Creative Themes Design

10 Creative Design Tips for Better Website Usability

06/23/2010  |  Category: Blog, Creative Designs  |  307 views  |   Print This  |   Email This  | 

Usability generally refers to how easy (or difficult) it is for your website visitors to use your website. With an Effective Creative Design, you could have the visitors find what they need easily, able to move around the website easily (navigate) & respond to your campaigns favorably (by signing up for campaigns, downloading materials or paying for a service or a product).

A website’s Usability Rating is determined by

• the overall layout & design of the website
• the content (copy material) within the pages

Designing a website for the best usability rating could be a very expensive project but the rewards are outstanding. In this report by Usability Sciences, a company that optimizes website design through iterative uses, Lee virtually doubled their online sales by redesigning their website creatively.

Quick Creative Design Tips for Better Website Usability

1. Usability Design Tip 1 – know what purpose the website will serve. Is it informational, is it for running campaigns or is it for sales etc? The purpose of the website forms the blue print of your creative design.

2. Usability Design Tip 2 – keep designs clean. Fonts, colors, line height, line spacing, indents & copy placements all add up to a clean website.

3. Usability Design Tip 3 – use hero images for calling attention. Limit to one hero n a page. If you are using callouts, no more than 3 attention grabbing callouts should go into any page.

4. Usability Design Tip 4 – design to reduce user clicks. Palm ® is best known to optimize their mobile devices to work with the minimum number of clicks. Take a look at their website – its has one of the most uniquely designed navigation!

5. Usability Design Tip 5 – play with navigation. This is one of the most crucial part of any creative design. Understand your client’s business driver behind designing their website & design navigation accordingly. It is always a good idea to keep Navigation Menus limited to 6 & no more than 2 Sub Navigation Menus on any website.

6. Usability Design Tip 6 – give due importance to the website’s footer. use it for additional links, sitemap etc.

7. Usability Design Tip 7 – help user to navigate by providing Related Articles in suitable locations. Related Articles could become a part of your Navigation Design Strategy.

8. Usability Design Tip 8 – design for multiple web browsers. Most of the current browsers are mutually compatible, i.e. if you design for Mozilla Firefox 3.6, the website will work well with Safari 4, Google Chrome as well as IE8. In the same lines, design for non-flash / non-Javascript browsers too. Many user turn their flash & Javascript off. In such situations, your website should still work reasonably well.

9. Usability Design Tip 9 – break conventions but use caution. Creativity demands that you break conventional & traditional practices. Like a top horizontal navigation (take a hint from the Palm.com design or the Lee.com design for example). Break rules – but it would be wise to break few of them at a time & see how it works.

10. Usability Tip 10 – Test your design with real users in a monitored condition. This is one tip that everyone fails to do & leaves everything to just fall in place. The Usability Sciences team are experts in doing this to perfection, so that by the 3rd iteration they provide you with a near perfect design!

The Big Mantra in Creative Designs is to Design for the User. A great design will marry the Business Objectives behind a design to the right Usability Pattern of the users to become successful.