This is nothing new: the visual design has a decisive role in the perceived quality of a website. The visual and aesthetic aspects influencing trust and credibility of a website. For any company or institution, the design of your website is a key part of its institutional identity.

But designing a website just from our visual training as a graphic piece more or as a more corporate image would be a wrong path.

A site that meets the objectives of our client’s visual communication can be very poor at other factors like ease of use, ease of finding information, download speed, legibility or accessibility. And how good we like our design to us or our client, these factors eventually a decisive influence on the end-users will have.

In other words, if users seeking information not found or become frustrated when trying to perform the tasks for which they entered the site, evidently of little use our efforts to improve visual quality. Users will quickly abandon or elsewhere. With a single click will suffice.

It is here where we encounter the concept of usability.

A definition of usability

The usability of a product or system is an empirical measure and on its usefulness, ease of learning, performance and appreciation of its users.

This definition is applicable to all types of products and systems, not only to websites or software products. For example could measure the usability of a system of urban signage, a tube of toothpaste or the telephone.

Usability can not be determined by evaluating a product in isolation. It is determined for a particular set of users in a given context of use. That’s why we say it is a relative measure. and that is why we do not believe that there are absolute rules of usability and equally applicable in all situations.

Design Usability seen

Some usability experts often describe the graphic design applied to the web as a kind of decorative layer (the “Look and Feel”) to be added to the prototypes once passed user tests.

On these positions must be said that research to users is not the same as design. The research and usability tests give us information on problems identified and we can draw a few lines of action to resolve them but not enough to conceive the final design with all its elements.

At the other extreme, many of the sites we design are not evaluated on their usability, is at the hands of our own inexperience, lack of resources, or perhaps because of the absence of a more comprehensive and multidisciplinary projects to address.

In the commercial websites users can disregard for economic losses. But this may be more severe on the websites of state agencies or essential public services should not only aim for higher goals and usability for a wider audience, but also begin to comply with the accessibility specifications. By not doing so, they are excluding a very high percentage of the population from access to information and the ability to manage transactions across the network.

One solution: the user-centered design

The methods of user-centered design allow us to achieve usability goals much higher than we could achieve using only intuition, recipes or calculating what we assume that users will do with the site (or product).

Many of the techniques are based on involving users in all stages of design. It is not designed for the users but the design with users.

But this is not so simple. For example do a usability test requires knowledge, time, dedication and experience. In addition, we must get to the right users and allocate some budget to pay them.

The test basically provide a list of tasks to users and watch them or film them trying to complete each task without our help. It’s incredibly rewarding to watch the users frustrated again and again with our design. No interaction design conceived only from our intuition or experience will be infallible. That’s why it is advisable to begin testing with low-fidelity prototypes (even paper), in the early stages of the design process.

The organizational structure and labeling of a site also should be designed from the mental model of users. For example, the technique of sorting cards (card sorting) allows us to determine how users classified, grouped and labeling information to include.

The design and usability need to be supplemented

Design as a discipline can provide knowledge and enriching experiences for usability and accessibility. For example in areas such as typography, readability, emphasis, style, color theory, space, composition and visual balance.

Usability and Information Architecture design methods provide user-centered, assessment techniques, the heuristic principles, 40 years of studies on Human Computer Interaction (HCI), all previous experiences from the web interface design Graphical User (GUI) and the contribution of science as archival and library for organizing and labeling information shared spaces.

The design and usability can and should be supplemented as disciplines. The benefits can be clearly seen from both sides. A good visual design does not exclude the usability but the favors, the same way that a high degree of usability and user compliance contribute to improving the image of any company or institution.