Usability is an important and often overlooked part of website design. Since usability testing may be too expensive for some webmasters I have included some basic information to consider when creating or rebuilding a website regardless of the niche or purpose of the site.

Everyone wants to impress people. Whether you use 6 syllable words or industry jargon it is easy to forget that not everyone is quite as up to date as you are about your content.

Not only that, but if you make visitors stop and think about what to do next too often, they will generally just leave your site. Keep things simple. Use words that a 6th grader would understand and make sure to organize things in such a manor that the visitor's scanning eye recognizes exactly what you are trying to convey to them and what they have to do next.

Keep things short and sweet. Make sure to economize your writing style. Using too many words to get your point across is bad SEO and prevents a scanning eye from identifying the purpose of your content.

Make sure that your web pages include easy to use, well thought out navigation. Include conspicuous site search facilities to help your visitor find what they are looking for without wearing out their mouse finger. A site requiring too many clicks to reach the visitor's objective generally is a site with poor conversions.

Any form element on your site should be surrounded by a label. All images should include a descriptive alt tag.

Have you ever been to a site that included button's, images, and text that was clickable, but you couldn't really tell? This is ridiculous but seems to happen when graphic design overwhelms common sense... and usability.

People online scan pages. It is amazing how quickly a decision point is reached by visitors regarding page content based upon the interest you generate, or lack thereof. The way to generate interest is with a well organized page that includes readable text, appealing background / foreground contrast, captivating titles, and appropriately placed headings written to attract interest and truthfully describe the content below.

Remove unnecessary words from headings and content. Organize your thoughts and present content in a meaningful way that lends itself to scanning. Create paragraphs with enough white-space to make it easy to quickly read the text.

Where am I? How did I get here? What do I do now?

A large percentage of online traffic barely understands what the Internet is. To many people, Yahoo or Google is the Internet. It is critical that you provide a site presence where any visitor will know:

• Your Site Name
• What you do
• Where they are on your Site
• What the page is about
• Leads them to related information or an order form

Breadcrumb navigation is a great way to let someone know where they are on your site. It also can be of great value in creating merchant web design and for general site organiziation. This can be a nice way to include alternate keyphrases on a page that is optimized for a related term.

Visited links should be visually obvious to your customer. I like blue links for unvisited and purple for visited links but if you change the color make sure that the text contrasts appropriately with the background color for visited and unvisited links.

Inappropriate text size is a huge pain for anyone surfing the web. Make sure that the font family and text size is appropriate for any visitor. Small text sucks

Nobody reorganizes a huge site once they realize their navigation is ineffective. It is imperative that the site organization and navigation methods are defined prior to generating large quantities of pages. Any site with a huge navigation system on their home page should rethink their site by using global and topical site navigation.

Usability is really simply about building pages and websites that convey your intentions to others successfully. To facilitate this, visitors must be able to navigate your site to find the information or topic they require. Once found the webpage must be segmented in such a way to inform, convince, and sell that product or service.

Usability testing requires a minimum of five participants, more is better. The personality and capability of the participants should be as closely matched type of site as possible. Don't usability test by enlisting the marketing or programming department within your company. Myspace layouts should be usability tested with young people, viagra with not so much.

A simple form of usability testing involves asking typical people to explain verbally, or in written form, what they think about a web page they see for the first time. No help or comments should be provided during the test. Use a product like Camtasia for screen recording. This along with sound will allow review of flaws and issues discovered after the testing process. I personally don't break the flow of a test by asking for written work.

Another simple usability testing example is to ask participants to perform specified tasks using a webpage. The clicks, scrolling, and time involved to succeed or fail at this task can reveal issues a designer simply would not encounter due to familiarity with the content and their background.

Finally, ask a participant to locate something or perform a task requiring site navigation and interpretation of design elements.

Remember that usability testing is not a focus group. Discussion of issues comes later when reviewing the screen recording and sound clip. Once an issue is identified, another usability test is required to see if your changes created an effective solution.

Fangs - Screen Reader Firefox Extension

Usability Resources
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Usability Articles
Nielsen Norman Group

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