5 tips for improving usability

Five tips for improving usability on your travel site...

1. Effective communication.

Ensure your homepage clearly communicates the nature of your offering. If you are a specialist, make this clear. Check that your homepage effectively tells customers what it is that you do. Don’t be afraid of plain, direct language. Also, given that customers may not arrive directly on your homepage, ensure this continues through the site as much as possible.

2. Clear navigation.

Good navigation matters across the web, but is especially vital on sites focussed on selling. Put yourself in your customers' place. What might they want to see? Ideally, you should back this up with some research. How are they behaving on your existing site? When relevant, provide users with a simple search feature. However, ensure that it is easy to use and not a source of frustration. Don’t force your customers to entry arbitrary information in order to complete a search request. Also, when designing your search criteria, think about your product range – avoid facilitating zero result searches wherever possible. If necessary, keep it very broad and allow users to filter down from a higher number of results.

3. Effective categorisation.

Customer requirements are varied and your product range should be the same. Find ways of creating meaningful browsing choices for your customers to enable them to quickly find a suitable selection of products. This can range from providing customers with an easy way to browse products across a specific category, or an easy way to browse based on attributes. Build this categorisation into the architecture of your site to create a clear structure for your customers. Be wary of simply duplicating the categories present in your offline materials – is this really the best product structure to use online?

4. Concise, meaningful content.

Provide your customers with the information they need to make their decision. Ask yourself what they might like to know? What might help them make the decision? Ideally, back this up with research. Quality content about the product can help convert a potential customer into a real one. At the same time, think about removing content that is not directly relevant to the core buying process, or perhaps place it in secondary sections. Web content should be shorter and more concise than brochure content, so a direct transfer from one medium to the other is usually not the best approach. Consider highlighting the important facts and don’t be afraid of bullet lists. Make your content easy to scan and easy to draw the vital facts from quickly and easily.

5. Clear calls to action.

Avoid confusion – make it clear what users must do in order to continue their journey around your site. Provide decent calls to action including not just ‘buy now’ buttons, but browsing options. If you have a core path you expect your customers to take, make it clear and make it obvious. Let your customer be in no doubt what they do next.

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• Web design & UX

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