As there are rules in every type of production, there are rules in developing websites. When you are publishing a book, you wouldn’t put its title on the back cover and print pages backwards (unless your culture tells you so). There is a certain set of rules in website development, which were created to help a visitor interact with your project in the most efficient way. It is called usability.
Usability defines certain principles according to which the website has to be laid out, structured, and navigated. There has to be a logic in content structure, the sequence in which parts of content (sections of the site) are presented, careful content selection. In other words, it’s how convenient and easy the website appears to a visitor.
Experts believe that most of the Internet is being looked at rather than read. An average web visitor reacts mostly to the visual signals sent from the screen and proceeds with reading the content only after recognizing some of those signals. Of course, it’s hard to tell when a human eye stops scanning images, colors, and the layout structure, and starts reading the words. But there is a direct correlation between which symbols are shown, how they are designed and written, and how fast the receiver of any visual signal is finding it clear and makes a decision to continue.
Unlike any type of non-digital sources of information, Internet provides by orders of magnitude greater variety of different kinds of media (websites) which compete with each other. If you are holding a newspaper, you most likely use it for getting the most out of it, because it will take you at least to stand up and get another one if you, say, don’t like how the text is formatted or you can’t find what you want. But it won’t take long for your visitor to make a decision about the relevancy and convenience of your website and to immediately close it and move to another one if yours is difficult or unclear how to read or navigate (process, use). And guess, how fast users make a decision if they want to move on? About 0.4 seconds.
Within a few seconds, you have to deliver a clear image of your business, display a graphic idea of your product, and describe how what you are doing may benefit your visitors. Not your customer, not your potential client, but the person who is looking at your website at the moment. You will keep them on your website and help them make it to the Contacts or Check Out pages only if those first several seconds of the visitor’s observing your website are productive.
It may take a complete redesign to make a good, convenient, logical, and easy to navigate web project if the original one does not meet important usability requirements. That’s why it’s so important to test the future website’s usability before the project is created and the content is structured.
(This article was written in 2007, but strangely enough, we still come across websites and applications that have usability issues.)