“It’s quite normal for e-commerce sites to increase sales by 100% or more as a result of usability. More important, they can probably avoid 9 of 10 returns by eliminating most mis-designed items (a 1000% improvement of the error rate metric)”.
- Jakob Nielsen

“A report by Creative Good showed that 39 per cent of test shoppers failed in their buying attempts because sites were too difficult to navigate. Additionally, 56 per cent of search attempts failed”.
- Creative Good

“Fortune 1000 companies each spend an average of $2 million per year on site redesigns, without knowing if the redesign made the site easier to use”.
- Forrester Research

“The dumbest mistake is viewing design as something you do at the end of the process to ‘tidy up’ the mess, as opposed to understanding it’s a ‘day one’ issue and part of everything.”
- Tom Peters

“A bad web site is like a grumpy salesperson.”
- Jakob Nielsen

Why is it important?

If your visitors find your site but then can’t navigate it, use any of the functionality on it or find what they’re looking for, then they will leave empty handed and disappointed in you and your site. Need I say more?

Link to Usability papers:

Measuring the quality of eService
“By conducting exploratory factor analysis and structural equation modeling, we found that e-service quality is measured on six dimensions: information quality, website usability, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and personalization”.

Designing usable online stores: A landscape preference perspective
As an exploratory effort, we adopted and extended Kaplan’s landscape preference model by including factors of legibility, coherence, variety, and mystery, and examined their effect on cognitive and affective appraisals and their impact on purchase intention…Our ?ndings demonstrated that the proposed model explained a large amount of the variance of purchase intention, invariant across different subgroups.

A Usability Evaluation of the Business and Industry Web Site
“During September and October 2008, the Usability Lab tested 12 novice participants in a “one-click” usability study of two different versions of a low-fidelity prototype of the Business andIndustry main page. The page was developed by the current Economic Web Site RedesignTeam. The page did not have any clickable links, though it did include text that appeared to belinks. Participants were given a set of tasks and were asked to click on a link that they felt would best lead them to information that would answer the task question. The link did not takethe participant to another page— once the participant had clicked, the task was complete. Thestudy evaluated the success and satisfaction of the participants and whether the link theparticipants chose would have led them to the answer they were seeking”.

Usability Evaluation of Three Social Networking Sites

“This study evaluatedthe usability of three of the most popular social networking sites (MySpace,Facebook, and Orkut). Results revealed issues related to confusing terminology,inadequate feedback and error messages, and improper link location impacted user performance and satisfaction”.

Webpage aesthetics, performance, and usability:Design variables and their effects

“Fifty-seven design variables and ten underlying clusters that conceptualize the structure of user webpage judgement are identified through content analysis on literature and structured interviews, balanced incomplete block user survey administration, and cluster analysis.”

The Discussion on Influence of Website Usability towards User Acceptability

“From Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, the development of Internet technology makes the existing value of websites has revolutionary change. How to provide suitable service platform for human-machine interaction through websites is the subject of debate that many technology developers and users concern about nowadays. This study uses Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) as the foundation, from the perspective of tourism companies and Internet users to analyze the relevant
factors of website usability”.

Effects of Interactivity on Website Involvement and Purchase Intention

“This study aims to understand how website interactivity (active control and reciprocal communication) can impact purchase intention through website involvement and how the impacts are moderated by the type of products featured on websites”.

Technical Review: Current Issues of Usability Testing

“System usability can be measured through various methods. One of the more important and widely employed techniques is ‘usability testing’, where asks, number of users, evaluators, and other factors are the main elements. This paper reviews usability testing together with current issues that can influence usability testing results, both negatively and positively. It also reviews web usability testing. In addition, in this paper, usability testing in the future is considered in order that improvements may be made.”

Recuperating Website Link Structure Using Fuzzy Relations between the Content and Web Pages

“The link structure of website allows us to spread the link power of home page to the individual pages of the site. In this paper we define the content and web pages as two important and prominent factors in website navigation and restate the enhancement in the website navigation as making some useful changes in the link structure of the website based on the aforementioned factors. Then we suggest a new method for proposing the changes using fuzzy approach to optimize the website architecture.”

A Heuristic Based Approach for Improving Website Link Structure and Navigation

“As web sites evolve over time, their complexity in both the content and the link structure also tend to increase,hence, causing disorientation and cognitive overload on the user side. User traversals tend to become more cumbersome,and information get hidden deep inside long chains of web pages and links. As a result, we need more creative design features to allow automatic and dynamic improvement of web site link structure. This paper describes a set of heuristics to optimize the web site usability and link structure.”

As a webdesigner (and technologically savvy user of the Internet), there is no excuse for you not to be using Firefox as your primary web browser. If you aren’t using Firefox yet, you need to go and download it right now. Not only does Firefox provide a top of the line Internet browsing experience, but it also provides an endless amount of functionality that you simply won’t find in any other Internet browser.

Because third parties can develop add-ons for Firefox, by downloading the best add-ons that are available, you can transform Firefox into a tool that dramatically increases your productivity and saves you a countless amount of time.?? Since there are so many different add-ons available to download, it can be a little overwhelming to pick out which ones you should be using.

Therefore, I decided to do all of the legwork for you and compile a list of the six best Firefox add-ons for web designers.

1. Web Developer
2. Firebug
3. Colorzilla
4. Fireshot
5. CSS Validator/HTML Validator
6. Browser Window Resizer

A CMS means a content management system. Many online publishers use different CMS systems to publish content on the Internet because one, it makes collaborative publishing easier, and two, the publishers only have to worry about creating the content and clicking a few buttons; the rest of the work, including publishing, archiving and maintenance, is handled by the CMS. Primarily, when you see blogs and magazine and newspaper websites, you are seeing content management systems in action. Non-news and non-blogging websites too these days use different CMS systems to publish pages and maintain the shopping cart items. You can easily come across an average corporate website using a CMS to publish and manage information pages.

The importance of a search engine friendly CMS

With more than 94% of online buyers turning to search engines for researching/finding the products they want to purchase, you can deny the importance of search engines only at your own peril. Every website aspires to leverage the relevant traffic from the search engines and for that their CMSs must generate search engine friendly pages. Most CMSs, especially the blogging platforms, claim to be search engine friendly these days, but do they really get your pages higher ranks? The SEO experts doubt that. So what makes your pages search engine friendly? Here are a few factors:

* Your CMS should generate search engine friendly URLs. A search engine friendly URL should contains the ampersand and equal to signs. It should contain the relevant keywords separated by dashes and not the underscores. Does your CMS generate search engine friendly URLs or still churns out those archaic URLs with equal to signs using products IDs and such?
* Your CMS should incorporate text-based bread crumb navigation. The bread crumb navigation tells your visitor exactly where he or she is in the hierarchy of your links. A good example of such a navigation would be something like Main -> Category -> Product. With a single click your visitor can go to the previous section and this way can access all the important pages with great speed. Search engines attach lots of relevance to websites supporting text-based bread crumb navigation.
* Your CMS should allow you to modify your title, and even your URL. Most CMSs generate the title and the URL automatically, but considering how important they are for search engine placement, you should be able to decide what words are included there.

Most modern-day CMSs claim to be search engine friendly but there are very few, for instance the blogging software WordPress, that generate highly optimised web pages. Whenever you are choosing a CMS for your website, take care that it generates search engine optimised pages for your website.