How to design your website to achieve a great User Experience (UX)

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes.

User experience (UX) focuses on having a deep understanding of users; what they need, what they value, their abilities, and their limitations.  It also considers the business goals and objectives of the group managing the project. UX best practices promote improving the quality of the user’s perceptions and interaction with your product or any related services, through designing this product or website interface with the best user experience.

Design really matters!!

There are integrated elements while designing your website. Understanding the user is your first step to have a successful design, evermore. Considering design fundamental principles is the base to have solutions if facing problems.

“Good design leads to a good user experience and vice versa”

There is a fact that must be in mind while designing your website that in our current quite competitive digital world, great UX is not a choice but it’s a die-hard need!

Websites which being enjoyed by visitors and users, beside that their objectives have been met diligently, are websites with a great user experience. You need to design a website using some techniques that will increase the satisfaction of the user and will improve the conversions and reach the most important thing, which is Lead generation.

But, how you can increase the user satisfaction?!

• Web development or graphic team should design websites that is simple and easy to access.
• Minimize user interface by replacing menu with icons.
• Make your user interface more intuitive and simple.
• Add elements that are helpful for user.
• Use laser focus features to grab user attention.
• Use “+ or -” signs to expand and collapse sections.
• Use context-based approach that keeps static menu at the top and vertical menu displayed on the screen.

Hierarchical Visual Design & User Experience

Showing relations between page elements through visual hierarchies improves the user experience.

You can reach that through some factors:

• The relative size of elements on a page will highlight the important item over another one. Drawing the attention to important elements through enlargement them will assert their importance. For example, headers, are almost always larger than text, which confirms their importance and weight. When these proofs not found, sorting through information could be a crushing experience for users.

In other words, “Bigger Buttons = Bigger Sales”

• Element’s placement/position also affirms their importance or the sequence in which we are intended to realize them. For example, in Arabic, we’re usually read and write from right to left and from top to bottom. The way we approach the screen is the same. Items to the right and top of center tend to be noticed first and considered more important than other items.
• Color and contrast shows the item relations, draws attention and confirms importance. A highlight color on a page, such as orange or yellow, draws the eye because of its difference from other elements. Also, the mix of high-contrast black element on a light-colored page has the same strong effect. To establish continuity on a page, color is an excellent way to show this, since we can explain color information quickly and with a high degree of accuracy (yellow brick roads are as useful in life as in film). Using all rainbow colors without sense or meaning leads to poor visual hierarchies.
• Movement draws our attention when used judiciously and for a purpose. Animation can be an effective way to carry information.

“Web developers need to understand `interactivity’ just as much as clients. Interactivity isn’t about non-linear navigation or moving animations on the screen. It’s about what people can do on the site, what they can participate in, what the site does to address their needs, interests, goals, and abilities.” Nathan Shedroff

Elements of great user experience UX

Designing via user experience means that it covers all customer experiences, which means that “usability” is just a sub-set of user experiences. When designing websites or any other business with a good UX, an important thing, must bear in mind, is the nature of the customer; gender, cultural trend and location, which will dependently affect the theme of website or product.

Here’s some elements of great user experience:

• Navigation- Web-pages must be facilitated enough to promote and make the transactions.
• Useful- Product & services must be useful dramatically to retain the visits, besides it should not be a repetition of other webpages. Shortly, they must be unique pages.
• Contextual- Simply think while designing the user journey as scenarios or storybook. Ensure that users are contextually aware of where they are within their journey.
• Human- trustworthy, approachable, and transparent
• Find-ability– It should meet the user’s purpose landing on the pages, besides providing way-finding signs. Immense option can destroy the buyer’s intent.
• Credible– The feeling of trust, safety & security should be preserved either by SSL certificates or by another authentic certification.
• Satisfaction– The experience should please and satisfy the users. Further support might be added in forms of sales agent interactions, customer support and chats.
• Valuable– Reasonable cost for the product or service.
• Less is more– this’s one of the most important design principle; removing indecisive content force the visitor to focus on where you want it be “focal point”.

Remember that…

“Simplicity is beauty”

Knowing more about design principles lead us to architecture. According to Vitruvius, there are three principles or requirements to have a good architecture and therefore design:

1. Firmitas- (Strength, Soundness)
2. Utilitas- (Utility) Guarantee successful functioning
3. Venustas- (Beauty, Pleasure) Include all aesthetic requirements

Applying these principles (soundness, utility and pleasure) to business technology user model “BTU”, your design will reach the eminence.