PaulGSmith.com: Web Analytics, Usability and More

Web usability is all about making sure that your website works for your visitors. Making sure your website provides it’s visitors with the information, functionality and user experience they want and expect sounds like good common sense but so often we web developers fail to do this.  One obvious reason for this is one that is becoming quite well known. Most visitors just don’t think about our products and services the way we do. It is easy to fall into the trap of designing for the internal audience rather than our target audience.

But there are other very important reasons. Many of those involved in designing and creating web sites, just don’t get how people actually work on the web. There is a strong tendency to approach the design of web pages and the creation of content as if it were print. In the print world people pay a lot of attention to the look and layout of the pages, documents, brochures they are reading. They spend quite a bit of time reading the details.

On the web this rarely happens. On the web visitors scan content. They just don’t have time to read every word on every page. Most of us have learned that we just don’t need to read everything. On the web visitors rarely make the best choices. Designers often think their visitors will look over all the information, links, buttons, and other content before making the decision where to go next. Far more typically a visitor will click the first link that looks reasonably close to what they are looking for.

Careful attention to web usability can have a great impact on this situation. Web usability practitioners pay close attention to how people think, what captures their attention, and what kind of mistakes our visitors are likely to make.

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