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Why is UX Design Important?
Poor UI/UX design accounts for 70% of online product failures, directly impacting your brand's conversion rate and consumer perception. Since 67% of consumers cite poor UX as one reason they abandon websites, UX design will play an instrumental role in customer engagement, retention, satisfaction, and conversion rate growth.
7 Key Principles Of UX Design
Here are seven UX design fundamentals that you should know to optimize your website's user-friendliness.
The User-Oriented Approach:
User-oriented Design (UCD, or user-centered Design) is an approach to web design that prioritizes users. To develop user-friendly designs, first identify who your target audience is. Learn more below.
Includes the following in creating a user-friendly design:
- User Scenarios: Develop realistic scenarios of how users engage with your site and identify pain points. Create Information Architecture: Arrange content to allow for intuitive navigation.
- Usability Design: Focusing on clear instructions that users will follow seamlessly is also paramount for user experiences.
- Prototyping and Iteration: Refine your UX through feedback loops and prototypes to meet user preferences and needs. Usability Testing: Test out your Design on real users to identify improvement areas.
- User Feedback: Continue gathering feedback from your target users and adapt your Design according to their insights.
Consistency
At its heart, your landing page's primary aim should be converting visitors into paying customers, so naturally, it should include elements that increase conversion rates and create an ideal user experience (UX). Consistency refers to creating uniform user experiences across your pages by maintaining visual components like typography, layout and colors by one another.
Imagine you are embarking on an adventure using a road map as your guide, with consistent symbols representing mountains, roads, water bodies and landmarks, making reading and understanding it simple to arrive at your desired destination more quickly and effortlessly.
UX design consistency offers users a road map for easily navigating their site, including navigation menus and call-to-action buttons that follow a consistent pattern. Users can better locate information more quickly when elements such as these follow a consistent design.
The best practices to optimize your website's consistency are:
- Advertisements, flashy animations or popups can become overwhelming for users of your site. By optimizing for various devices and screen sizes with responsive Design, the content will adapt itself according to each device's dimensions seamlessly.
- To avoid confusion and reduce user frustration, ensure the functionality acts uniformly throughout your application.
- Selecting or deselecting checkboxes should produce consistent actions or results regardless of their position on a page; your branding should remain constant from page to page.
Hierarchy
UX design hierarchy refers to prioritizing elements on a website to form a visual scale that draws users' attention and organizing information so that users understand its presentation. Web designers act like audio narrators, guiding visitors from page to page as users navigate online. Designers carefully organize content based on importance, similar to how audio narration emphasizes certain plot points or characters.
The following elements are key in creating a visual hierarchy on the web:
- Scale or Size Larger components often catch our eyes more readily; by employing different sizing solutions, you can emphasize content of importance while creating visual order.
- Color: The strategic use of colors can draw the eye directly to key design features on a website. Utilizing contrast or bright hues can draw viewers' eyes toward important pages on your site and highlight important content.
- By creating contrast through color or typography, elements become easier for readers and stand out.
- Proximity By placing related elements close together, you can emphasize their relationship and importance for easier user comprehension of information relationships.
- White Space By strategically employing whitespace, you can highlight important components and give users breathing room in your Design.
Consider these ideas when setting a hierarchy for UX design:
- Select a focal point. Determine what's most essential about your Design and ensure its central messages or elements receive their due by making strategic design choices.
- Consider viewing patterns. Research how people browse web content. To direct people's focus, utilize familiar patterns such as Z or F shapes.
- Create Multiple Versions Explore various design solutions to determine the ideal visual result.
- Experiment with different color schemes, element arrangements and messages until you find one with which your message and hierarchy align the best.
Context
Context in web design refers to the environment or circumstances within which a site exists or is being utilized - including factors like its target audience, cultural influences, user behavior patterns and technical considerations, and your purpose for developing it.
Here are several key points that illustrate an essential UX design concept:
- Meaningful Design: Context is key when providing users with meaningful experiences, yet it can become vague over time, leading to a design that must communicate clearly to its intended target audience, creating poor user experiences.
