Make Your Website Easy to use

Website is synonym to modern business for providing information to customers and to increase revenue. Thus it becomes an indispensable part, with website designing even more inevitable for making your website more users friendly and appropriate. If your site is not easily navigable and if it does not contains to the point and the latest information it may lead the customers away.

These are some facts relating to the website use by customers:

• According to a research conducted by Forrester, 40% of the web users do not return to sites where they have had a negative experience.

• Several studies pointed out that around 50 -70% of the IT projects fail to deliver the expected results. Poor user design is the primary cause of these failures.

• According to IBM, the design changes in the web sites related to increasing the usability resulted in an average reduction of 9.6 minutes per task, with projected internal savings of $6.8 Million.

• According to IBM, by investing $1 in usability testing on software, the payback is between $10 and $100.

• Microsoft asserts that one of their key competitive advantages is the usability of their software.

Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group is an internationally recognized expert in the area of web site usability. He says that, "Usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use."

After making a website it should be constantly evaluated to find out how user-friendly it is. This will help in building a more effectual, proficient and gratifying experience for your customers. These are some points that should be taken care while designing your website to make it more usable.

1. Help your customers find their way: The most significant question that one should ask himself is that; how easy is for the customers s to navigate the web site When customers visit your websites home page, will they find a clearly perceptible navigation system or do they have to ramble around clicking things in vain

You should have a simple navigation system otherwise you will confuse your users. A simple drop-down or tab menu will be easy for your customers to use. It may not look as creative or modern, but your users will be able to find what they need.

2. Say what you mean, and say it clearly: You may use marketing jargon and buzzwords to make our site more attractive but they may as well lead to confuse your customers. You should clearly state the products or services that are offered by you. You should provide all the information relating to your products and services on your homepage and that too in simple and clear words.

You should provide all the imperative information like the description of the product or service, its price, selling terms etc. in clear terms that there is no doubt left in the customers mind. If clear language is not used the customers might become vulnerable about the product or service and lots of valuable sales may get lost.

3. Keep it simple: Presenting the products, sale items, services etc. often with lots of graphics and color may be a great way to make your website look attractive but for many customers, it can be an annoyance. You should keep pictures, large text etc. to a minimum. These types of publicity stunts make the site look cheap and it also increases the time for web pages to load.

4. Provide up-to-date information: People visit your website to get information about your product. You should make it as effortless as possible for the customers to get all the relevant information about the product or service. Customers detest lots of advertising on any website and get aggravated.

One sure irritating thing for the customers is the pricing secrecy. Most websites do not provide the price of their products and services, they make the customers to fill a form to find out how much the product will cost and most of the customers drop the idea of buying from such a business. Thus you should not make a customer to fill out a form and should provide the price of the products on your website.

Customers want immediate information about the product and services and you should provide it to them on your web site. It is also very important to update your site regularly.

5. Test your web site: This is a good way to accomplish good usability. But it is also very important that you test the web site with your desired audience. In this way you can observe the types of questions and problems that arise while using the website by the users and you should test individually.

Testing does not consume lot of time for a small web site it should take about 20 minutes or so per user. Testing with a sample of four or five users will be sufficient to get adequate feedback. After testing and finding out the places where change is needed the website should be changed.

6. be a usability supporter: If your web site is user-friendly it could boost up your sales to a large extent.

The Nielsen Norman Group conducted a study of the ROI (return on investment) of 42 web sites that were redesigned. The owners of these web sites spent at an average of 10% of their total IT budget to improve the usability of their web sites. After redesigning the sites, site usability increased by 135%, the sales-conversion rate increased 100% and traffic increased 150%, according to the study.

The more user-friendly and navigable you make your web site the more customers will get attracted and the sales will increase of your business. Making your web site more usable is often a very time consuming and expensive but it gives good results to the business in the long run. With the increasing ferocious competition among the businesses to get more and more customers having an easily navigable site can be give a competitive edge to the business. So it is very important to have a well designed and easily accessible website.