Usability and navigation

The ability for users to find their way around your site easily and quickly is crucial to its success. Ease of navigation is important for two reasons:

• so that you can encourage users into action quickly
• so that visitors who are looking for something specific can find it easily.

Providing quick and intuitive access to actions and information is important. Easy navigation means that users do not have to think about hunting for what they want. Things that are difficult to find, reach or do can create frustration for visitor/s and cause premature departure from your site.

Some features of what is commonly considered best practice in website navigation include:

• A site structure that is ‘wide and shallow’ rather than ‘narrow and deep’. This means that users can click from page to page to move across different content areas instead of drilling down into increasingly detailed content layers that then require several backwards clicks before moving to another area.
• The ability to get to anywhere on the site from the home page or landing page (see website design) with just one or two clicks.
• Using multiple ways for a user to find information and incorporating different tools for finding and jumping to pages. At a minimum this usually includes a menu structure, a search facility and a site map. More sophisticated tools include breadcrumbs (a navigation path indicated by a series of hyperlinks across the top of a website to help a user easily keep track of their location and link “back” to previous pages), quick links and tag clouds.
• Effective use of hyperlinks so that a user can scan pages sequentially, just like flicking through a book or brochure.

Accessibility

When designing and developing your website, you should strive to ensure that it complies with best practice accessibility standards.

Accessibility refers to the ability for all people to view and engage with content on your site, regardless of any visual, physical or hearing impairment or difficulty reading or comprehending text.

Tools to improve accessibility include a function to magnify text size and providing captions or transcripts for audiovisual material.

The international web standards body, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C),  has prepared accessibility guidelines. These cover a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will also often make your Web content more usable to users in general.

If you are working with a web designer and/or developer, consider discussing with them how best to structure your website to ensure accessibility, especially if your website is aimed at people who may have accessibility issues, such as older people with age related impairments. The W3C has prepared specific guidelines for developing for older users.

There are also free services for checking whether your site is readable by colourblind visitors and those with contrast issues, such as Vischeck and CCA.

For more information about accessibility, visit the W3C’s ‘Getting Started with Web Accessibility’ homepage.

Using easy-to-understand language

Using simple and clear language aids navigation and greatly enhances the useability of a website. For more information on writing text content see text content.