Think user, usability!

Ever visited a website, which has the most dazzling flash graphics, that takes so much time to load that the aesthetic value of the graphics is just lost on you? Your tired 28.8 kbps dial-up connection at home takes up precious time to load the website, and you want to cause serious bodily harm to the person who did not think of the home users needs before designing the website.

This genre of websites lacks basic usability, which causes immense frustration to users who need to interact with websites like these, on a regular basis.

Incorporating basic fundamentals of usability and interactive design can increase traffic in an exponential manner to a website.

Relying on usability inspection to evaluate the user interface of a website, using evaluative feedback on specific elements of a user interface to improve it, and improving upon the ease of interaction for the end user, to eventually reducing the frequency and seriousness of user errors, will all result in a larger number of users visiting your website, thereby generating greater ROI (Return On Investment).

With a lot of research being done in the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), many website designers have begun to sit up and take note of the surprising results some of the research has thrown up. Users are increasingly demanding an easier way to interact with a website, and the common sense approach to website designing is fast gaining ground. Early proponents of the common sense approach to website designing (which basically consists of a lot of usability and interactive design related ideas being consolidated, for application to website design) like Jakob Nielsen, Robert Mack, Steve Krug, and Lisa Price, are all working towards improving user experience while interacting with a website.

Practical techniques you should keep in mind before you design (or re-design) your website: 1. Dont force your users to think. Keep user interface decisions simple enough, so that users can make their decisions, without having to draw workflow diagrams.

2. Integrate usability inspection into the website design lifecycle. If time and resources permit, integrate heuristic evaluation (an informal method, where you have usability specialists judge whether each user interface dialog element conforms to established usability principles), plurastic walkthrough (a scenario where developers, users, and human factor experts walk through a simulated user scenario, and deliberate upon user interface issues), and cognitive walkthrough (have people from different disciplines inspect an interface to see whether they walk through the user scenario the way you expect them to).

3. In the absence of specialized human factor expertise, integrate low cost usability inspection (which would involve you walking through the user scenario or having a few people test the user scenario, and comment upon their experience).

4. Always have people easily figure where they stand in the current scheme of things. Implementing this principle would be as easy as having a page name at the top of the page, or in the case of a website, with very deep branches, have a clearly explained path at the top of the page.

5. Keep the navigation in the same place on every page, so your users don't have to go looking for it.

6. Try not to overwhelm users with options. If you have a lot of content, organize the options into logical groups to make it seem like there are fewer of them, when your users interact with the options.

7. Organize the site according to what your users are going to be looking for, not according to your corporate organization chart, or even according to your business priorities, unless they happen to coincide with your users' interests.