Firstly, lets consider the term 'user friendly'. In plain words it is a combination of factors that affect the perception of site by user or it is just a simplicity of a website.
Many people have been in the situation when they visit a new site and it is very difficult to orientate there, as well as receive necessary information.In several minutes and sometimes even seconds of being in the site like this, there is a big desire to leave it. Unfortunately designers are often chasing for creativeness and forget about the users, about those for whom they were doing that site.
Then we try to detect what elseto pay attention for, in order to manage it easily and make its work the most effective for us:
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Simplicity of navigation. When the user visits your site for the first time, he must understand where he is at that moment and then navigate without any difficulty throughout the site.
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Efficiency of usage. The time user spends to find the necessary information must be minimum (it is about time of site loading, because if it is big, the user won't wait and just leave the site).
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Memorability – easy navigation while visiting the site next time, remember where the content items and a proper content are placed.
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Make sure that there are no mistakes – mismatch of the name and the content of web pages and others.
What you shouldn't do:
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Choose non-standard sizes and colors of used fonts. Practically 60% of users consider this web designer's mistake to be the most annoying and distracting while navigating this site.
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Place main menu in non-standard areas. How would you feel yourself if you would sit into the car and find out that thewheel is not on its usual place, for example on the back seat. Yes, it is very creative, but very inconvenient. For years of HTML language existence there were appeared some optimal concepts of site building. For example everyone got accustomed that the menu is usually on the right side or at the top of website page.
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Forget about the content. You should always remember that design is only a beautiful layout that embraces the content. Users visit sites not to adore the design, and beautiful pictures in the menu, but to receive some information. So you should regularly renew it and make sure that it is enough of content in your site.
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Overload site with animation. Of course, if the perfect animation doesn'timpede the navigation on the site, doesn't distract the user, it may exist.
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Forget about the contact page. It is very useful to embed some contact form on your site, now it is easy to create web form with an online generator like PHPForms. Users sometimes may want to communicate with you in private, write you some advises about site or even some complaints, and it is very important to give them this opportunity, and then when you receive the message, write the answer as soon as possible.
Site testing
An important part of site's creation is its testing by independent users. A total analysis of design quality, content and usability must held. After that all received information is analysed and developer decides what changes to make and what functions to add. Also the level of consumers' satisfaction with product/service is examined in order to plan the strategy of the site. The main purpose of testing is to make the web sitemaximally useful and easy to use for its visitors.