut corners in this aspect.
• Double-check for any Broken links – Dead links or broken links are again the negative impression of your site. Moreover, it reduces the SEO score of your page with crawl errors. Thus you should essentially check for possible dead links on your site.
• Is your site mobile responsive – When Google also index mobile-friendly sites first, so making your site mobile friendly is a primary need. If the site is mobile-friendly, it can handle different screen sizes and as well as slow connections. Consequently, you will get better search results, which means good publicity for your business or website.

4. Clarity

Your visitors may range from novice users to expert internet freaks. Thus they would come up to your site with certain goals in mind with a short time in hand. If your site can let them reach their goals as quickly as possible, it will leave your site with a good impression and increase repeat visitors' chances. So, the design of your website must be clean and usable. Few points to be taken care of given that. First of all, it should maintain simplicity in its design. Your goal will be not to distract your visitors with unnecessary information.

It should be precise and informative for the visitors. Along with that, it must provide a consistent experience to the visitors. The information that your site will leverage must have familiarity with the user experience. It should provide proper guidance related to your site's offer to the visitors because I have already mentioned that your visitors may range from novice to expert levels. The site must be interactive, and the most useful way to make it interactive is by providing feedback options. This would indicate the success or failure of actions users perform on your site.

5. Credibility

Do you know through your website visitors would like to know who you are? And that is the first thing that comes into their mind. In other words, your credibility matters a lot before they go through your entire website or website content. So, don't make room for the site visitors to be skeptical about your existence. Provide clear and concise information on 'About Us' along with contact details.

What you do and how your services can benefit them is the most important part of the content. A grammatically correct and honest content on your work and performance can establish your visitors' virtual credibility. Additionally, testimonials from previous clients, work references, portfolios, social media followers, etc., work remarkably to win your visitors over.