Creating a great user experience (UX) is critical for the success of your website. A positive user experience can lead to increased engagement, higher conversion rates, and more satisfied customers. But what does it take to create a great UX for your website visitors? In this article, we'll explore 10 key points to keep in mind when designing your website.
1. Know Your Audience:
Understanding who your website visitors are and what they are looking for is critical to creating a great UX. Take the time to research your target audience and their needs to ensure your website meets their expectations.
2. Simplicity- Keep It Simple and Easy to Navigate:
In a website layout, simplicity essentially means getting rid of unnecessary components in a design, Simplicity entails having a clean layout, a two or three-color scheme and plenty of white space, an average of two fonts, and the third one for your logo. Your graphics must have a purpose; to be both clickable and insightful. lastly, your website should be easy to navigate, with clear menus and intuitive links.
3. Optimize for Speed:
One of the most frustrating experiences for users of the web is waiting for a page to load for too long. To improve your page speed, start compressing all your images before loading them onto your website. Image file size is one of the leading causes of a slow page speed -- using websites like compressor.io can help you dramatically speed up each webpage you own.
4. Design for Accessibility:
Website accessibility is a crucial aspect of website design that must not be overlooked. Ensuring that websites are accessible to all people, including those with disabilities, is not only the right thing to do but also makes good business sense. Some best practices for website accessibility include:
Providing alternative text for all images
Ensuring proper color contrast between text and background
Providing transcripts or captions for videos
Making sure that website content is structured in a logical and easy-to-navigate manner
Ensuring that website forms and buttons are accessible through keyboard navigation
5. Use Visual Hierarchy:
Visual hierarchy is an important aspect of website design that can greatly impact the user experience. Visual hierarchy is important because it helps users quickly and easily navigate a website and find the information they need. When visual elements are arranged in a logical and intuitive way, users are more likely to engage with a website and stay on it longer. Visual hierarchy can be achieved through the use of various design techniques, including:
Contrast: Using contrasting colors, fonts, and sizes to draw attention to important elements.
Size: Using larger elements to emphasize important information and smaller elements to de-emphasize less important information.
Color: Using color to convey meaning and draw attention to important elements.
Placement: Placing important elements in prominent locations, such as the center of the page or at the top of a webpage.
You can test visual hierarchy by getting feedback from users, analyzing user behavior through tools like Google Analytics, and performing A/B testing to compare different designs and see which one performs better.
6. Provide Clear Calls-to-Action:
When designing a website, it is important to have a clear call-to-action (CTA) that tells the user what action you want them to take. A call-to-action is a prompt that encourages the user to take a specific action, such as signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase. A good call-to-action should be clear, concise, and action-oriented. It should be easy to understand what action you want the user to take and why they should take it. Additionally, a good call-to-action should be visually prominent on the page, using design elements such as color, size, and placement to draw attention to the CTA. It is generally best to have one clear call-to-action per page. Having too many CTAs can be overwhelming and confusing for the user. However, if you have multiple actions that you want the user to take, you can use secondary CTAs that are less prominent on the page.
7. Use Responsive Design:
Smartphones have been around for a decade. Over 80% of internet users now use mobile devices to surf the web. Yet, many websites still lack key features that would improve the mobile UX. We often see websites that are viewed more on mobile than desktop or tablet. That just speaks to how user behavior is changing. As 61% of mobile users will never return to a website if it is not mobile responsive,all design must be done with the mobile view of web pages in mind.
Mobile responsive means that your website will automatically adjust for viewing on different screen sizes and devices. While most website themes and templates are already mobile responsive, we also suggest avoiding:
Tables and other images that may not scale down properly
Sliding images
Hover actions instead of clicks
Links placed close together
Pop-ups
Small buttons
8. Minimize Distractions:
Avoid cluttered designs or too many distractions on your website. Use white space and clear visual elements to draw attention to important content, and minimize the use of pop-ups or auto-playing media.
9. Detect your 404s
Although search engines won’t punish or blacklist you for having 404 errors, your visitors do. When someone clicks on a link, they expect it to take them to the page they want to view. Thus, encountering a 404 error will annoy users and make them leave your website with a bad user experience. So, remember, when someone follows a specific link, the last thing they want to see is a 404 error page. Therefore, make sure that the conversion links you have included on your page actually work.
10. Conduct a UX Review/Audit
Naturally, as humans, we tend to focus solely on completing a task. We get our projects, we run with them, we share the results, and then we start over again. There’s very little time set for reflection. That’s a real shame. This encourages us to create systems filled with weaknesses and discrepancies and then continue to replicate the issues over and over again.
Sometimes, switching off for a day is a good idea. Pull together the UX team and review your strategy. Ask questions about the efficacy and importance of the work you do and then, based on the responses, adjust the way you work.
In conclusion, creating a great user experience is critical for the success of your website. By following these 10 key points, you can design a website that is easy to use, accessible, and engaging for your visitors.