Usability & Accessibility: Key Components in Website Design

Website usability & accessibility: part of the design?

Usability and accessibility are two of the most important components in successful website design and yet seem to be two of the most neglected.

Brief definitions:

• usability: making a website as simple and fast to navigate as possible, and presenting information / products in an easily readable format
• accessibility: making the content of a website available to everyone, including those with less-than-perfect eyesight.

There are elements of accessibility and usability that overlap. For example, many websites use absolute font sizes (they cannot be resized using browser controls) as opposed to relative font sizes (in Internet Explorer go to View... Text Size... and select Smaller, Medium, Larger, etc. - the text on the 1 Cog website can be viewed at any size, unlike the majority of websites).

Usability - the foundation of good website design

Let's demonstrate good website usability by highlighting some examples of bad website usability:

• the navigation of a website is not immediately understandable
• the navigation of a website makes it difficult to return to previous pages
• enquiry forms give no confirmation that they have been successful
• it is not immediately obvious which pieces of text are links because either the designer has underlined text that is not a link or removed the underline from links
• the website takes an age to load - this damages usability by the frustration caused by waiting for a mountain of fancy graphics to download
• congested web pages: there's so much crammed on the page you can't see the wood for the trees
• blinking text and graphics: distracting, annoying
• pop-up boxes: if you've spent more than a few minutes on the web, you'll be heartily irritated already
• superfluous pages: many websites employ splash pages, usually with a large, impressive graphic that says underneath 'Click Here To Continue'. This impressive graphic does not impress anyone.

The list above gives some indication of the factors that need to be considered in making a website usable.

That was nice - here's my credit card

1 Cog has a strong focus on the usability of each website we produce. We can also act in a consultancy role and give a professional, independent assessment of your existing website, helping to make it as effective as possible. Get this right and your customers will thank you with their credit card numbers.

For further reading you may like to visit an excellent resource for website usability and design: Software Usability Research Laboratory. Usability can also be described as Human Computer Interaction (HCI) - an excellent resource for this is HCI Bibliography.

Accessibility? My customers can see just fine

Excuse us for being blunt: that's just arrogant.

From the RNIB's Campaign for Good Web Design: "There are two million people with sight problems in the UK. Good design can make your websites, information materials, goods and services and buildings accessible to them."

Making a website accessible to all takes little effort, although it is another element of website design that is neglected by many web designers, perhaps because it is another example of why "web design is not graphic design".

Making websites accessible need not compromise the functionality or appearance of a website, and can aid elements of it such as search engine optimisation by providing good linking structures with correct usage of HTML tags.

1 Cog makes websites that comply with guidelines set out by the RNIB's Advice on designing accessible websites and W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).