Design Your Site to Be Usable: Part II

In an earlier installment, we gave you tips on how to make your site more usable. Here are three more best practices that websites should consider when it comes to usability.

1. Let them contact you. Easily.

Have you ever gone through a website and have questions in your mind? Chances are, you would look for a contact page or some ways to contact the company.

If you do not let your customers get in touch with you easily, you have just lost an important sale, or perhaps an opportunity to show that you care by making sure you have great customer service.

You would also lose the chance to manage your reputation effectively. These days, if the customer can’t complain to you directly, they would write a scathing blog post about you and your company and that would be the start of a PR nightmare you wish you never had to contend with.

Making it easy for your customers to contact you is also a good way to make your site usable. Take a look at how Coca-Cola does it:

Not only do they provide their contact details, they also make it easier for you to find the answers to your questions if you are an investor, a student, a journalist or an interested reseller. They also invite you to ask them, and had put up a friendly human face to encourage you to get in touch.

2. Let them search your site.

Search is one of the easiest ways to let your visitors find the content they want, but a lot of websites still do not include a search button on their sites.

Make sure that you include a search box on every page of your site.

3. Use relevant page titles.

Maybe you just have a lazy website designer, or you have never thought about it, but having the same page title for every page on your site is a big no-no. Yet a lot of sites are guilty of having the same title for each page of their site!

Not only do you lose the chance of helping your page rank higher on search results, you are also doing your visitors a great disservice. They would not know what the page is about when they search for it and they would have to click on your link and wait for the page to load to see what the page is all about. If you include a title, they would know beforehand if it’s the right page or not.