User-friendliness

Considering what utility or satisfaction the user will derive from your web-site, why the user will come to your web-site at all, is strategically a priori; you should have thought about it well before you began an actual web development project. When I say user-friendliness, I mean those factors that determine whether the solution actually works as it should for the user. In other words, will the user find that the site works, as you want it to? This is vital if your site will succeed.

Over the years, we've begun to understand what kinds of things users understand, and what kinds they don't. Some of these revelations are summed up in the tutorial below. There are also a number of good books on this topic, such as the standard reference "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug; the title is an apt description of the average user's standpoint.

User-friendliness - free tutorial (PowerPoint)

The preceding tutorial is a very elementary and fundamental introduction to this theme. There is far more to say about this topic, and many have done it better than I. If you want to investigate this material further, I would recommend that you visit Jakob Nielsen's web-site www.useit.com.