Usability

Product pages of online shops are perhaps the most complex of the landing pages, as they have a lot of information, require some action and functionality. Needless to say, there's a lot of room to work in in most shops.

What is a product page?

A product page is a page of an online shop, which contains:

• a product name
• a photo (and links to other photos)
• a description
• notes about sizes, color, specifications
• link to add the product to the shopping cart
• links and information about related products

Lately, when one of my stories got popular, I not only have had an insurge of visitors from Digg and other social sites, but also some comments both on the Digg page and under the post itself. Some comments were about the subject, but some revolved around making the article readable.

The whole experience of having a popular article allowed me to gain a better understanding of how I could improve my articles, as well as site and hosting performance.

When everyone and their cat knows what SEO is, few people remember about making their websites usable for their own visitors. Unfortunately, they are missing a goldmine here, as website usability can have as positive effect on a website as quality search engine optimization.

What is website usability?

Anyway, what's this usability thing?

Put simply, usability is about making the site easy for your visitors. The easiness is about understanding what the site is about, navigating to what the visitor needs and doing what both site visitor and owner want.

When people visit a website, they have their own goals for that. To reach the goal, they need to click on URLs to get to other pages and read text only to click further. What can you do to ensure that your site visitors can find what they are looking for?

Normally, people often tell you that people don't like to read online and they have a memory span of a hyperenergized 3-year old rocket. However, data collected over a period of time confirms that people do read what they are interested in.

What proof?

Since starting my blog, I have been watching the stats closely. Though it is interesting to see the sources of traffic and keywords people use to find my site, it is also interesting to see what people (or you) are doing on my site, too.

Long story short, here are the stats about experience of my blog visitors:

Usually, usability is thought of something invisible to the developers and is rarely associated with website content and traffic. Read on how usability can affect your website copy and traffic.