Usability Components: Errors

published by Dan in Usability | Website Design with No Comments

The last usability component left to discuss are errors. This component is of utmost importance in website design. Depending on the severity and number of errors an otherwise good web site design can be rendered useless or really irritating at the least. Of course, in most websites before a site is launched critical errors are caught and fixed. It is very rare (if it even ever happens) that a website is fully launched after beta testing without catching catastrophic errors. However, even though a website might be free of critical errors it can still have seemingly insignificant errors that still leads to decreased usability. Although it isn’t expected that a website be absolutely free of errors a usable website will have the least number of errors as possible. Furthermore, a good webmaster/web designer will immediately fix any errors, however small it may be, when it comes to his/her attention even after beta testing.

Errors in web design leads to decreased usability for several reasons:

• it hampers users from accomplishing their tasks
• it irritates users leading to decreased satisfaction
• it hampers search engine spiders from indexing all pages

Not all errors lead result in the same things but at least to one of the results listed above.

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