Alertbox #1

Usability 101: Introduction to Usability

This article stresses the importance of the usability of a website. The article introduces five key concepts that can be used to determine the usability of our own websites. These concepts will be important to learn and apply in order to produce quality websites.

The five concepts are:

Learnability
Efficiency
Memorability
Errors
Satisfaction

Lack of usability creates frustration in its users and people will unlikely use that website. Usability is the most important aspect that we can work on to improve our website. There are many ways that you can test and improve the usability of a website. One way is to go out and ask someone to look at it and explore. You may watch them in the process and ask them for feedback on ways that you could improve. If you do this about five times that should be good enough.

This process may require developing many designs, but never forget the good aspects from the old designs, just build upon them. It is not needed to invent the wheel over and over again. I can implement all of these strategies in my own design. I may not be building a grand website for a large company, but I can make my website interesting and user-friendly to those in the classroom and for myself. I still have a ways to go, but this can be a good foundation to build on and something that I can check myself on from time to time.