Including Usability In The Web Design Process
Whether you want a website for a personal project or as part of a business venture, the process of web design is critically important. The idea, of course, is for the end result to be an attractive, fully functional website which attracts visitors and in the case of business oriented sites, customers. Part of designing an effective website is to pay close attention throughout the design process to the goal of making the site user-friendly; if your site isn’t easy for visitors to navigate and find the content or access the functions they’re looking for, they’ll be looking elsewhere.
If you’d like to learn more about making your website easier to use and a generally more inviting destination for visitors, read on. Whether you’re building a new website from the ground up or if you’d like to make some changes to an existing website to enhance its usability, the suggestions below can help you to make your site more appealing to users and thus, more successful overall.
Be Concise:
Your site needs to communicate clearly and quickly to visitors in both design, email archiving, and HIPAA. People are impatient, especially when they’re online. With literally millions of other websites out there to visit, if you take too long to get your point across, you’ve lost your visitors; and if your website is part of your business, this means that you’ve lost them to your competitors.
Tell your visitors what they need to know without unnecessary padding; they’ll appreciate that you get right to the point and will be more likely to return for repeat visits. If your site is a ecommerce site, make sure that the checkout process is quick and easy and that any forms that customers need to fill out are as short as possible. The longer it takes them to complete the process, the more likely they are to decide to take their business elsewhere.
Clarity and Intuitive Navigation:
Apply what is known as the “alien test” to your website. Imagine that you are an alien visitor who just landed on the planet; can you look at your website and tell in 10 seconds or less what it’s all about?
The point of this test is to show the importance of making your site as self explanatory and easy to understand as possible. Your visitors should know at a glance what your site offers and how to find what they’re looking for. This refers to both the content on your site, which should be as clear as possible and your site’s navigation, which should be equally straightforward. Include a navigation bar on every page with clearly labeled links to the pages and other content on your site which your visitors want. If visitors can’t figure out quickly where to find the information they’re looking for or your site is difficult and confusing to navigate, they’re not going to stick around for long.
Content:
Content isn’t a matter of web design in the strictest sense, but it is so important to your Dallas Web Design site’s usability and its ability to draw visitors that it should be given the same kind of attention and care. Content is king on the web, just as it always has been and having well written content on topics which are relevant to your visitors can go a long way towards helping you attract an audience, especially through organic search engine optimization. You don’t need to flood your site with content, but adding some new and informative pieces to your site on occasion can help to drive traffic as well as making your site more useful to your readers.
Security and privacy:
Consumers are becoming more savvy about online security and especially if you have an ecommerce site, you need to pay a lot of attention to ensuring that your site is secure enough that visitors will feel comfortable doing business there. Even if your site is not overtly commercial, your visitors want to know that their privacy is as important to you as it is to them; unless you have a legitimate reason for doing so, don’t ask your visitors to give out personal information or you may risk losing them. If you’re selling something, your visitors will be willing to share contact information with you once they decide to make a purchase from you - no one is too eager to give out this kind of information unless they need to, even if your site’s security is impeccable.
This innocuous acronym stands for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. This is a federal statute that was enacted in 1996 to attempt to protect the medical records of citizens. The Act itself is massive, and covers many aspects of medical care and the handling of records and information. The two that are relevant to our needs are the privacy rule and the security rule. Both of which will be covered in depth later. There are other rules provided under the act and they are the Enforcement Rule, the Transactions and Code Sets Rule and the Unique Identifiers rule.