Website usability.

Good usability goes unnoticed

A visitor will never say “what convenient navigation”. They simply reach the enquiry form without noticing how it happened. An interface only becomes noticeable when it gets in the way: it is unclear where to click, the form asks for too much, the button has slipped under the thumb of a neighbouring element.

This leads to a rule that website owners do not like: usability cannot be checked by feel. You know your site by heart and physically cannot see it through the eyes of someone who has landed here for the first time. You need data.

Signs that the website is getting in the visitor’s way

• People come in but never reach the form — the drop-off happens on the same screen every time.
• They start filling in the form and abandon it on a specific field.
• Lots of clicks on elements that are not clickable.
• The mobile version converts noticeably worse than desktop.
• Visitors use the site search to find what is already in the menu.
• The pricing page is opened more often than the home page — which means it is hard to get to.

None of these signs is a verdict on the design; each is an address where to look for the problem. Usually it is not about style but about the route: the path to the target action turned out to be longer than the visitor’s patience.

How to test website usability

1. Define the target action. One per page: an enquiry, a call, a booking, an order. Without it there is nothing to measure.
2. Build a funnel in analytics. Yandex Metrica and Google Analytics show at which step people are lost and how many.
3. Watch session recordings and maps. Webvisor, the click map and the scroll map answer the question “what exactly did the person do”, not “how many of them were there”.
4. Separate desktop and mobile. Behaviourally these are two different websites; averaged figures hide the problem.
5. Give the site to three people from outside the company. The task is to complete the target action out loud, with no hints. Five minutes of observation usually give more than a week of discussion.

What makes an interface invisible

• A clear structure. From the first screen it is obvious where you are and where to go next.
• Plain language. People scan, they do not read. “How it works” is clearer than “Solutions”.
• A minimum of clutter. The fewer new elements the brain has to recognise, the shorter the path to the goal.
• Predictable details. An “Order” button within thumb reach, a menu that opens in a single line, autofill in the fields.

Why this affects more than conversion

Website convenience has become measurable for search too. Core Web Vitals — a set of speed and layout-stability metrics — are an official Google ranking signal. Scroll depth and time on site also tell the search engine whether the person found their answer or left to keep looking.

The result is a double effect: a site that is easy to move around sells better and ranks better at the same time. The reverse is also true — an inconvenient site loses both leads and positions.

How we work with usability

At epic name. we do not start with a redesign. First we look at behaviour through Google Analytics, Yandex Metrica and Hotjar, test clicks and attention, and then simplify the path to the enquiry — without a radical rebuild of the site. On our projects this delivers a conversion uplift of 25–70%.

This order saves money: it is often three or four specific elements that get in the way, not the whole interface. A full redesign in this situation only wipes out the accumulated statistics.

Frequently asked questions

How does usability differ from design?

Design is responsible for how the site looks, usability for how easy it is to use. A beautiful site can be inconvenient, and vice versa.

How much data do you need to draw conclusions?

For click maps and session recordings a few dozen sessions per page are enough. To compare variants you need more — that already calls for a proper test.

Can usability be checked without analytics?

Partly. Watching a real person will reveal the gross problems. But without figures you will not gauge the scale of the losses or understand what to fix first.

Is a redesign compulsory?

No. In most cases targeted fixes are enough: shorten the form, rewrite the heading, move the button, remove a redundant step.

What to do next

Start with the one screen where the most people are lost and remove one obstacle from it. Then look at the figures two weeks later.

If there is no time to dig into the reports — design and interface prototyping. Related reading: why a business needs UX/UI design and how to test hypotheses with A/B tests.