Designing a new website can be complicated, and with all the factors involved – brand, visuals, graphics, coding, hosting and so on – it’s easy to overlook one of the most important questions.

Is your site easy to use?

You may have hired a great web designer to design your new website and make it look great. But that doesn’t mean it’s user friendly. The skills required to make something look good are very different from making it work well. Thousands of beautiful award winning websites have failed to attract customers or convert them to sales.

Think about your own use of the web. How often have you opened a great looking website, and gotten lost? How often have you come to a website with a firm intention to buy something, and abandoned your purchase, frustrated because you can’t find what you’re looking for, or there’s not enough information about the product?

In a physical store, you’re likely to ask a sales assistant these questions. But on a website, it’s more likely you’ll give up and go to another website. Why bother emailing or phoning them, when you can find a better website just a click away?

What if your website is doing something like this to your customers?

Can customers do what you want them to do?

You’ll have specific goals for your online business. For instance, you might want people to:

• sign up for a newsletter
• complete a survey
• buy products
• fill out an application form
• send you an email enquiry
• or even just find out whether you’re open today.
• How easy is it for people to do these things on your site? How obvious is it?

Can customers do what they want to do?

What about your customers? They may want to do the things you want them to, but maybe they have other things in mind as well.
For instance, you may want them to buy a product online. But they may want to use your site to figure out whether your product suits them, and then go to your physical store to pick it up, play with it and buy it. For some products, that’s very common (cars are a good example, but there are many others).

Usability is way to make sure it’s easy for your customers to do these things.

Usability for ecommerce websites

If your site is an ecommerce website, usability is particularly important. Because if people can’t figure out where they are in your site, they may not be able to find your products. Or maybe they don’t have enough information about the product to buy it.

If they can’t find them, or they can’t assess the product properly, why would they buy them?

If your checkout and payment process is difficult, people will give up and just go somewhere else. You’ve done it yourself, right?

What you can do about it?

Visit  www.user-friendly-website-designer.com