The importance of usability
Usability is measure of how easy a website (user interface) is to use. High usability is absolutely crucial for any site to survive. If your site is hard to use, the visitors will leave. If they don't manage to find what they are looking for, they leave. If they get lost on your site, they leave. If it is hard to grasp the information on your site, they leave. And you don't want your visitors to leave do you? At least not until they have done what you want them to do.A site with good usability will dramatically increase your conversion rate, which means that you send more traffic to your partners and make more money. It is therefore well spent time and money to work on improving the usability on your site.
Improve the usability of your site
The easiest way to improve your usability is by user testing. You need to find a few users representative for your target audience. An easy way is to ask a few friends to test your site. Once you've found some users you ask them to perform representative tasks on your site. Watch them do it and see what they do easily and what they have problems with. Be careful not to influence the users when they perform the tasks, it will contaminate the results.After the tests you will probably have identified some problem areas. Fix them and let the users perform the same tasks again. And do this over until they easily can perform the tasks you want them to. In order to avoid having to do a major redesign of your site it is important to start these tests at an early stage, not when you have already built the whole site.