- Sociocultural Context: Sociocultural context refers to both physical and social environments where people live.
- Target audiences: immediate social and physical environments should also be considered, including factors like cultural norms and values, religious practices and beliefs, interaction patterns between different generations, and geographical location.
- For instance, Brazilian online: shoppers tend to utilize installment payment plans. Therefore, an eCommerce platform targeting this market must offer this payment method during checkout to keep up with local culture.
- Localization and Language: To start the localization process, products must be translated into multiple languages. To facilitate effective communication and reduce chances of misinterpretation, localization includes cultural references and idioms as well as any additional non-textual and linguistic components that make for clear communication and avoid misunderstandings.
- Iconography: When designing icons for use within context and audience awareness, care should be taken in their creation and placement.
Accessibility
Website accessibility refers to designing websites in such a manner as to ensure equal access and usability by those living with disabilities. This requires creating an inclusive digital environment where individuals with disabilities can navigate, interact and perceive web content without restriction or difficulty.
Prioritize accessibility when planning user experience (UX). Doing this will enable an exceptional experience for all.
Tips Make Your Website Accessible:
- Alt Text: When uploading images for viewing by individuals with visual impairments, provide descriptive alt text so they understand them fully. Detailed descriptions for informative photos should be given. In contrast, decorative ones can have their alt texts left blank to demonstrate they don't require essential reports.
- Heading Hierarchy: When structuring content correctly (H1, H2, etc.) using heading tags (H1, H2, etc.), create an effective hierarchy to help users easily navigate it all and remember screen readers are provided context via header tags as headings also offer text context.
- Contrast: For optimal readability for those with vision impairments, select colors with a sufficient contrast ratio. Coolors is an excellent contrast ratio checker to ensure accessible combinations are chosen. Strive to achieve a distinct difference between the foreground color and background hues when designing content for those who may need help.
- Accessibility for audio and videos: Provide accessible video and audio content alternatives. Transcripts may be made available for audio files to facilitate users with hearing impairment or those preferring textual access; captions/subtitles will assist those without hearing loss to understand visual material more fully.
- Clear and concise content: To simplify its interpretation for users with cognitive disabilities or limited language abilities. Use simple language when developing content for these audiences.
- Accessibility via Keyboard: Make sure that all aspects of your website can be operated and accessed using only a keyboard - this is crucial for people with disabilities who use keyboards instead of mice to navigate websites.
Usefulness
Website usability can be measured using metrics that evaluate how easily visitors navigate and engage with it.
UX design principles highlight five principles essential for website usability:
- Accessibility: When considering the accessibility of a site, factors like hosting provider and device compatibility need to be considered.
- Clarity: For optimal website design, transparency must be intuitive, clear and free of distractions and confusion that prevent visitors from finding the information they seek quickly and efficiently. A clutter-free layout and well-organized navigation contribute significantly towards this aim.
- Recognition: Users should easily recognize elements on your site and their interactions without spending too much time learning them. Using familiar patterns or conventions can help reduce learning curves significantly.
- Credibility: Building trust amongst users is of the utmost importance, and you can do this by offering transparent, reliable information and featuring customer testimonials or reviews on your website.
- Relevance: Be certain your content is engaging for its target audience while understanding their needs to optimize the usability of the material provided.
Storytelling
Story-telling in UX design can be an effective strategy. Drawing upon our human desire for stories, storytelling provides more engaging user experiences while tapping into emotional memory banks through UX design principles of storytelling.
Integration of Storytelling in UX Design: Strategies
- Understanding the Story Triangle: Effective storytelling requires exchanging dynamic information among the story, narrator and audience in an exchange between all three participants in an effective storytelling experience. Remember that audiences interpret stories differently depending on their unique life experiences.
- Engage Your Audience: Inspire active participation. Invite feedback and inquire into participants' motivations, assumptions, and personal narratives - this way, they'll provide more insightful ideas into UX design than they otherwise might.
- Balance Details in Your Story: Pay close attention to how much detail is included. Too few details could leave readers' imagination unfulfilled. At the same time, too many details could limit the creative and emotional thinking of the audience.
