Usability

You have heard the term before, but what exactly is usability and why is it so important? Usability refers to how easy a website is for the users to interact with it. The term can also be used to describe the process of making a website or product more usable. It can effect how likely a user is to view your website, engage with your website and ultimately come back later.

Why?

Usability is important for a variety of reasons. Most notably, not having a usable website can result in a lot of negative outcomes for you and your users. The following is only a sample of possible negative outcomes from having an un-usable website.

If a website is difficult to use, people will leave.
For websites necessary to study or do a job, poor usability can decrease productivity.
It can decrease ROI (return on investment). Specifically for a university it could potentially decrease enrollment if the institutions websites are too difficult to navigate.

How?

The Nielsen Norman Group, a well-known user experience consulting firm, breaks usability up into 5 quality components. ¹

Learnability - How easy it is for new users to complete basic tasks.
Efficiency - Once introduced to the design, how quickly they complete tasks.
Memorability - When users have been away for awhile, how easily they can use the interface.
Errors - How many errors users make, how severe they are and how easily they can recover from those errors.
Satisfaction - How pleasant is it to use the design.

How do you improve on these 5 components?

Recruit users that match your user base. Don't worry about having a lot, you can have as few as 5 users and still gain insights from this type of testing. ²
Write tasks for users to walk through. Maze has an amazing article on how to go about doing this.³
Observe what the users do as they walk through the tasks. Let them do the talking, don't lead them down a specific path. Watch for pain points, where they succeed and how long it takes them to complete the task. The UX Collective has a template for collecting observations. ⁴
Iterate. Make some improvements based on what you see and test again.