If your site does not get the expected results, users abandon it prematurely; do not perform the actions you would like. Despite the services or products you offer is valid and competitively priced, most of the time, the cause is your’ usability problem.
In the early 2000s, many of the first e-commerce sites began to fail. Swooping sales, bloated cart abandonments, bounce rates of 90 percent or more. During the expansion of the internet in the 90s, many believed that it was necessary to intervene in graphic design to move from botched sites to attempts to impress with great use of animations, web graphics, and multimedia. But very soon, it was discovered that this was not the solution either.
The key to the success of a site was not the glossy sites full of special effects, but the failure to apply the principle of Keep It Simple, Stupid. The principle of web usability was born. For taking more benefits, you have to contact mobile app development Toronto.
A fully usable site is a precondition for survival on today’s web. The same goes for corporate intranets. Usability affects employee productivity. The time they waste understanding how a procedure works, a path, where the goal of the research is, is time (and money) wasted: you are paying them to do something that is not completing the work they should be doing, and so you pay them.
Characteristics of a usable website
Therefore, your site must be designed to offer the best solution based on six fundamental needs.
- Navigability. Clear, delimited paths, with simple indications on how to move, advance, or retrace your steps. (e.g., when a user is forced to press the back button of his browser because he cannot find a clickable button, you have a usability problem).
- Waiting time. They need to be reduced. Maximum three seconds, better if only one second (more on this later)
- Completeness of contents. Clarity, simplicity, readability, and above all, usefulness (more on this later)
- Understanding of information. No technical terms, obscure, difficult to understand.
- Communicative effectiveness. Presentation of information in a concise but complete way.
- Graphic attractiveness. Simplicity is fine, but a design is always needed. One that manages to express and confirm usability principles is the goal you should strive for.
10 Common Mistakes about Your Website Usability
Creating a fully usable site is not easy, and in the best possible way, specific tests with your reference users are necessary, even before designing the site. But even without special designs and analytical texts, you can use pre-made graphic templates or build your site avoiding at least five mistakes that many make.
Mistake 1 – Style over usability
What are you saying about: sites that are all convoluted and full of effects, horrible to navigate, and on which finding information is impossible. The filmmakers want to copy Apple’s site or make a Silicon Valley-style one but lack the skills to do so. Better to do something simple but usable!
Mistake 2 – Slowness and heaviness
You are talking about: sites full of images, animations, and java scripts, which take time to load. And sites on cheap servers that slow downloading. This also destroys SEO. Sites that are too slow to load due to non-optimized images, unnecessary animations, automated code scripts, invasive ads, and pop-ups penalize the user experience and cause loss of access.
For e-commerce, speed is of the essence – as the Big Commerce site that serves online stores worldwide warns: Therefore, you must make sure that your site has loading times that comply with current standards, which is between one and three seconds.
On the contrary, if you are preparing to review your site to make it more effective for a mobile experience, in addition to reviewing and perhaps replacing your template with a mobile-friendly one, you will also need to review information and content.
Mistake 3. Mobile optimization: how to get started
A good way to get started is to check out your site by connecting from mobile. This way, you can get an idea of loading times, how the design works on a smaller screen, if the content is still legible, and if navigation is easy.
Mistake 4 – Create too many pages without a hierarchy
A usable website needs a few well-designed pages. You don’t need to overdo it. And if you want to create a lot of them (for example, a blog with lots of content), you need to create a clear hierarchy of contents. The elements for a clear and functional hierarchy are:
- Menu
- Page structure and layout
- Visual hierarchy
- Proper formatting
- Readable text
Mistake 5 – Write non-user-oriented copy
Anyone who designs a fully usable site should ask themselves the following questions. Does it solve their need for which they landed here? Do you know the solution? Are you handing it to you clearly and exhaustively?
Writing in a user-oriented way means putting yourself in their shoes and always trying to give them what you are looking for. But a lot of humility and concentration exclusively aimed at solving the user’s needs. Consequently, the texts must be
- Interesting
- Useful
- Providing solutions
- Offer ideas for interactions, comments, feedback
- Correct (it seems obvious, but diagramming and typos abound even in the pages of the most renowned sites).
- Clear: Make an effort and try to be understandable, with sentences that are short, clear, and spaced apart. Wrap often and no text walls.
- Formatted. Use headlines, headlines to increase understanding (and help SEO).
Writing and reputation
A site with clear, well-organized, and highly understandable information gives the site an image of competence and organization. It well prepares the user who has the feeling of having landed in a place where the speaker knows what he is talking about. From this point of view, the strategy needs to prepare with the utmost care all the texts but especially two pages: the Home page and the About us page. It is necessary to give a clear demonstration of the clarity and usefulness of the information.
Mistake 6: functionality of the app
One of the most common mistakes come across, not just in user onboarding but in communication in general, is that many developers focus their message around their product’s features or functionality rather than its user benefits.
The truth, however, is that users are interested in knowing what they can do with these features and, specifically, what benefits there will be for them from using them.
Mistake 7: Asking too much permission
One of the most common mistakes seen in many mobile applications is the abuse of permission requests. Many, perhaps too many, times the developers ask to send notifications the first time the application is opened, even before onboarding.
So why request this privacy intrusion before communicating the added value your mobile application will bring to users’ lives? Depending on the vertical in which you operate, you may need to request access to different types of personal information. In user onboarding, it is essential to limit the requests to what is strictly necessary (and above all, it is necessary to explain why there is this need). The other permissions can follow as the user learns how to use the various elements of your app.
Mistake 8: Not customizing the experience from the start
Some applications can modify their service based on user preferences, think of music, or e-commerce services. In the user onboarding phase, adding a simple screen asking the user to indicate their preferences could give us a unique advantage in creating a more targeted experience and communicating to the user that their interests are your main interest.
Mistake 9: Complicating registration
User onboarding can also be useful to complete the registration of a new user. Just think of telephony or messaging services such as WhatsApp or Skype. In this case, it is essential to create a simple and clear registration, requesting only the necessary information. It is also advisable to include social registration to simplify this process. Research has shown how social login can increase registration by 50%.
Mistake 10: Extending unnecessarily
At this point, you think it is clear that user onboarding is a fundamental step to retain new users of your mobile application, creating an experience that has the user at the centre and that focuses on their needs. Research has shown that around two-thirds of users prefer an onboarding of fewer than 60 seconds and how this directly affects the app’s usability in the future.
The perfect user on boarding perhaps does not exist, or it is difficult to create one on the first try. Like many other businesses in digital, it is vital to test to understand what works best for your mobile application. Creating a positive user experience already in the onboarding phase can improve the adoption rate of your service over the long term. In fact, in the first moments of using the app development company Canada, you can transmit both the value of your product and lower that barrier of doubt present in the minds of your users to retain them and increase the value of the LTV.