Consider setting goals before choosing details for your tale:
- Establish a Hero's Story: Apply an established structure in telling engaging tales that resonate with audiences. Break your hero's journey into five distinct parts - introduction, rising action (climax), falling action (resolution) and ending. UX storytelling design gives examples for this process, as the Hero's Journey can also help.
- Exposition: Introduce the characters and setting of your story by providing details about their background, needs and motivations.
- Rising Action: Focus your users' attention on the challenges, obstacles, and decisions they must make daily. Create tension while stressing the need to find solutions quickly.
- Climax: Reach the story's pinnacle, where its turning point occurs and display either positive results that showcase UX benefits or negative ones to identify areas requiring improvement.
- Falling Action: Illustrate how UX helps solve user challenges, enhances user experience, eliminates issues, etc.
- Resolve: Round off your story with how implementing a UX solution solved their user problem while showing its positive influence on the overall experience.
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What Is The Best Way To Optimize Your Website For User Experience?
88% of shoppers who experience poor user experiences will not return to your website designer. Yet, UX principles can help optimize it for users.
Define Your Target Audience
Understanding who your users truly are is the first step toward developing an optimized website experience for them.
This step-by-step tutorial will assist in the identification of your audience:
- Acknowledging customers requires conducting audience research. Utilize tools like CareCloud or SparkToro for demographics, behavior traits and conversation topics before surveying customers to gather immediate market intelligence.
- Know Your Competitors Conduct extensive research on your competitors to ascertain their target audiences and detect any market gaps between your business and them.
- Research to gain an in-depth knowledge of your target audience by investigating their psychological traits. Conduct surveys and interviews and monitor social media to overview their attitudes, values and interests comprehensively.
- Create Personas for your Users Analyze customers to develop 3-7 fictional personas representing their common goals and challenges to help make more efficient brand decisions such as branding, digital strategy, email campaigns, and SEO strategies. These can then serve as guides when it comes time for brand decisions involving these customers.
- Understanding your user base is the cornerstone of making informed UX decisions.
Assuming, for instance, that an audience comprises tech-savvy millennials that prioritize simplicity and convenience, designers could prioritize mobile interfaces featuring user-centric designs with intuitive user experiences, easy access to recommendations tailored specifically for them, seamless social media platform integrations as well as seamless recommendations aimed directly at this group.
Simple Navigation
UX designers should focus on developing intuitive navigation to facilitate easier use for their users:
- Descriptive Navigation Labels: Instead of generic labels like "Products and Services", use keyphrases that accurately reflect your offerings. Not only can this improve SEO (search engine optimization), but it will also make the site user-friendly.
- Create topical navigation labels: Instead of organizing content by format (articles or videos), use topical labels that directly address visitors' queries and interests, such as: "New Healthcare Trends" or "Technology Breakthroughs."
- Add a Call-to-Action Button: Include an obvious call-to-action button such as "Get in Touch With Us" in your header to encourage visitors to contact you easily and efficiently.
- Establish Navigation Hierarchy: Create your navigation items so they benefit from serial-position effects; this makes recalling and remembering things easier when they appear at either the beginning or the end of a list or sequence.
- Optimize for mobile devices: Develop a responsive mobile menu. Ensure all links and icons can easily be clicked on from small screens.
- Optimizing Navigation With Google Analytics: Google Analytics gives insights into user behavior such as most popular pages, navigation pathways and search behavior, allowing you to optimize navigation to provide users with an improved website experience. By harnessing this insight, you can further maximize website navigation to offer them optimal experiences when visiting your website.
Prioritize Content
Here are some tips to help you prioritize content when it comes to web design:
- Create a visual hierarchy:Determine which content elements are most important on your website and ensure that the key information is easy to scan for users.
- Prioritize your users' goals: Determine the main goals you want visitors to achieve on your site and ensure that all relevant information is readily accessible.
- Condense and streamline content: Reduce the amount of information and clutter to improve readability.
The ultimate goal of the website should be to direct users to the most relevant or useful content while allowing them to explore the site freely.
