Usability is the key to online success

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Think of all the big success stories of the last 5 years on the internet. Almost all of them are famous for their usability. As much fun as it to make a website that people read, it’s even more fun to make a website that people use. When you great a website that people “do”, then you’re in really good shape. When Google became a verb, it meant everyone was “doing” their website until it hurt.

If you concentrate on usability, your life gets easier. Find out what the users want, and give it to them. In some ways that makes your job of website development easier than ever. When people are engaged in using your site, they come back with little encouragement.

It’s not easy to make usable websites. It takes quite a bit of development time, but really, anything having to do with website development makes time. You can decide on adding content, or you can make a website where others contribute. If you don’t have a ton of development skills, you can always use one of the many CMS available.

One nice thing about concentrating on usability, is you can spend less time on content. If making content is getting to you, then you might want offer a way for others to make the content for you. User-generated content is all the rage, and with great reason: it costs you less to develop.

If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to the Sootle RSS feed!.