Having a website that prospective customers can get to grips with easily is essential for every small business. If a web user encounters usability issues while viewing a site, they are likely to abandon that site in favour of one that they find more intuitive and pleasant to interact with. Understandably, today’s web users don’t want to waste valuable time learning to use a website that doesn’t make much effort to accommodate them. Here at Image Concepts, we’re committed to understanding your business and market sector so that we can help you create a website that suits your target demographic perfectly. However, there are certain common usability issues that affect the websites of all types of business and that you can anticipate and resolve easily, regardless of what market sector you’re in.
1. Comprehensibility
Ensuring that your site explains itself well is absolutely essential: if a user enters your site and doesn’t understand it almost immediately, they are likely to leave quickly. You need to make sure that your site is easy to understand because comprehensibility is a more common usability problem than you might realise. Examine your site as though you’ve never seen it before and ask yourself how well it explains your business and its own purpose. Is it an e-commerce site, a customer service site or a simple brochure site? Does it explain what your business does? If you do have a comprehensibility problem, you can easily resolve it by adding concise introductory paragraphs, clear business logos and images that help explain your business to your homepage and landing pages.
2. Navigation
An overcomplicated navigation system can make a site almost unusable. It’s absolutely imperative that web users are able to navigate your site with ease. Many websites use a simple navigation bar, which runs along the top of the screen and contains a link to each main section of the site. Links to individual subjects, services or products can be found in the relevant sections themselves. Users find this system intuitive because it is used by so many websites. What’s more, it keeps navigation simple and tidy by dividing it into relevant sections. As such, it’s worth adopting this system of navigation, regardless of what type of site you have in order to avoid navigation-based usability problems.
3. Purchasing
Many small businesses make a simple mistake when designing the e-commerce sections of their site: they divide the purchasing process into too many steps. This can seem complicated or simply bore prospective customers. Try to allow customers to purchase your products and services with as few clicks as possible in order to prevent usability problems emerging at the point of purchase. If they have to enter information in order to buy a product, try to create a form where they can enter most (if not all) of the information on the same page.
By pre-empting and addressing usability issues before prospective customers encounter them, you can reduce your bounce rate and increase the number of sales you make. Here at Image Concepts, we’re always ready to help you improve your site, so if you’d like to know more about beating usability issues, get in touch with use today.