Website Usability Tips - Part 2

11. Bread crumb navigation is a simple yet very powerful SEO and usability tool. A keyword rich bread crumb throughout the site not only ensures solid internal linking, but also better user experience, where the user is always aware about his precise location on the website.
12. Here are some useful tips you can use while doing pagination for your website content:
• Don’t use underlines
• Provide large clickable areas
• Identify the current page
• Space out page links
• Provide Previous and Next links
• Use First and Last links (where applicable)
• Put First and Last links on the outside
13. You must save your website from falling into the pit of baby-duck-syndrome which causes the user to stick to the first design they are more familiar with. As a result they tend to judge the new design on the basis of its similarity to the first design even when the second one is more user friendly than the previous one. Users often prefer a system interface that is similar to the one they have learned on and hence you must avoid doing unplanned or drastic interface changes on your website.
14. Do you know that the majority traffic on your website tends to ignore anything that resembles to an advertisement banner? This is because of the Internet phenomenon called 'banner blindness' due to which the users have developed web related schemata for different tasks on the web. So while searching something on a website, they focus only on the specific parts of the page where they would assume the relevant information could be, i.e. small text and hyperlinks. Banners, no matter how large or colorful they are, get ignored by the users. So the idea is to merge the banner advertisement in the web page in such a way that the user doesn't ignores an ad just because it's a banner.
15. Managing a logical Informational Architecture is one of the biggest challenge, every webmaster faces while organizing the internal links and content. A website with a logical Informational Architecture (IA) not only gives a rich user experience to the visitors, but such a site also enjoys better chances of ranking high on the Search Engines.
16. Almost all the modern browsers today use popup-blockers to stop pop-ups, ad blocks and other site content which they recognize as advertisement. Firefox, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer make use of it by default — therefore don't use pop-ups to present important content of your website. Otherwise you will deprive major part of your target audience from noticing the important information on your website.
17. We all know that not all the Real Estate on your website is equally fertile. Crazy Eggis a wonderful tool to discover the sweetest spots on your website that yield the majority clicks and exposure. You can find the best banner space on your website, you can compare the old interface to the newer ones. You may try the demo before geting your hands on the professional plan.
18. Keep in mind that a user shouldn’t need to wait for more than 2 seconds for certain types of system response, such as application-switching and application launch time. Although, this response time of 2 seconds is somewhat arbitrary and may vary, but this is a reasonable order of magnitude. The usability thumb rule says: the less users have to wait, the better is the user experience.
19. While using contrast color schemes, you have to be very careful. You can't go wrong with black and white but all you need is to add more drama and use light font on a dark background or a dark font on a light background. Browsers are different, monitors are different, you never exactly know how the colors will render.
20. The navigation system should be in the same place on every page and have the same format. Visitors will get confused and frustrated if links appear and disappear unpredictably. Consider using Server Side Includes for your main navigation system to make certain the navigation system stays consistent.

• Website Usability Tips - Part 1