A Useful Experience: Why Usability Is Essential To UX Design

Chances are we’ve all encountered websites that may be informational but wouldn't be described as easy to navigate or even pleasing to journey through. Built with the business in mind, the site is designed to deliver information about the brand or service it supports. This provides knowledge but no real engagement, excitement or use to the audience, let alone attention to functional aspects like speed, flow and function.

Enter user experience design. With a clear focus on the user, UX design seeks to unlock the inner workings of an audience's needs and how they expect a website to function, look and feel. These elements go far beyond the visual design, including all touch points a user encounters when they visit a website -- from navigation, content, imagery, calls to action, interactivity, forms and the list goes on. Analyzing and assessing how well these assets work for the specific user is critical to ensuring a website is successful and provides valuable insight into the site's efficiency and ultimate usability.

The Impact Of Usability On User Experience

Usability itself is a highly user-centered component of UX design, referring to the ease and efficiency in which a user can access or navigate a platform, product or website. In many ways, usability is the most important aspect of a website that is not seen, affecting everything from SEO to site speed.

As the landscape of the digital environment becomes increasingly complex, user experience and web usability have become two of the most important aspects of ensuring the success of a digital product, website or app -- even the overall health of a brand or business.

As a creative team specializing in UX strategies, clients worldwide engage our team to mitigate problems related to an already up-and-running site. Many of the comments include: "Why are my abandon rates so high?" or "Why am I getting complaints that a user can’t find something on the site?" While these issues are frustrating, they are all too common and can be resolved with user experience strategies and usability implementations.

In a recent report from the Interaction Design Foundation, when global computer security software company MacAfee began "integrating usability testing to learn more about its customers and their needs, the company saved over 90% in support expense costs."

Usability In Action

Accessibility

Web accessibility is a big deal these days, and for good reason: inclusion. Enabling people with diverse abilities to not only access but perceive, navigate and interact with the website is a win all around. From both a technical and physical aspect, accessibility is required for many industries and is fast becoming a chosen feature for brands and businesses identifying underserved but impactful audiences.

Features include screen readers, magnifiers, voice-recognition software for user-generated content, alt text and more. Additionally, accessibility can be taken a step further by strategizing and implementing compliance best practices. For example, you could create an understandable and robust overview of accessibility via a site map.

Customer Experience And Testing

Good usability is essentially a mission-critical element of customer experience (CX). Acting as the digital representation of a company’s voice and vision, customer experience is nonexistent without usability. When usability strategies such as user persona development and usability testing are leveraged, a company can better understand their customers' needs and create strategies to achieve them.

Testing for usability can take many forms, and should always be scaled for the product or service it is supporting. Participants are typically asked to journey through the entire or specific areas of the experience, attempting to accomplish the tasks set out by the test. Usability tests can and should be timed, monitored and recorded for future analysis and optimization.

Our agency typically kicks off a usability strategy by reviewing goals to direct the analysis. Questions surrounding goals can include: "Can a user easily find the product they are looking for?" or "Are the calls to action effective?" These activities can create value for both the internal team to gain knowledge about their user and deliver an optimal experience to the end consumer.

Brand Positioning

Usability is one of the main keys to gaining the trust of a user and the marketplace as a whole. Along with outdated aesthetics, poor usability on a website can negatively affect the reputation of a company. The effects are far-reaching and can easily impact the bottom line of a brand.

Ensure images are high-resolution and your copywriting is strong and engaging. Delivering an optimized user experience can elevate overall brand perception and lend a positive association with the brand that is essential to retaining or gaining market leadership.

Internal Productivity

From content management systems to internal portals, easy-to-use, quick-to-learn and simple-to-update systems are a valuable aspect of management and training. We've found that employees who engage with a more usable interface are more likely to experience job satisfaction, complete tasks in less time and update content on a more regular basis.

Optimized Conversion

Ensuring that visual and contextual cues are at a user's fingertips is a core component of usability, and there's no better vehicle to deliver a usable experience than the call to action (CTA). In fact, according to research, emails with a single call to action increased clicks 371% while increasing sales by a staggering 1,617%. This means that a business can gain exponential engagement, not to mention revenue, just by providing a visual cue for a user to find what they are looking for easily. With a few usability tweaks, a company can increase its business drastically.

At its core, usability comes down to analysis, design and implementation. Getting to know the inner workings of the user personas, customer journey and company goals is a starting point. By implementing and leveraging a user experience design process, website usability has the potential to forge more effective relationships between prospective and current customers as well as internal stakeholders.

By following best practices throughout the UX design process, the ideal user experience can deliver increased brand satisfaction and a better bottom line to the business it supports.

Daily Quordle #501 — answers and hints for Friday, June 9

Given that Quordle is like Wordle but a lot harder, we do not judge anyone searching for the daily Quordle answers for game #505. Or rather 'answers' plural, as Quordle has four solutions to find each day.

If you've not played it yet, you should — it offers four times the fun of the original viral word game. But it's arguably more than four times as difficult, as you only have nine guesses to find the quartet of words. (Sometimes, today's Wordle answer is harder.)

Like Wordle, it also resets each day, so if you miss one game you'll have no way of knowing what the previous daily Quordle answers were. Well, unless you bookmark this page, in which case you'll be able to check today's Quordle answers at your leisure, as I'll be updating it each morning.

Quordle was acquired by Merriam-Webster and could get some new features. We will keep you posted right here if the company makes any changes to the game.

Be warned: Spoilers lie ahead for game #505 so only read on if you want to know today's Quordle answers! And please don't use this page to cheat and pretend to others that you got it right when you didn't really. That would be a misuse of our hard work.

Before we get on to today's Quordle answers, we'll give you a few hints to guide you in the right direction. We'll give you three starter clues, then one big hint at the end. And after that we'll tell you the answers, promise.

So, here are your starter clues:

* By vowel, we mean A, E, I, O, U. There are other letters that are sometimes considered to be vowels, depending on how they are used. 

Here's another clue to give you an advantage: One of the Quordle answers may put you in the depths.

Still stuck? Then let's move on to the answers.

Today's Quordle answers begin with the letters:

Combined with the hints above you should now have all the clues you need.

Scroll down for the Quordle answers if you still need help.

So, what are today's Quordle answers for game #505?

I won't make you wait any longer — here you go:

Today's Quordle answers was another easy one, resulting again in a score of 3-4-5-7. As usual, I began with two of the best Wordle start words, RAISE and COUNT, since they contain all five vowels and five of the most common consonants. That helped, as did the presence of an 'L' in three of the words. 

If you're looking for a list of older Quordle answers, we can also help. Here's a list going back 20 games.

Quordle is one of the many Wordle clones to have arrived in the wake of Wordle's huge success. It's essentially the same game, but you play four versions of it simultaneously and have nine attempts to guess all the answers. 

The letters behave as they do in Wordle, turning green if they're in the right place, yellow if they're in the word but in the wrong location, and gray if they're not included in the answer at all. 

A nice extra is that though there's only set puzzle per day, a practice mode is also included. And you might well need it, because it's pretty difficult.

If Quordle is too tough for you, you might prefer something in our list of the best Wordle alternatives, but if you want an even more stressful test then we'd recommend either Squabble or Octordle. 

We also like the new Heardle, which is like Wordle for pop music, plus the geography-based Wordle clone Worldle, the Star Wars-themed SWordle and the math-based Mathler, among others. 

But the original is still the best, so don't forget to also check our the best Wordle start words and to look at today's Wordle answer if you won't get a chance to play.

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