Tips for UX design
Throughout this blog, we will be talking about five simple ways to increase the user experience of any website or product. User experience is essential, and without it, you have something that looks nice, but it doesn’t take into account the way users want to use the product or service. Also, there are lots of tools and mechanisms that are disposed to UX designers. However, sometimes you don’t have the budget, time, or a person on the team to do it. So, what happens if you end up in a situation like that? You fall back on tried and true principles, which is what we will be going over today.
Must Read: 7 UX Design Tips To Build A Smarter Website
One of the most critical aspects of user experience is leading the user through the funnel and taking them where you want them to go and where they need to go. A clear call to action will make things more accessible and easy. You also won’t have to hide your primary or secondary actions. Then, you always want to make sure that your primary action is the primary and your secondary is actually the secondary.
Before you begin the project, you need to define the clear goal for the project and the design. As you’re funneling people through, be sure to ask yourself, what do you want out of the user? There needs to be a primary call to action and not multiple primaries. Therefore, find out what is essential and stick to it.
People only have so much mental capacity to devote to your product or service. Therefore, the more you can strip away, the more you’re going to help people focus on what you want them to do. Everyone loves options, but you know what it feels like to walk into that Italian restaurant with a hundred different things on the menu. So, you stare at the menu forever, overwhelmed by the options. Instead, a lot of people prefer to have a more specialized niche like a bistro with five things on the menu.
A smaller menu makes it easier to decide, and that is what you want when it comes to your website. You want to make it simple for people to decide on your product or service.
People don’t read, they scan. It doesn’t matter if that paragraph you wrote is phenomenal, strip it down. You want to strip down any long headlines you may have. If people can’t get the gist of what’s going on with your product or service without scrolling fast, the text doesn’t belong there.
So, you want to avoid long blocks of texts, the marketing speaks, and buzzwords. People will see right through that and then move on to something else. In the end, a picture is worth a thousand words, so you don’t want to clutter up the interface or the design with more visuals. However, if an icon can say an entire paragraph, then use the image.
People are terrified of white space, clients especially. White space gives off a sense that you’re lazy and that you forgot to move things together, and you haven’t done your job. Let things breathe rather than boxing things inside of other boxes. Open things up and remove the borders and the lines, and let things have a little more room to operate. Therefore, people will have some room to address things, see, and use things.
50% of people will expect your website to load within those two to three seconds. If it doesn’t, there’s a problem. This is the medium people design for. Therefore, it’s another good reason to strip things out and focus on what needs to be there. Less is more. User experience is about stripping things down. It’s about governing the content, controlling the flow, and leading the user in the right direction.
A few simple ways to improve load times are to pick a more straightforward design style. Flashy is great, but it may not be faster. The second tip is to optimize every single thing that you put into your website. This includes images and logos. Everything should be optimized. It would be best if you were running your images through image optimum to make sure you’re stripping out all the excess stuff. It would also be beneficial to use responsive images, and not making your device load the largest possible banner. Instead, your site should be loading the one that is specific to its device size.
You also need to implement smart image techniques and smaller image techniques, so your website loads faster. The last tip is you need to use the right tool for the job. You don’t want to bring a tank to a knife fight. Maybe you’re designing a massive enterprise website that needs a robust CSS. You could also just be designing a landing page, and you can run that page as static. So, you need to consider your hosting, tooling, or set up and take those things into account. When it comes to digital design, load times are serious.
Those are five tips that can help you to improve your user experience in your web designs. Web design, at times, can seem very challenging. However, these tips can help you to improve your overall efficiency and productivity. Just remember how valuable the user experience is. Your website will be the first thing people see when they check out your product or service. So, if they have a terrible experience with your website, they will associate it with your product or service.
With that said, make sure a potential client or customer is interacting with your site, that the feel of your site flows naturally. Don’t clutter pages up with unnecessary text or images. Also, don’t make things overly complicated. Keep in mind that less is more. Lastly, make sure pages are organized, and you don’t leave it unfinished with a vast amount of white space all over the site. If you are trying to figure out how to hide a featured image in WordPress, click here.