Usability

Usability means ease of use. Before making a Website public, the best way to evaluate its usability is to have naive users try it out. This is the equivalent of market-testing a new product and adjusting the product (or the way it is marketed) to help it succeed financially.

Designing a website that takes into account the human element requires both an understanding of our nature as well as our physiological limitations. Usable websites incorporate human tendencies and limitation into its overall design.

There are three things to consider when evaluating the Usability of a website's design:

Clarity of the purpose and meaning: here we can simply say that "the clarity of purpose, or meaning of your communication is reflected in the results that you get."
A great website is usually one that has been fine tuned at several levels through repeated testing and adjusting to ensure that the combination of text, graphics and links creates the intended message. A website user would say, "The more well-organized a page is, the more faith I will have in the info."

It is the responsibility of the website provider to prioritize the information presented. Website users usually skip over material that they consider to be fluff. This includes introductory and welcome messages also. They almost always immediately scan for a HyperLink to the information they are seeking.

Speed: speed is function of: the size of the files in the Website (bigger equals slower), the capabilities of the server (computer) the Website files reside on, traffic volume on the Internet at the time the Website is visited and the capabilities of the Website visitor's computer.

File-size problems are usually due to the use of graphics, so before you launch your Website, review sizes of your graphics files. Try to keep it to 10K total for all graphics on each page.

The server is the computer on which your Website resides. So just choose a good service provider, that possibly is able to give you routine evaluations to test performances.

Information design: it is the art and science of ensuring that the information that the user wants is very easy to get. One way to achieve this result is to minimize the number of mouse clicks that users must execute to get the information they need or want. This type of design is not simple to execute, but when it's done well, it makes the Website "feel" simple to use.

At a Website, graphics interest, but content rules.”