Training your users for success on your site

It's the gentlest possible way to train a puppy; the ideal way to 'housebreak' your kids, and its also applicable to helping people use your business website ...

Make the right thing easy, and the wrong thing hard

Of course, your visitors are neither puppies nor children. However, most people visiting your site will have one-thousandth of the experience that you do with the navigation, the terminology, and the product/service itself. You'll need to keep things simple if you want people to be able to achieve their goals on your site, and ultimately help those internet pages pay for themselves! Today we look at 6 ways that a web designer can make the right thing easy, and the wrong thing hard for your visitors.

1. Follow usability best practices

Making the 'right things easy' is often done by using conventions. Conventions make things easy for the user - when there is a 'conventional', or familiar path, people will usually follow it. The discipline of usability is mostly focused on discovering how to use conventions to your advantage - how to make things easy for people. Ask your web designer how they follow usability practices for your site.

2. Make headlines descriptive and directive

Headlines are easy to notice - while the words are more of a copywriting issue than a web designer issue, the size, type and positioning also needs to be optimized to visually lead people towards the headline.

3. Pay attention to your forms

When it comes to forms on a website, the 'right thing' is for your customers to fill in all the appropriate fields. There are several ways your web designer can make this easy for them, including:

• Offering selections from drop-down boxes instead of making them type

• Autofill fields with cookies where possible

• Place hover-over explanations near relevant questions, so you user doesn’t have to abandon the form to find out things like the value of different packages, the inclusions of different options, etc.

4. Terms and conditions

If terms and conditions are required on your site, you want every user to read them. Your web designer can display them in a box that automatically loads, rather than through a link that must be clicked, to help ensure that people read (or at least scan!) the text.

5. Don't require registration

People hate registering - they don't like the idea that their personal details are sitting in a hundred random companies marketing lists. If possible, try not to make people register to do things on your site - this is the 'easy' option and almost always the preferred one.

6. Trim your tree

This obscure-sounding piece of advice for 'making the right thing easy' actually means that you should keep every page on your website as close as possible, in terms of clicks, to the homepage. When you look at your website in it's 'tree' structure, trim it down to help make the right thing easy for your users. Conversely, if there are some areas of the site that it doesn't make sense for 'average' users to access, your web designer can create a tall branch in the tree (a longer click trail) to make it 'difficult' to get to.