Dirt and Rust is all about usability. A website that is usable works better. Usability is vital to a website’s success.
What is usability?
Usability is “the ease of use and learnability of a human-made object. The object of use can be a software application, website, book, tool, machine, process, or anything a human interacts with.” [Wikipedia] Usability is important because as we move away from machines with obvious interactions (also called “affordances”) we designers need to make these affordances clear but have them cooperate instead of confuse.
Design is hard, as they say! That’s why clients pay us the big bucks; and we need to front up and give them amazing value. We can do it with usability.
I like to make a website work to its primary goal and sorting out usability is key to this. First I analyse this primary goal and then measure whether it’s achieved it. If it hasn’t, changes are necessary, rinse and repeat.
This work is never done, and this is a very good thing! Even though change is hard it can bring amazing value.
I create sales machines for clients and usability is the key.
Further, visual design/look and feel isn’t just beautiful, it makes this sales machine work. There’s a reason why everyone with a shopping cart online wants one just like Apple.com. There’s a reason why expensive cars look great while going fast.
A website must be beautiful to keep a human being interested, but it also must make it easy for the user to get shat she wants. No usability, no sale. No affordances = confusion = dropped cart = no money.
Examples
So now I imagine you want some proof of what I do? Fair enough. The following projects highlight how I apply usability concepts in the real world:
- Your Virtual Assistant – Primary Goal: Get more website enquiries
