Understanding Usability and Its Importance in Website Design
Usability refers to the perception of the users of how consistent, productive, easy to use, and organized it is to carry out specific tasks within a system. In the present times with the digital medium becoming the main medium for all sorts of activities such as shopping, booking doctor’s appointment, and more, there is a need for the designers to have a proper understanding of the expectations of the users (Malik, Muhammad and Sajid 2021). The expectation of users again depends on their prior knowledge and the experiences that they have in their past. Studies have found that users tend to act on their expectations even when there are some indicators on the screen to counter those expectations. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has to be mentioned in this context as this concept has expanded to include fields such as cognitive science, cultural anthropology, ergonomics, sociology, visual design, and more (Jain and Purandare 2021). The designers of user experience have to follow a specific process that allows them to figure out the key aspects of the interaction. Referring to all of the information given above it can be said that some usability guidelines need to be followed to meet the expectations of the customers.
Usability is defined as the factor related to system quality that represents the answer to various frustrating interactions with technology. This describes the quality of products and systems from the user’s perspective. Problems or issues in usability are about the different aspects that make the application ineffective or difficult to use. Recently, the usability concept is taking into account the other concept of accessibility (Bi et al. 2021). Accessibility lays stress on the application features that are supportive of universal access by any class of users or technology. In simple terms, accessibility determines the readability of the content of a web page, mobile application, and more.
Usability design is about bringing in improvisation of a specific product that in turn serves as a guide to the actual design. User-centered design is the more appropriate term for usability design. There is a need to develop applications as per certain usability principles and guidelines because being related to interface design this as well integrates with the technical level of the whole system (Lewis and Sauro 2021). Usability as well as reflected by linked human factors and is assessed when operating different tasks. This again also describes how a specific user can interact in an effective and efficient manner with a system.
It can be said that guidelines of usability have a major role to play in almost every stage of the design process. Some defined steps need to be followed before designing any website application, mobile application, or any such digital thing. The new design should be guided by the good and bad parts that have been identified from the old system. Paper prototypes should be developed as well so that one or more than one design ideas can be tested. Usability testing thus is a significant part of the software development life cycle (SDLC) being the measurement of the extent to which a specific software product meets the expectations of the users and developers (Twidale, Nichols, and Lueg 2021). There are again various metrics for evaluating usability such as navigability, loading speed, accessibility, readability, and lastly functional performance.
The Role of Usability Principles and Guidelines in the Design Process
Some of the common usability principles and guidelines in the context of website application are as given below:
- Easy navigation- Intuitive navigation is something much needed or rather expected by the visitors of a web page. In an ideal case, a visitor should not have to think much about what he should do next after visiting a website (Aljedaibi and Bashmail 2021). Navigation should be kept simple and many options of navigation should be avoided.
- Consistency of style- User’s convenience should be given thought when developing a website. This will help the developer to be specific with the consistency of the style of the website. The colors used and the styling done needs to be done in a way that these are recognizable. Most importantly all of the pages of the web application should have a general template as this supports good navigation.
- Industry design standards- In the process of website development, something that is much more important is adhering to the standards of the specific industry for which the website is being developed. Templates for a travel agency cannot be applied to a website being developed for a medical application (Windlinger Inversini and Tuzcuo?lu 2021). Abiding by the standards will mean enhancing the communication process with the end-users.
- Visual engagement- Visual information is processed faster by human brains rather than information provided in long notes. This is the reason why web applications should use pictures and illustrations (Nisar et al. 2021). The users will be attracted to the web application if it is made visually attractive. Again, here as well, the picture chosen should be as per the theme of the web application.
- Mobile compatibility- The majority of the users visit web applications or websites using mobile devices. As per the reports, with every passing day, the use of mobile phones will increase, and thus every developer should create a mobile version for the site or the application (Forecast number of mobile users worldwide 2020-2025 | Statista 2022). Creating a mobile version will enhance the usability of the web application as when doing so the developers have to follow some specific recommendations.
