usability and accessibility
Simply put, can the person who comes onto your site find what they are looking for? Is it easy to navigate the site, enjoyable to "wander" without getting lost and having to hit the back button constantly? Yes, we have seen those sites too and also left pretty quickly. Is your site accessible to people with different needs, for example, is your text resizable for people with visual impairments, can it be read on a text only browser, can a keyboard be used to navigate instead of a mouse?
If the usability factor is not there, people will not hang about. They will close the browser or go back to the search engine and find another company or individual who can provide the same service, but with a website that screams, "stay, explore - hey, I'm nice, and what's more, I look good too".
Navigation should be consistent, not jumping all over the page layout and the navigation elements should be grouped. For example you can see on idealEye that we have a main menu at the top and whenever that section expands we provide a menu on the right. Wherever you are on the site, you can see the main navigation and wherever you are in the sections, you can find all other parts to that section. This is especially important on medium sized websites who may have many pages. For example, we have designed sites with over 150 pages of content but wherever you are on that site you can find your way home or to previous sections. Navigation aids that are sometimes employed, design wise for this, include drop down menus and crumb trails.
For example, our crumb trail in this section reads: home>resources>website
usability and accessibility
so you can always see where you are in the structure of the site. Navigation
like this and drop downs would be decided upon dependant on how much content
you have.
Usability is also about accessibility. If someone comes onto your site, access issues may arise for the following reasons:
- browser being used
- platform being used
- needs of the user
At idealEye, we strive to make our websites as accessible as possible. We design and test on both Mac and PC, therefore ensuring cross-platform accessibility. We test on various browsers on both platforms and we test our pages against accessibility guidelines.
