Web Usability

Enovate Design create usable websites, which enables your visitors to achieve their aims quickly and efficiently. That might be to locate a particular piece of information or purchase a product. A useable website can reap significant rewards:

  • Every £1 invested in improving your website's usability returns £10 to £100 (source: IBM)
  • A web usability redesign can increase the sales / conversion rate by 100% (source: Jakob Nielson)

Navigation conventions

There are many conventions on the internet that experienced users are familiar with and have become accustomed to, for example:

  • The organisations logo is positioned in the top left hand corner of the page and links to the websites homepage.
  • The term "about" or "about us" is used for information about the organisation
  • The position of the websites navigation is consistent from one page to the next
  • Any flashing elements or those placed above the top logo are often advertisements
  • The term "shopping cart" is used for a location to store items you wish to purchase

Enovate Design never underestimates the importance of these conventions. As the Internet matures users are becoming accustomed to websites behaving in a certain way. A departure from these conventions will harm your website's usability and you may be left with nothing but a handful of dissatisfied site visitors.

Download time

Web usability research has shown that 8.6 seconds is the maximum time web users will wait for a page to download. Enovate Design ensure all pages download with this limit.

As of September 2006 1 in 4 UK web users are still using slow dial-up internet connections (source: National Statistics) so it's key to usability that your website downloads quickly.

Presenting information

Research shows that web pages are read in a different manner to printed media. Instead of reading pages word-for-word we scan web pages and only certain items such as headings, link text, bold text and bulleted lists stand out.

You might have noticed the absence of images from the list. Contrasting to the way in which we read printed media, on the internet we see text before we see images. Therefore at Enovate Design we do not place important information within images where it runs the risk of being overlooked.

Framesets

At Enovate Design we avoid using framesets for our sites as they create many usability problems, such as:

  • Only the homepage can be bookmarked
  • Poor presentation when pages are printed
  • Users feel trapped if external links open within the frameset
  • Search engine robots cannot access pages within the frameset easily
  • Impossible to e-mail a link to a specific page on the site

Please enquire about our web design services.