Usability?
Have you ever thought about the usability of a website? Most likely, this is something which you typically pay little to no attention to, which is a good thing. If you ever think about it, then it’s probably because the site you’re using is difficult to use, so the goal you had when first visited cannot be easily achieved. But what causes it?
Part of the problem is the battle between designers and developers: the designer would often like to create the most fantastically beautiful and creative site on the web, with no regard to practicality; the developer would prefer to create a site that is technically brilliant and can cope with every contingency, but requires a PhD just to make sense of the interface. In either case, the result is a site unusable to anyone but the creator.
To give a website great usability requires a delicate balancing act, with both excellent design and superb functionality existing in perfect harmony - if only one of these exists without the other, then the site will fail. Great design makes the site easy to understand, and great functionality allows it to achieve the users’ goals.
Here at Base Creative, we achieve this by making the designers and developers work together, and then by getting non-designers and –developers to test what these two groups create. This combination allows us to create fantastic websites with both great design and functionality, and also with great usability. End result: happy users and a happy client.