I can’t help but notice how a blog is designed, not only in the aesthetic aspect but also in its usability and way of organizing information.
Making a blog that is coherent with the content and that everything is in sight, is intuitive and we have everything at hand is complicated. Having a perfect blog is impossible, but what you can do is try to polish small details to make it a more usable and less chaotic blog for readers.
Why are usability bugs important?
These failures in some cases can be a true boycott of your strategy and more so when you take them for granted because you are seeing them everywhere all day. Search engines care that readers have a good experience , so if they detect usability, loading or architecture problems, your positioning will suffer. It is difficult to change things that are so normal and are almost formally established within blogging and it is normal to have a blog under some of the faults and small errors that readers do not like at all. It’s okay if your blog has any of these bugs, but it’s up to you to know if you can change it or not, It is up to you to evaluate if it will attract more traffic , obviously we cannot always modify our blog as much as we want.
How to know if we have usability bugs
As a general rule, it takes us a long time to realize that it does not work as it should or does not fulfill the function for which we have put that element. Usability bugs affect the bounce rate. If your blog is in order but at the moment of truth in the statistics your bounce rate is tremendous , this may be because the content is not what the reader expects, it is lazy, the page loads badly or due to a usability error or design errors that drive the reader to despair. Link failures that do not work well are reflected in SEO tools such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider in which it makes it clear if there are broken links. Another tool that can give you clues is the Google mobile checker. This post is almost dedicated to what can be some principles of user experience and a bit of usability , but I have not wanted to be pretentious and I prefer to call them design errors, which is the most sensible way to name something that pretends to be practical. and it doesn’t really work.
1 False affordance or he looked like a link
This blunder is more common than it seems to us, it is fought in UI (user interaction) like fire, eliminating those elements that look like links and are not , or that seem to take you to a place and do not take you anywhere are a serious problem in the long run in a blog. They produce frustration in the reader , imagine that you have some images with the name of the categories of your blog, what do you think the reader expects to happen when clicking? in this case that it redirects you to the category itself to see everything in it, but what if instead it refreshes the page and continues in the same or opens the original image file? It upsets you right? Well, this simple thing can make that visit not click on any more links. Sometimes we believe that the reader has nothing better to do than spend half an hour on our blog going around, and in reality, nothing further, most spend a few minutes to get the little information they need and if they find it at hand better.
2 Not having a navigation bar
There was a time when designers wanted to wipe menu bars off the face of the earth, however in blogger sometimes we have to make the menu bar from scratch like in this post. You can greatly increase the number of visits with a clear and fluid navigation within your blog, if you do not have a menu bar that organizes the pages and categories of your blog it is very complicated. Imagine that you arrive at a room and there are no more doors to go to the following rooms, the easiest thing is for them to turn around and continue looking outside for more organized content. Sometimes we rely too much on the reader’s intuition, a reader comes to your blog to read an article not to play riddles or to look for links that may or may not lead to another interesting page.
3 Lack of contact information
There is no one to contact you because you have hidden the contact form.
A design and legality flaw is that you cannot contact the author or the blog, you must do everything possible so that they can contact you in the contact section of your blog.
Putting a contact section does not mean that everyone is going to write to you, but rather it is a mailbox open to collaborations and suggestions. I have put the contact page like many other legal ones that are mandatory in many cases, such as the cookie law page to name one.
4 Very wide design, full width texts: the eternal line of text.
This error is very common, we do not realize it and sometimes we have an endless column width.
It is harmful for several reasons:
- The reader with a column of more than 750px has to make a great effort to read, apart from moving his eyes from one side of the screen to the other, when a column is wide it is easy to change lines because it is not normal to continue with the view to the right but down.
- This causes the reader to get confused and what it is about is the opposite.
- A line on the screen is much more complicated to read than on paper, if you notice we are more used to narrow sizes when reading than wide sizes, for ergonomic reasons.
- It is not usually resolved well on many occasions and throws the typical usability problem: the graphic content is wider than the screen.
