Making your webpage easy and enjoyable for your visitors is the key to usability success. There are plenty of tricks and tips to try out…
1. Making Faces
Whether you’re walking around town or visiting a bar, you can’t help but take a look at the faces around you. Subconsciously you are absorbing much more than you realise. You can take advantage of this fact by featuring people’s faces on your webpage, sounds simple you think? Well hold on, there’s a bit more to it than that. Studies have found that we actually look in the direction of the face we see on screen, so if you want to share some specific information make sure your friendly face is looking straight at that information.
2. Quality Counts
As shameful as it is to admit, we humans really do have a tendency to judge a book by its cover. Therefore the quality of your webpage is key. Visitors are going to believe that your product or service will be as good as your webpage looks, so make sure you invest in making it perfect.
Once the user has checked out how you look, they will then be judging you on personality. It’s one tough crowd out there! So they will be looking at the actual quality of your website, the amount of errors, how often information is updated and its ease of use. If you tick all the boxes, then you’ll be more than likely to guarantee a second date.
3. Keep Scrolling, Scrolling, Scrolling
Once upon a time only around three-quarters of all visitors to your website would not have bothered to scroll. Those who panicked at hearing this information made the dire mistake of attempting to cram all their information into the top half of the site. Unfortunately no one lived happily ever after.
Flash forward a few years and it appears we are now the generation who love to scroll. People are much happier to have content well spaced out with plenty of white spaces as it makes it clearer and easier to read. People are now so keen to scroll that they will even make it right down to the bottom of the page, so make the most of every inch.
4. Blue is the Colour
As important as it is that your site stands out from the crowd, it seems people still love their home comforts. When people visit new websites they look for something familiar, this is called usage patterns. People expect certain things to be the same, such as the location of the website’s logo and the behavior of tabbed navigation. People know what they know and in this case, they know that links are blue. Google sticks to this time-honoured tradition and so should you.
5. How wide is your Search Box?
Time for some specifics - the ideal search box is 27 characters wide. A fact that is clearly not known by many, as the average search box is just 18 characters wide. So take note and remember that by giving the user more space allows them to review, verify and submit their enquiry quickly. Sounds simple enough but yet so many people still choose to ignore this, make sure you’re not one of them.
