What is Website Usability? Aspects, Needs of Users, Trust, Loyalty, Customer-centric

What is Website Usability?

Website usability refers to the ease with which users can navigate and interact with a website to achieve their goals. In other words, a website is considered useful when it is easy to use, efficient, and effective.

Five Aspects of Website Usability

The ease with which a website can be used by visitors is referred to as website usability. A website should be designed keeping in mind the requirements, comfort, and mental capacity of the users. While determining the usability of its website, an organization should consider five major aspects related to its design. These are:

• Availability and Accessibility of the Website
  
• Clarity
  
• Learnability
  
• Credibility
  
• Relevance

Availability and Accessibility of the Website

The website should be easily accessible and not take too much time to load. Hyperlinks should be correctly linked. Moreover, the website should be suitable for operating on various digital media. It should load even when the connection is slow.

Clarity

The website design should be simple, clear, consistent, and easily understood by visitors. It should avoid any kind of ambiguity. It should guide the visitors in content search.

Learnability

The website should promote self-learning among visitors. Its interface should be intuitive and should not require explicit instructions or a long process of trial and error to understand the process.

Credibility

The content on the website should be credible and precise. It should not have any errors, such as incorrect grammar, punctuation, or misspellings.

Relevance

The content on the website should be credible and relevant to the users. Nothing is more frustrating for a user than to navigate through a website and not find the information he/she was looking for or find the wrong information.

An organization can evaluate website usability by determining whether it meets the following objectives:

• Fulfilling the needs of website users
  
• Gaining the trust and loyalty of customers
  
• Having a customer-centric design

Meeting the Needs of Website Users

For any business firm, each individual visiting its website is a prospective customer. Therefore, it should create a Web presence that meets the requirements of its website users. For this, a Web designer can provide the following on the website:

• General information about the organization
  
  
• Characteristics of the products or services offered by the organization
  
  
• Warranties, after-sales service, or repair policies offered by the organization
  
  
• Website design that helps easy navigation by customers
  
  
• Contact details, including contact numbers of the helpdesk personnel in the organization

Factors of Trust and Loyalty

Organizations are focussing on various methods to build customer relationships by providing an efficient support system before and after a purchase. One such method is the e-marketing value chain. The purpose of an e-marketing value chain is to build strong relationships with customers by fulfilling their needs and offering support before and after a purchase. This helps the organization in developing customer confidence and loyalty towards the organization.

It is not easy for organizations to gain the trust and loyalty of customers through the Internet. For this, organizations need to demonstrate their competency, credibility, and trustworthiness to them. This can be done by creating an interactive website interface that customers can easily navigate and contains content that is clear, precise, and relevant to the customers.

There are three ways through which an organization can develop trust and loyalty with its website visitors:

• Creating and sharing useful content on its website
  
• Catering to the needs of its customers
  
• Highlighting the organization’s credibility through a professional website.

Customer-centric Website Design

A customer-centric website design refers to a website that is developed around the needs and wants of its customers. Customer-centric websites provide the following benefits to organizations:

• Ease of use
  
• Speedy resolution of customer queries
  
• Increase in sales figures
  
• Availability of detailed company information.

Organizations can achieve a customer-centric Web presence by ensuring that the development and design of the website are focused on existing and prospective customers. For this, an organization can follow the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards, which were enforced to ensure compatibility and agreement for the use of the Internet. In other words, the organization can use W3C specifications, guidelines, software, and tools for its website design.