Encouraging Usability Through Design

Guest Post By Kim DeFranco

Hi, we’re BizBrag, nice to meet you. As creators of a social media platform for small businesses, usability is essential in attracting users to the application and prompting use. Our engineers, like knights of integration and development, have battled the never-ending task of making sure the user interface is both engaging and easy to navigate. It is no Einstein moment to realize simplified design will attract potential users and satiate those already on board. However, achieving the perfect layout is not as easy as it seems, especially when the inner workings are fairly complex.

The user interface is instrumental in providing desired functionality and efficiency to customers. Aside from slaying the dragons of integration and development, our engineers make sure the dashboard is self-explanatory. Regularly, we add new features, additional editing capabilities or improve upon other functions to ensure the user has the best possible experience. BizBrag’s goal is to maximize efficiency in performance and usability to benefit the end goal of our users.

Featuring interactive components has allowed for an increase in click-through rates and streamlined usability. One such component is a thing we call a “Braggit.” A Braggit is a message capable of being posted to social networks, email lists and exists as a stand-alone webpage. Through encouraged interaction by way of links, videos, contests and call to action buttons, our site sees more traffic. Additionally, each Braggit is optimized enabling it to be searchable. As anticipated, this leads to more views and click-throughs.

Findings show that 52% of consumers do not revisit a site due to aesthetics. By incorporating a clean design on both our website and our user interface, we ease the comfort level of the user. In the world of websites, much like that “real world” we used to live in, first impressions are everything. Through the use of an interactive infographic on our homepage, we briefly describe the elements of our platform using tooltips. (These are items you hover over, without clicking and a box of info appears) This allows visitors to easily and quickly learn about products/services.

Less is more; nobody likes foraging for nuggets of relevance when visiting a website. BizBrag easily directs traffic to key pages increasing the overall amount of time spent by users. As a result, after a redesign, we experienced a 45% increase in click-throughs to our sign-up page. At the end of the day, choosing to give exposure to features results in what internet users really want. Instant gratification.