Why Should You Lay More Emphasis on Usability Design?
Before we dive right into the importance of website usability, let us first understand the true meaning behind the words with respect to the work done by UX/UI designers. In simple terms, usability design can be defined as a set workflow pattern that decides how effectively and/or quickly can a specific individual complete a predefined set of tasks under controlled operating conditions.
Importance of Usability Design
Let us quickly go through the reasons why usability is important and why it is a prime aspect of UX/UI designing.
Increases the Accessibility Factor
You do want to make sure that all the important features on your website are available to the users, right? Usability design helps your website’s user to navigate through the various components on the site easily and get hold of the function keys in a jiffy. This provides a seamless experience of navigating from one process to another. This is especially helpful when your website focuses on providing multi-functional elements to the users.
Creates a Consistent Design
The world’s leading websites have developed their own unique interface that has stuck in the minds of the users. Take Facebook for an example. The classic blue and white simplistic design is something that all of us can identify quickly. A consistent design not only helps you put the navigation buttons into perspective for a long period, but also ensures that you don’t have to spend a lot of time experimenting with the design.
Helps to Collect Feedback from the End-Users
Feedback collection is an important activity that every website owner needs to keep in mind while updating/modifying the website. A usability design focuses on user-friendliness. You can have an option wherein the users can easily share their feedback, thus enriching the user-experience. This also allows you to add better features as per the feedback.
Provides Room for Development
A usable design always has room for improvement. Making a smooth workflow pattern and a storyboard design for your website will help you ensure that there is a constant room for development in the interface. It is easy for a website developer to come up with the correct placement of added functionality in case he/she focuses on creating a usable design. In fact, the previous benefit, that it ‘helps to collect feedback from the end-users’, can directly be correlated to this benefit to provide exactly what the customer needs.
Increases User Retention and Acquisition Rates
A good product/service at an affordable price can often fail if it is not sold/marketed properly. A usable website design ensures that your website effectively targets the demographic for a functional marketing effort. A user will immediately turn away from a website that takes too much time to load or is not aesthetically appealing.
Such a website places all the important components of functionality within reach and optimizes the back-end processes to improve the user retention rates. The best part of this process is that when you focus on retention of users with this method, you automatically make way for your website to acquire more users through word-of-mouth and organic publicity.
Some critical parameters that decide the usability factor of your website include placement of navigation buttons, optimization of back-end source code, aesthetic appeal, etc. Making sure that your UX/UI design and development efforts follow an ergonomic approach is the best way to ensure that your website is a perfect fit for the complete target demographic.
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