Usability and the utility, are not only the visual design, are factors to determine success or failure of a Website. Since the visitor (User) of the page is the only one who clicks the mouse and therefore decides everything, for now the standard approach for successful and profitable web design is the user-centric design, anyhow it's all about user's experience and how can he use your features.
Here we are going to discuss the main principles of web design and the latest approaches which will lead us to create an effective website.
Designing a Usable Effective Website
How do users think? In order to use the principles of making a great website, you have to understand how do users usually thinks, and act accordingly.
Basically users habits and behaviors on the internet don’t differ a lot from their habits In our real life, like if we are going to talk about a store, people go to store – a related store of what they are looking for obviously, then if they found what fulfill their needs, they will actually buy it, or at least they will leave a good impression!
Now think online, people are using search engines for searching of a certain service or product or some information, they are looking for something usable and clickable that is related to their needs, user as a visitor to your website and believe it always don’t take long before clicking the back button , if he didn’t found what makes him happy !
Users appreciate quality and credibility, yes they do! If the page provides users with high quality and credible content, that adds the highest value of your website.
No reading, Just Scanning! Yes, users do not read they scan the whole page looking for a fixed points or anchors that might guide them to what they are looking for, so do not expect that user will read all of your content without arranging it according to how user will SCAN it.
Web users are impatient and insists on instant contentment, very simple principle, if users couldn’t find what meets their expectations then, the web designer failed to do his job and the company will lose money accordingly as the user will search for another, and the alternative search for the user might be your biggest competitor!
Users are not making optimal choices, users doesn’t always choose the optimal choice while searching for their goals, but they keep scanning web pages going from a section to another searching for what meets their goals then it will be clicked immediately, so satisfying is more important than optimization, while also optimization is hard and will take some time, in opposite with creating satisfaction.
Users are using their improvisation, in most cases, user's goes through instead of reading information provided by the designer, so if you found something that works with that, just stick to it, Even if you can't understand how it works but you still can use it!
Users want to have control, like they needs the easiest way to navigate your site, click a link and get back from it easily with their back-button without any popup pages or new windows that will keep popping every time they click a link, they want to be their own controller and to control their browser.
By now, you can understand the most important behaviors of web users that must be taken into consideration while building your website design, and please remember Content is always the king, quality and credibility will add a great value to your website, test and keep test the user experience, by treating yourself as one of them not just a webmaster we web designer!