Big Ahha

Usability is often mentioned as a cornerstone of good web design. Website usability is about creating efficient and intuitive experiences for the people who use your site.

It has been said that website usability can be broken down into these components:

• Learnability: How easy is it for people to accomplish basic tasks the first time they come to your website?
• Efficiency: Once people have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?
• Memorability: When people return to your website after a period of not using it, how easily can they reestablish proficiency?
• Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors?
• Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?

It’s easy to see how these can be positive aspects of a website. Increased user satisfaction, reduced long-term development costs (costs incurred from fixing poorly designed sites), reduced training and support costs, and repeat business are just some of the benefits you can realize when planning and developing your website with usability in mind.

But you can’t stop there. While usability should be at the forefront when creating your website, great usability alone isn’t enough to make your website successful.

Donald Norman is a renown expert on usability, user-centered design, and author of “The Design of Everyday Things.” But he acknowledges that usability without usefulness is useless. “Usability is always secondary. It’s never the most important thing about an experience. I will accept poor usability if I get what I need, if the total experience is great. I will reject perfect usability if I am not rewarded with a useful, engaging experience.”

In other words, usability is important but doesn’t even matter if the content and functionality of your website isn’t useful. It sounds simple enough, but it’s something that is often overlooked. If your website isn’t providing a useful service it doesn’t matter how good it looks or usable it is. Your visitors will quickly head elsewhere.