Mistakes that Affect Medical Website Design Usability

Posted: Mar 16 in Usability tagged Usability best practices by Ines

Unless you’ve studied some aspects of web design and usability, odds are you have no idea how certain aspects of your medical website could actually be hurting your visitors’ user experience. Web usability defines how easily a person can use, or enjoy using, a particular website. In the case of a website for medical practices, a site is considered usable if the visitors can easily find the information they’re looking for.

Common Mistakes

Again, website usability is a specialized subset of designing a website. Often times, people who make mistakes in a site’s usability do so because they’re unaware of website usability best practices. The list below contains some of the most common errors made in website designing. Knowing what to avoid can help prevent you from damaging your visitors’ user experience and help your site’s usability increase.

• Using PDF files for online reading. When you link to content, your links should point to other web pages, not PDF documents. People have trouble reading these online because they’re hard to navigate and are often intimidating in length. Provide a link to a PDF for visitors who wish to print the information, but use this as an option, not the standard.
• Non-scannable text. Rather than presenting large chunks of information, break up web page content with headings, lists, and emphasized text. This makes it easier for the visitor to find what’s important or interesting to them.
• Opening pages in new windows. People tend to think that sending a visitor to another website is a bad idea, so they set links to other websites to open in a new page. While this practice keeps your website on the visitor’s screen, it also pollutes their desktop with new windows. This practice is viewed by some to be as annoying as pop-up advertisements. Visitors will find their way back to your medical website, but if you irritate them, they may not visit ever again.