Usability

What is usability, and why is it important?

Web design is so much more than making your site look cool. If the site isn't intuitive and easy for your user, it will create frustration and a major drop in usage - and can also give your organization a negative image. Usability is the quality of your site that makes it easy to use, intuitive, and functional - allowing your users to achieve their desired tasks as quickly and easily as possible.

Many factors contribute to creating a highly usable web site. Some of them are tangible and easy to address, such as screen resolution, while some are difficult to conceptualize. Cultural and demographic factors can be difficult to determine.

In all cases, thorough research and testing will provide more insight into what will help make your web site more usable to your audience. While this is not always practical or affordable, especially for smaller web sites, it is possible to use web standards and best practices to help you design a highly usable site.

This section outlines some important usability issues that should be kept in mind while designing any web site.

   + Screen Resolution
   + To Scroll or Not to Scroll