Figure 1: Number of mobile users all across the world from 2020 to 2025 (Forecast number of mobile users worldwide 2020-2025 | Statista 2022)
The principles and guidelines that have been mentioned above can help enhance the usability of the website and web pages. Adopting the usability guidelines will mean an increase in customer acquisition and loyalty, maximizing the various opportunities for revenue generation, optimizing the resources and development to time and costs, getting more insights from user engagement, and bringing in a reduction in troubleshooting and related costs. With a strong user experience, companies will get a competitive edge and be able to attract more customers (Aljedaibi and Bashmail 2021). Planning the journey of the users on the website or the web application will help to convert users into buyers. For this, the developers can perform A/B testing for testing what users respond to best and thereafter refine the experience in a continuous way. Resources can be optimized and adopting a user-focused approach will save time, resources as well as money. Optimization in the user experience of the platform, the companies can ensure a high level of engagement. Avoidable errors can be addressed better with proper user experience in place. Often convoluted navigation results in users being lost and not getting to access the functionalities that they want to.
In the present times, users are looking forward to responsive web design. This refers to the approach as per which design and development need to respond to the behavior and environment of users on the basis of screen size, platform, and lastly orientation. This practice will consist of having a mix of flexible grids and layouts, images, and proper use of CSS media queries (Nisar et al. 2021). In more simple words, if suppose the user shifts from laptop to iPad, the website or the web application should in an automatic way switch to provide space for factors including resolution, size of the image, and abilities of scripting (Anwar, Hardini and Anggraeni 2021). A user may as well require to consider the device’s settings if in case they have a VPN for iOS on their iPad. Overall, it should be that the website or the web application be laced with technology that can automatically respond to the preferences of the user. With this feature, the need for varied design and going through a rigorous development phase will also get eliminated on part of the developer. Apart from responsive design techniques shortcuts can be added to the website application so that the users who are knowledgeable about the basic functions can directly skip to the main functions.
Conclusion
From the above discussion done it can be said that UX design needs to be focused on for building websites and proper designs and principles be referred to. With a well-developed UI/UX experience developers can bring significant improvement in the satisfaction of the users and ensure that there is a high level of engagement achieved between the customer and the system. Following the above-mentioned usability principles and design will mean users can be engaged with the site more easily and there will be much traffic directed towards the website. The website or the web application will become popular as more users will get to know about it. Focusing on developing a responsive website will mean automation to be introduced into the website design thus being of much help for the users. With businesses wanting to become more and more customer-friendly, the usability principles mentioned above need to be focused on. In all ways, the companies will be helped to address the errors that otherwise happen in websites or web applications.
References
Aljedaibi, W. and Bashmail, R.M., 2021. Usability evaluation of mobile devices user interface. Nexo Revista Científica, 34(04), pp.1290-1300.
Anwar, M.R., Hardini, M. and Anggraeni, M., 2021. Review of Responsive Design Concept Based On Framework Materialize On The Website. ADI Journal on Recent Innovation, 3(1), pp.59-66.
Bi, W., Lyu, Y., Cao, J. and Lin, R., 2021. From Usability to Pleasure: A Case Study of Difference in Users’ Preference. Engineering, 13(8), pp.448-462.
Jain, S. and Purandare, P., 2021, July. Study of the Usability Testing of E-Commerce Applications. In Journal of Physics: Conference Series (Vol. 1964, No. 4, p. 042059). IOP Publishing.
Lewis, J.R. and Sauro, J., 2021. Usability and user experience: Design and evaluation. Handbook of Human Factors and Ergonomics, pp.972-1015.
Malik, H.A.M., Muhammad, A. and Sajid, U., 2021. Analyzing Usability of Mobile Banking Applications in Pakistan. Sukkur IBA Journal of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, 5(2), pp.25-35.
Nisar, M., Rehman, M., Anjum, M., Murawwat, S., Bashir, K. and Saleemi, M., 2021. Usability Evaluation of Food Wastage Mobile Application: A Case of Pakistan. Sustainability, 13(24), p.14027.
Statista. 2022. Forecast number of mobile users worldwide 2020-2025 | Statista. [online] Available at: <https://www.statista.com/statistics/218984/number-of-global-mobile-users-since-2010/> [Accessed 5 April 2022].
Twidale, M.B., Nichols, D.M. and Lueg, C.P., 2021. Everyone everywhere: A distributed and embedded paradigm for usability. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 72(10), pp.1272-1284.
Windlinger Inversini, L. and Tuzcuo?lu, D., 2021. Usability theory: adding a user-centric perspective to workplace management. A Handbook of Management Theories and Models for Office Environments and Services, pp.173-183.
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