When designing a product, website, platform, or other experience, consider these three tips to ensure the best usability for your customers.
1. Don’t skip the research
Understanding customers and their challenges leads to creating the best product. The development team should list the information and customer access that is available and create a plan that helps support ongoing research. Beyond regularly talking to customers, ways to gain insight include:
- Listening to customer service calls
- Accessing feedback through help forms
- Shadowing customers throughout the day
2. Create a consistent user interface
Customers should not be challenged to use the platform. A consistent user interface helps reduce customer confusion and facilitates quickness navigating the website. Implement a design system to ensure the basics such as button shapes, colors and typography are consistent across the platform to help support users.
3. Follow usability norms
Innovation is often confused with usability. New and flashy is not necessarily the best solution. Core website tasks are not the place to start creating a new icon for a search or moving the home icon to the bottom of a site. Follow research-based web design and usability guidelines. This will support the creation of highly responsive and easy-to-use websites that customers will find enjoyable. Both the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Nielsen Norman Group have published resources on web usability.
