How to make the site easy to use?

In addition to planning what your Web application is going to do, you need to consider how it is going to do it. Making your application easy to use is important: If customers can’t find your products, they aren’t going to buy them. And if customers can’t find the information they need in a short time, they will look elsewhere. On the Web, customers can easily go elsewhere. Making your application easy to use is usability engineering. Web usability includes such issues as

• Navigation: What is on your site and where it is located should be immediately obvious to a user.
• Graphics: Graphics make your site attractive, but graphic files can be slow to display.
• Access: Some design decisions can make your application accessible or not accessible to users who have disabilities such as impaired vision.
• Browsers: Different browsers (even different versions of the same browser) can display the same HTML file differently.

Web usability is a large and important subject, and delving into the topic more deeply is beyond the scope of this book. But fear not, you can find lots of helpful information on Web usability on — you guessed it — the Web. Be sure to check out the Web sites of usability experts Jakob Nielsen (www.useit.com) and Jared Spool (www.uie.com). Vincent Flanders also has a fun site full of helpful information about Web design at WebPagesThatSuck.com.