Usability is a quality attribute for ease of use. Research has shown that usability is a very important factor for websites. It actually is a limiting condition. If a site is not easy to use, a lot of visitors will navigate to other websites to find what they are looking for. That is the cruel thing about the web: competition is just one click away. Usability is also a key factor for web applications. If an application is not easy to use, users will get frustrated and stop using the application. This blog post is the first part, written by Jurjan Huisman, in a series on web application usability. In these blog posts some examples are given on improving the usability of web applications. These examples also hold for ‘normal’ websites, but are specifically important for web applications.

Electronic forms
In electronic forms the required fields should be marked to actually show that these fields are required. When a user fills out the form and presses the submit button, all the required fields that have not been filled out should show an error message. This error message should not be displayed in a pop-up, but right next to the relevant input field. To take this even one step further, ajax-technology can be used to display error messages on the fly. For example, ajax can be used to notify the user of a wrongly spelled e-mailadress.

As an addition to the error messages other aspects of electronic forms are important as well: the cursor should automatically be positioned in the first data entry field and pressing the Tab-key must lead the user through the input fields in a logical reading order. Obviously, it is a big plus when information that can be filled out automatically is done so. For example, when someone fills out his or her postal code and house number, the streetname and city fields are automatically filled out. Next to that, when you hit the back button of the browser, all the previously filled in data of an electronic form must not be lost.

Next up in the series ‘Usability in web applications’ is nonstandard scrollbars.