People love sites that are easy to use and they keep coming back to them. To make a site highly usable is the ultimate show of respect for the end user. You’re putting their convenience and comprehension above all else, perhaps above even your own visual ideas. It’s like saying, “I’ve taken the time to understand you well enough to know what you really need to do here and this design will save you some time and effort.”

-Web Design Workshop by Robin Williams

Find a balance

Usability, as it applies to the web interface, has been a much debated topic in recent years. In the search for the most usable interface, the extreme viewpoint seems to dictate a bland, vanilla-flavored web environment - highly usable, easy to understand, but devoid of any visual character.

The opposite end of the debate favors the design aesthetic over all else, promoting complex, breathtaking pages at the expense of such practicalitites as intuitive navigation and clear communication.

While both sides make a valid points, we tend to favor the pursuit of balance. Finding the right mix of creativity and user-friendliness is the approach that will best serve the end-user and will make for an enjoyable web experience.

So, the question remains, how do you go about finding that balance?

Do your homework

As I mentioned before, people love sites that are easy to use and they keep coming back to them.

Designing a site to be attractive and usable requires studying how the real-world user will actually interact with the site and how they will most easily comprehend the message. Based on that knowledge, the designer can arrange, or rearrange, the page elements accordingly.

Research begins by talking to people who are or could be potential users of the site and find out what features they think are important. Often what is plainly obvious to the designer can be confusing to uninitiated users. If someone has to spend more than a few seconds trying to understand how to use a site or determining what the site is about, then there’s a problem that requires some modifications. A web site should not need an instruction manual!