It is very common in blogs that have a full width layout and on certain screens it can be much greater than 960 pox wide, which is heavy. Although it may not seem like it, the reader is lazy, everything that seems complicated or excessively dense is easy to ignore.
5 There is no way to get to old posts
If you do not have a menu bar it is almost impossible to access previous content , this failure is very common in blogger blogs that rely on scrolling. When a reader has more than 5 advances with the mouse, it is difficult for him to go down further. A blog that is not about news in this type of blogs I understand perfectly, apart from living from the last 10 posts, it lives from its “closet background” all you have written is the richness of your blog and what can hook the reader, so it is essential that they can access the old content of the blog. A good way is the most popular post lists , the category list, but above all the related posts.
Or the site map so they can search by categories or alphabetically. One way to order your posts are the post lists or the mega posts that group content, making an entry about the post is one of the ideas that I proposed in the post about what to write when nothing occurs to you .
6 Difficulties for them to share content
If we have learned anything, it is that we are lazy to share content, so if you want them to share you must make it very easy. It is not only useful to put the share buttons below the post, but you must make calls to share within it, for example, if you use a plugin to share content , activate the options that let you Pin, Tweet or share the photos on Facebook, because it is very It is difficult for someone to share a photo well on their own and with the call of a plugin like Sumo me, which is the one I have installed, it is very easy to do it.
Besides, if you are the one who proposes in this way or another to the reader to share, you give him permission, dispelling any doubts he may have about copyrights.
7 Have the sidebar full to bursting with elements and links.
The sidebar is either a success or it is the biggest flaw of a blog , so you must measure whether it is being useful to you or not. The sidebars over time have been filled with widgets or gadgets that are more “traditional” than necessary or beneficial for your blog, it is the case of how harmful tag clouds are , placing badges and objects that do not have expiration date and make your page take much longer to load , links to sites… if we add to this latest posts, public, list of categories and in some cases another menu bar you have a lot of noise to confuse your reader already google with your SEO.
8 Links that are indistinguishable from the text
If you have worked on a good structure of internal links, you do not want a small design flaw to ruin your strategy in an amazing way: Your links are not distinguished from the text, therefore they go unnoticed by most readers, especially those who access from your mobile device, it is not enough that it is in bold that goes unnoticed because it can be highlighted text, ideally it should be a different color from the text. Sometimes the color variation is worse, I have thrown in the towel with some blogs that use a gray so light that I even doubt that it looks good on all screens, one day looking for a “send” I thought it was not there and yes but it was so “subtle” that it was hard to see and it helps to see… well, that’s how his internal links were those that he used in the text.
It is estimated that 0.8% of men and 0.5% of women suffer from some variety of color blindness in Spain, numbering over 2,000,000 people, so considering improving accessibility to all the content we offer does not it is nonsense and is very necessary for some people.
9 Pop up without any control.
This is a serious design and marketing error, the pop-ups are misconfigured in a timely manner. Not because a form to sign up for a course or a newsletter comes out as the page loads , you are going to do it. Rather, you are going to close it because you do not know if you are going to like that blog, you will read the content of the post first and when you should leave the pop up to invite you to subscribe, while you read, it will not come out because it already did when the web loaded or you scrolled down 200px. Too bad this way we are not going anywhere, not by stifling the visitor much we get better results , so you must take into account which elements of your website perform and which do not meet any objective to eliminate them. This does not mean that the use of pop ups is bad , quite the contrary , pop ups are very effective tools but in the right measure and well configured , I advise you to look at your google statistics to establish a reasonable time for the visit of the reader so as not to be «craving».
10 Small or difficult to read typeface.
Along with the size of the buttons, there are two very important usability maxims that deserve a lot of attention when designing a website, the choice of typography is very important in the appearance of a blog. We must pay close attention to the legibility of our content and the coherence of the typography with our design. I deal with typography in more depth in the following posts: This other one is about how to install Google fonts in blogger. These are very common design mistakes that we can all make.
