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I review websites every day. The flaws that I find are almost always the same. So I decided that it would be a good idea to write an article on the most common usability flaws and how to avoid them. |
Lack of Funnel Planning
It’s a fact: people won’t do anything unless you ask them to, which means that you need to use calls to action on your site. But you also need to plan the process your visitors will go through to complete the desired action.
Let’s say that you sell t-shirts and your desired action is for your visitors to place an order. Let’s assume that you sell red and blue t-shirts. You should use the home page to get people’s attention and tell them why your t-shirts are so great. Then, at the end of the home page, invite them to visit you red t-shirts page or your blue t-shirts page. They will click on either one and then tell them about your red t-shirts and their benefits. At the end of that page, invite them to add the item to the shopping cart. In the shopping cart page invite them to start the checkout process.
Always take your visitors to the next step, don’t just have the information on your site and hope that people will find it. Plan the process and have appropriate calls to action.
Less is More
The first thing I do when I review a website is looking for elements that I can remove. The more I get rid of, the better the website looks. If you have a feature that 0.01% of your visitors use, get rid of it; it’s confusing the other 99.99% of your visitors.
Start taking things away until you only have the essentials. Resist the temptation of having a lot of stuff in your pages.
Group Similar Sections Together
Organize the information on your site in a way that you only have a few sections and several sub-sections. This is called vertical architecture and it’s the opposite of horizontal architecture (which allows you to access pretty much every page on the site from the home page).
Make Text Easy to Read
Use every-day words for your website. Impress your visitors with your content, not with fancy words. Use short sentences and short paragraphs. Get your point across with as few words as you can.
Use bullet-points, bold text and subheads to make the text easier to read.
Easy-to-read text is the difference between a successful website and a failure.
Say What You Offer Right Away
Every day I see websites that fail at telling their visitors what they are about in less than 30 seconds. Why are these companies putting their visitors through this kind of torture? If you are McDonalds, you don’t really need to explain that you sell burgers. But if your brand isn’t that popular, use a tag line or a headline to let your visitors know what they can find on your website. This is a great way to express your competitive advantage. If you sell dresses and what makes your company unique is that they are imported from Italy, make your tag line “Luxury Italian Dresses”.