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Chris Jasek of Elsevier’s User Centered Design Group answers your usability questions
Chris Jasek
Q: How can I make it easy for people to learn how to use my library website?
A: That’s a great question. Certainly it’s a great goal to want to make your website easy for students and faculty to learn to use, especially when it comes to eLearning resources available on your website.
Familiarity is an important aspect of learnability.
Learnability is one of the five components of usability as defined by Jakob Nielsen in his book Usability Engineering. (The other four components are efficiency, memorability, errors and satisfaction.) Learnability addresses how easily a novice or first-time user can use your website. It’s important to remember to usability test your website with novice users as their fresh perspective yields a lot of good information.
Familiarity is an important aspect of learnability. Your website should work in a way that’s familiar to your users as they’ve built expectations from using other websites and products. You should strive to understand what other products your users are using and what expectations they have around them. If your website works in a familiar way as other tools they’re using, your users will have no problem learning to use it.
Consistency also has a positive effect on learnability. Number one, your website should be consistent within itself. The page layout and interactions should be consistent across your site. As users explore and use more areas of your site, they’ll easily be able to learn to use these new areas because they work the same as other areas.
Your website should also be consistent with best practices followed by other websites. Many people want to make their sites unique and have them work differently than other websites. Usually this is a big mistake and following the crowd is a better practice.
Finally, keep it simple. The simpler something is, the easier it is to
learn. Keep your website limited to the most basic features and
only add features when it becomes clear they are needed. 
www.elsevier.com/librarians/AskUCD
Nielsen, J. (1993). Usability engineering. Boston: Academic Press.