Use Visuals to Promote Your Business
Consider these suggestions when creating effective visuals for your website design:
- Use visual cues: When designing your website, incorporate visual cues such as arrows or icons directing users towards important information or actions you would like them to take.
- Optimize images: Selecting relevant and high-quality photos can add depth and visual interest for better user engagement with the site.
- Maintain a professional and cohesive appearance: Create an appealing online experience through consistent visual style, color scheme and typography on your site to build brand consistency.
Improve Page Loading Speed
Slow-loading websites do not go down well among visitors - up to 41% will leave it altogether if its loading takes too long.
To ensure the loading speed of your website doesn't cause visitors to abandon it, take these steps:
- Select a hosting solution optimized for performance. Regarding speedy platforms and web hosts like BlueHost or GoDaddy, choosing one with powerful platforms built to maximize speed is ideal.
- Optimize and compress your images. Image sizes affect loading speed; by switching file formats or activating lazy loading, you can optimize and compress images for better loading performance.
- Reduce redirects. Too many redirections will slow loading time. Remove unneeded redirects by ensuring your Top Level Domain (TLD) resolves with only one redirection path; tools like Screaming Frog will assist in finding and eliminating redundant redirections.
- Cache your web pages - caching stores copies of files stored on your website to ease server workload and enhance Time to First Byte/page load speed by using caching software or server caching.
- Cache your browser resources locally to reduce reload times on repeat website visits while taking advantage of plug-ins available to cache website pages.
- Optimize CSS and JavaScript files. Optimizing CSS and JavaScript code involves eliminating unnecessary characters, spaces, comments or elements such as unnecessary characters. Autoptimize or SiteGround Optimization plug-ins are useful ways of optimizing code to make it smaller, allowing files to load faster.
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). CDNs help distribute static web pages across many servers to reduce website latency, thus improving user experience and decreasing latency issues.
- Remove unnecessary plug-ins. Limiting the number of plug-ins installed can reduce website slowness and security threats, so review installed plug-ins regularly, delete/turn off those not being utilized and utilize the PageSpeed Insights tool for measuring their impact on page speed.
Choose A Mobile-Friendly Design
Daily users devote over four hours to using their smartphones. Mobile-friendly designs should not be treated as optional; they must be considered essential.
Make sure that your website is mobile-friendly:
- Reactive Design ensures a site responds automatically to each device its visitors use, including adapting layout, functionality, content, and layout accordingly to make the experience of using mobile phones more pleasant for the users.
- Popups must also be minimized or eliminated as these may adversely impact user experiences on mobile phones.
- Optimize button sizes and placement. Please ensure that your website's buttons are appropriately sized and placed strategically for mobile devices, with interactive elements like navigation controls or buttons placed where thumb control can easily operate them.
- Use legible fonts with easy-to-read text. Select fonts that can be read easily on mobile screens (14 pixels and larger), such as testing it across several devices to make sure that your text can be seen without difficulty. Avoid complex fonts in favor of clear and easily understood fonts with clear styles for greater readability.
- Leave enough space between links so users can reach them easily without accidentally clicking them to prevent accidental clicking, improving usability and decreasing user frustration.
- By leaving enough room between links for touch recognition and accidental click-through, this strategy can enhance usability while reducing frustration for end-users.
- Simplify and declutter your website Design to enhance user experiences on mobile devices. Utilize white space effectively by focusing on essentials.
- Be sure to regularly test your site on Android and iOS mobile devices to provide users with an exceptional user experience. Google's Mobile-Friendly Test can be invaluable for mobile compatibility with any website.
Testing & Iterating
Test the Design of your site regularly with users to identify areas for improvement and gather user behavior analytics, conduct usability testing and feedback.
Maintain a keen watch over these User Experience Design metrics:
- Task Time: Task time measures the duration of specific actions on your website by an individual visitor, for instance, how long it takes a customer to purchase online from you or another retailer. For an eCommerce provider, this could mean tracking how long customers spend making an order from their storefront website or vice versa.
