How To Make Your Website User-Friendly

W ebsites are undeniably an important way to establish contact between yourself and the people you want to reach. Your users should have a seamless and enjoyable experience on your website, it should not leave them confused or frustrated. Knowing how to make your website user-friendly and thinking from a user-centered lens while designing can help you achieve user satisfaction and higher traffic.

Speed

Your website should, quite simply, be fast. Users often have short attention spans and want their content fast, taking minimal time to load. 40% of users wait up to three seconds for a website to load before abandoning it. 

Make sure to minimize loading time by compressing and minimizing your resource files, utilize browser cache to avoid reloading resources, and scaling your server and database to increase response times. You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to analyze your site’s speed.

Content

Making sure your content is user-friendly means that all the information that you want to convey is easy-to-read, clear, and concise. It is also important that you have enough content on the website, keeping in mind what the user might require. There should be in-depth information where needed and should be supported with images and videos where possible. Your website’s typography should also ensure the content is readable on all screen sizes.

Design

A website with a good, clear aesthetic can be visually appealing to the user and make their experience much smoother. Start by choosing a color scheme following formal design principles, and choosing colors that are easy on the eye and not straining. The overall layout paired with the color scheme should make the website beautiful, clear, but not bulky. 

Make sure your logo is properly placed in the website’s layout, usually in the top-left or center of the navigation bar. The logo is a part of the design, and the color of the logo should also be a factor when choosing the website’s color scheme. Animations are another way to help the user experience but they are tricky since overusing animations can be distracting, make the website bulky, and decrease its loading time. 

Responsiveness

The percentage of users accessing the internet from their mobile devices has drastically increased in recent times -around 49.71% of today’s web traffic comes from mobiles. Whether the user visits from their desktop, phone, or tablet, the website should look and behave correctly, and its content and layout should adjust according to different screen sizes. 

You should also focus on user responsiveness -the website should respond accordingly and efficiently based on the user’s interaction. If they submit a form and some data is invalid, make sure to let them know exactly where the error was; if the page has refreshed, make sure the valid data is still pre-filled in the form and the user does not have to re-enter it.

Accessibility

One extremely important principle of user-friendly web design, which is often overlooked, is accessibility. It is perhaps the only principle that is also regulated by law in some places. Accessibility is about making sure your website is usable to everyone, including people with visual or hearing impairments and other disabilities. 

The World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Guidelines go into detail about making web content more accessible. You should generally focus on key features, such as making the website keyboard and screen reader accessible, using semantic tags, providing alternative text for images, and captioning for audio and video content.

Navigation and Search

Once the user is on the website, you want to make sure they can find their way around it easily and find the information they’re there for. Your website should have a navigation bar containing the most useful links. This gives the user an idea of what the website has to offer. Do not excessively layer or overload your navigation bar. 

Additionally, title your pages appropriately, with the right headings -you could also use breadcrumbs that show the user’s path on the website much like a file directory. Make sure to also have search functionality to let users find something easily. If a user cannot locate their required resource within a few clicks, they are bound to move to another website.

Conclusion

Thanks to Reddit, here are some user-friendly website examples for you to get inspiration from: Awwwards, Toggl, and LiveAbout. Knowing how to make a website user-friendly can be all the difference when it comes to gaining user traffic, reaching a wider audience, and expanding your business. Try to implement the mentioned principles, do some user testing, and see what it does for your website. Now that you know how to make your website user-friendly, you can work with the design to ensure your customers have a good experience! 

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