Effective
Web Design

In the Internet world, if you want to make a mark and succeed in your business, it is imperative that you get the perspective of those who will visit your site. Your success or failure depends on how they react to the information provided on the website. Hence getting to know what goes on in users minds before planning to set up a website is very important. Web usability is the term that has been coined for the approach that makes a website easy to use for an end-user. The average user surfing the web page should not require any training and should be able to intuitively follow the instructions. The main aim of usability is to present the information on a website in a clear and concise manner, to provide users with obvious choices instead of misleading them, to remove ambiguity, and to place the most important things at the right place. You can visit http://www.upassoc.org/ for more usability resources and community discussions.

For an e-commerce website, paying attention to usability aspect becomes imperative because it decides how profitable the business will be. A properly designed website which has taken into account web usability is sure to trigger sales and help users to perform the transactions valuable to the business. In the beginning of 2000, when the e-commerce sites suddenly started failing by leaps and bounds, it was found that these websites had fancy designs but they were not drawing user’s attention. The web gurus suggested that web designers should stick to the KISS (Keep It Short and Simple) principle while designing a site for its success.

Over the years, several people have researched on usability but it was Steve Krug, whose book on usability “Don’t make me think” provided real insights into what goes in user’s mind when they visit a website. He pointed out that a good website should allow its users to accomplish the intended tasks as easily and directly as possible. According to him, a user usually takes the first available solution to his problem and it doesn’t matter whether it is an optimal solution or not. He stresses that websites should take advantage of this user behavior.

Website designers also started using some tools to analyze user behavior. The most important usability tools were Eye Tracking and Multivariate testing. Eye Tracking was a techniques used to study user eye patterns while surfing a website. The visualizations revealed that users often read web pages in a F-shaped pattern, two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.

The above heatmap gives a detailed analysis of how users read a web page. The areas where users concentrated the most are colored red; the yellow areas indicate fewer views, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Gray areas didn’t attract any attention.

There are direct implications of this Eye Tracking analysis. They are as follows:

• Users don’t read the website text thoroughly
• The first one or two paragraphs should be used to state the most important information
• The paragraphs, bullet points should start with information carrying words

Therefore, if you wish to design a website, you need to keep the above points in mind. This will make the information on your website easy to understand for a user.

I will also share with you some tips to make your website a hit with users. In order to design an effective website, keep the following points in mind:

• Users appreciate good quality content so even if your web design is average but you are providing good quality content, users will be definitely attracted to your website.
• Users scan as the eye tracking studies have shown so be sure to guide them through the web page.
• Web users want instant gratification hence if you put more cognitive load on them your business is sure to fail.
• Users don’t make optimal choices, they just choose the first available option, hence its your job as a designer to guide them clearly.
• Users want to have control so no sudden surprises fro them.
• Users don’t like to think so keep it really simple and obvious.
• Never test user’s patience and hence don’t make them perform any action unnecessarily.
• Make use of effective writing with short phrases, clean layout, and objective language.
• Make use of white space on your web page to give it a clean look.
• Follow users expectations
• Test your website quite often

There is many web tools that can help you analyze the user behavior in your site, such as eye tracking tools, click tools and many other, but most of them are premium and you need to purchase them. Google Analytics is giving you the same advantages of that tools, simply go to you Google Analytics account choose the desired website profile and click on “content menu” in to the left bar, than from the drop down menu choose the option “Site Overlay”.

Than will pop up an window with your website (in overlay mode) and next to the each link you’ll see percentage bar, that will show you the link goal value and click made on it. With that information you can understand what is interesting and grabs the attention of your websites visitors.

Understanding user behavior is not as difficult as it seems to be. However, you have to be a little more vigilant. I hope these points will help you to embark on a profitable journey because if the first step in web designing is well thought then the results will sure be profitable.