Best Websites Usability
best websites usability
7 Best Practices for Improving Your Website's Usability
Writing content for web users has its challenges. Chief among them is the ease with which your content is read and understood by your visitors (i.e. its readability).When your content is highly readable, your audience is able to quickly digest the information you share with them — a worthy goal to have for your website, whether you run a blog, an e-store or your company's domain.
Below are a handful of dead-simple tips and techniques for enhancing the usability and readability of your website's content.
These tips are based on research findings and suggestions by well-regarded usability experts such as Jakob Nielsen.
This list is not exhaustive, and is meant merely to arm you with a few ideas that you can implement right away. If you have additional tips to add, please share them in the comments.
Web pages must be designed to facilitate the ease of reading content through the effective use of colors, typography, spacing, etc.
In turn, the content writer must be aware of writing strategies that enable readers to quickly identify, read and internalize information.
As we go through the seven tips below, keep these three general guidelines in mind:
Learn moreSteve Krug
- Text and typography have to be easy and pleasant to read (i.e. they must legible).
- Content should be easy to understand.
- Content should be skimmable because web users don't read a lot. Studies show that in a best-case scenario, we only read 28% of the text on a web page.
1. Keep Content as Concise as Possible
It's pretty well known that web users have very short attention spans and that we don't read articles thoroughly and in their entirety. A study investigating the changes in our reading habits behaviors in the digital age concluded that we tend to skim webpages to find the information we want.
We search for keywords, read in a non-linear fashion (i.e. we skip around a webpage instead of reading it from top to bottom) and have lowered attention spans.
This idea that we're frugal when it comes to reading stuff on the web is reinforced by a usability studyconducted by Jakob Nielsen. The study claims a that a 58% increase in usability can be achieved simply by cutting roughly half the words on the webpages being studied.
Shorter articles enhance readability, so much so that many popular readability measurement formulas use the length of sentences and words as factors that influence ease of reading and comprehension.
What you can do:
Universal Principles of Design, Revised and Updated: 125 Ways to Enhance Usability, Influence Perception, Increase Appeal, Make Better Design Decisions, and Teach through DesignLearn moreWilliam Lidwell
- Get to the point as quickly as possible.
- Cut out unnecessary information.
- Use easy-to-understand, shorter, common words and phrases.
- Avoid long paragraphs and sentences.
- Use time-saving and attention-grabbing writing techniques, such using numbers instead of spelling them out. Use "1,000″ as opposed to "one thousand," which facilitates scanning and skimming.
- Test your writing style using readability formulas that gauge how easy it is to get through your prose. The Readability Test Tool allows you to plug in a URL, then gives you scores based on popular readability formulas such as the Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease.
That is, when we look at a webpage, we tend to see it not as a whole, but rather as compartmentalized chunks of information. We tend to read in blocks, going directly to items that seem to match what we're actively looking for.
An eye-tracking study conducted by Nielsen revealed an eye-movement pattern that could further support this idea that web users do indeed read in chunks: We swipe our eyes from left to right, then continue on down the page in an F-shaped pattern, skipping a lot of text in between.
What you can do:
Measuring the User Experience: Collecting, Analyzing, and Presenting Usability Metrics (Interactive Technologies)Learn moreThomas Tullis
- Before writing a post, consider organizing your thoughts in logical chunks by first outlining what you'll write.
- Use simple and concise headings.
- Use keyword-rich headings to aid skimming, as well as those that use their browser's search feature (Ctrl + F on Windows, Command + F on Mac).
What you can do:
- Make the first two words count, because users tend to read the first few words of headings, titles and links when they're scanning a webpage.
- Front-load keywords in webpage titles, headings and links by using the passive voice as an effective writing device.
- Use the inverted pyramid writing style to place important information at the top of your articles.
What you can do:
- Consider breaking up a paragraph into bulleted points.
- Highlight important information in bold and italics.
In a study called "Reading Online Text: A Comparison of Four White Space Layouts," the researchers discovered that manipulating the amount of margins of a passage affected reading comprehension and speed.What you can do:
- Evaluate your webpages' typography for spacing issues and then modify your site's CSS as needed.
- Get to know CSS properties that affect spacing in your text. The ones that will give you the most bang for your buck are margin, padding, line-height, word-spacing, letter-spacing and text-indent.
What you can do:
7. Use Visuals StrategicallyPhotos, charts and graphs are worth a thousand words. Using visuals effectively can enhance readability when they replace or reinforce long blocks of textual content.In fact, an eye-tracking study conducted by Nielsen suggests that users pay "close attention to photos and other images that contain relevant information."
Users, however, also ignore certain images, particularly stock photos merely included as decorative artwork. Another eye-tracking study reported a 34% increase in memory retention when unnecessary images were removed in conjunction with other content revisions.
What you can do:
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