Web usability information
Web usability is about making a website usable for everyone by presenting the information in a clear and easy to find manner. There are many aspects to web usability, some of which are taken care of by the corporate web templates and others which web authors control. This section focuses on how make the webpages you author more usable. Much of the web usability information you need is within this Web Authoring Guide.
Web usability is also closely tied in with web accessibility. Look at the resources for web accessibility, and in particular, the ten tips for creating accessible content.
Main points to consider in regards to web usability
- The navigation must be logical and clear. When an area within UniSA
creates a new website using the corporate web templates, the Marketing
and Development Unit (MDU) helps with the navigation, or the
information architecture as shown the left
menu in a website.
It is worth revisiting this every so often because as pages get added and/or deleted the original information architecture can become obsolete. - Content must be easy to read and find. People scan a webpage for the information they need and if they can't find it they will leave the page. Web content on your site has a wealth of information including page length and layout, and use of different types of media (eg linking to PDF files etc).
- If you include links to files that are not webpages, eg Word documents, PDF documents, or any other multimedia files, inform the user by indicating the type of document and the file size.
- As most people use search engines to find the information they are looking for you can improve search results by providing suitable content as mentioned above, and by adding metadata. Content within the page and metadata all contribute to search engines finding the page. This includes external search engines like Google and the internal UniSA search engine.
- Try to keep the size of the page down. If you include images make them as small in file size as possible. The most common mistake people make is including an image and then resizing it within Frontpage. This does not reduce the file size. Read our instructions for adding images to webpages. Including an image that has not been optimised for the web can mean that someone might be downloading a 1Mb image which will take some minutes with a internet dialup connection.
Web usability resources
- Jakob Nielsen's Useit.com
- Eyetracking web usability - based on workshop run by Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice Coyne (Powerpoint, 2.4Mb)
- Web usability presentation - based on Deakin University study into the usability of university websites (Powerpoint, 202kb)