- Session Length Average (SLA): This metric displays the duration of sessions on your website for users. This KPI allows you to measure user satisfaction and engagement on your platform.
- Abandonment Rate: An abandonment rate can be defined as the ratio between transactions initiated and purchases abandoned - it serves as an important metric to monitor by online shoppers as it indicates any issues with checkout processes or designs that could hinder purchases.
- Rate of Errors: This measure shows the percentage of users making mistakes when performing tasks due to usability problems, such as selecting inappropriate actions and having difficulty filling forms. Calculating this rate allows you to identify problematic areas and address them effectively.
- User Retention Rate (URR): Your URR measures how often visitors return to your website over time and helps evaluate retention strategies.
Read More: What are web development services?
UX-Optimized Web Designs By Digital Silk
Digital Silk is a full-service agency that expands online brands through tailored digital solutions. Our services encompass strategic branding, website design and development, user interface design/UX solutions for apps developed on Android platforms, digital strategy consulting, and mobile app creation services.
UX design has always been at the core of all web design projects we've completed, helping clients engage visitors by personalizing their journey and crafting an experience unique to each visitor.
Experience our UX design work:
Spar & Bernstein:
User-Centric Design Spar & Bernstein, an immigration and personal injury law firm in New York that specializes in immigration and individual injury cases, wanted their visitors to select immigration or personal injury right when they landed on the homepage. Our designers developed a user journey for Spar & Bernstein that lets visitors choose whether immigration or personal injury law is their concern right from the homepage.
Once they select their service of interest, visitors are taken directly to a main landing page with categories including motor vehicle accident liability laws and product or construction accident liabilities under personal injury legislation. Our user experience approach enables visitors to customize their journey.
Design Consistency at EVLO Fitness Equipment:
EVLO Fitness provides video workout classes designed to keep people active. The website we created for them features uniform logos, color palettes, typography, tone, and messaging - a UX principle that fosters visitor consistency while offering clear messaging via conversion funnels and other components that improve visitor experiences on-site.
Hierarchy of LIG Solutions:
LIG Solutions serves as an intermediary between consumers and insurers who want to find quality health coverage for themselves and their dependents, whether individual or group. Our designers created two-tiered navigation for LIG's website - providing high-level categories. At the same time, the local drop-down menu makes finding what users are searching for easier than ever.
Welch's Fruit Snacks:
Welch's Fruit Snacks is our next UX example and needs no introduction. Digital Silk designed the website of Welch's Fruit Snacks, specifically targeting Mexican mothers through market research conducted with these mothers indicating interest in fruit as a nutritional ingredient; moms also expressed appreciation of strong flavors and textures, which we incorporated into the Design by creating 3D custom graphics to show the consistency of food, giving visitors a sense of taste when visiting this food brand.
Story-telling for ACLU Virginia:
American Civil Liberties Union Virginia (ACLU Virginia), an organization which stands up for human rights, approached us to design their annual report and bring their accomplishments alive by telling their stories. We took great pleasure in fulfilling that task.
From each story's outset (i.e., introduction (the problem) to its conclusion (promise of resolution), we included engaging animations that grabbed people's attention as well as changes to background colors to elicit different emotions as users scrolled along their journeys.
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Conclusion: Create a UX-Centered Web Design
Digital Silk is an experienced web design firm offering services such as UX/UI design and development and web branding/content production - among many others - across various services and solutions.
Our team will extensively research your industry, competitors and audience to craft a solution tailored to you and attract their interest.
- Digital Silk provides Professional Guidance: Our team of digital experts delivers exceptional results and are trusted advisors providing valuable guidance through each project phase.
- Transparent Collaboration: At Prodigio Consulting Services, we take great care in cultivating openness in all our partnerships. Thanks to regular updates, detailed reports and timely check-ins, you're always in the loop - something no other provider does as effectively.
- Customized Solutions: No one size fits all. At Web Sniffers, we work closely with our web designers to understand your specific requirements, brand essence, demographics and goals - to deliver tailored solutions that reflect these aspects to strengthen and build your brand.
