Designing a great user experience (UX) is the foundation of a successful website. UX is about making a website enjoyable, interactive, and natural and providing interaction that satisfies users.
Did you know…
UX is a user’s/visitor’s overall experience and satisfaction when interacting with a website, and this can be from a website’s initial look and feel to the functionality. It is how easy and seamless a person finds navigating a website and completing the task they visited a website for. A good user experience needs to be simple, fast and enjoyable. We can all agree there is nothing worse than going on a website with pages lagging, images not loading, and you cannot find what you were looking for; this is why your business needs a UX that your customers will find compelling.
We have compiled some of the essential user experience (UX) best practices we feel are crucial when working with you to build your website.
Understanding your users: Investing time to research your target audience, their needs, goals and frustrations or difficulties. A great way to do this is to ask questions or request surveys and feedback from existing customers or users. Gain an insight into how they feel about their experience and what they want to see.
Persona development: Create a fictional “ideal customer” to help you choose the design of your website based on real customers.
Menus: Ensure your menus are clear, concise and organised in a predictable and common sense way.
Breadcrumbs: These are very important as they show visitors where they are on a website and allow them to return to a previous location by following the breadcrumb path.
Search facility: A good search function will help visitors find a product or service quickly without looking for it themselves.
This post explains why user-friendly website navigation is essential.
Consistency: Ensuring the design has the same visual look throughout; this includes colours, typography, layout and imagery.
Hierarchy: Guide users to essential elements using a visual hierarchy with size, colour and placement on a page.
Accessibility: Making your website compliant with WCAG guidelines will ensure that the user experience is suitable for people with disabilities; here’s how to make your website more accessible to people of all abilities.
Responsive pages: A website designed to be fully functional on screens of various sizes is essential. When we build any website, we prioritise responsive design. As of September 2024, the % of people using mobile devices to surf the internet was 63.68%; in 2011, this was only 6.1%. So, mobile website design should be a significant aspect of your user experience.
Clear error messages: Create informative error messages telling the user the mistakes they might have made so they know what they have done and how to correct things to ensure they do not get errors again.
Handling errors: Using rules or hints to help prevent mistakes from happening will very much help with user experience.
Loading times: If your site is slow to load, there is nothing more a visitor hates than a slow-loading website. Optimising your site speed by reducing file sizes and using a good host and caching system will help increase load times. Check out your website’s speed on Google Page Speed Insights; this gives you a score and an idea of any website speed issues.
Responsiveness: This is when a customer clicks on a product, the website does not respond to the request very quickly, and there are lags or delays. Optimising this will help significantly with the loss of users. Did you know that 17% of cart abandonments relate to slow, lagging or crashing websites?
We follow these user experience best practices for all our customer websites to ensure you have a great-looking website and your visitors/users have a seamless and user-friendly experience.
If you want to learn more about our UX services or have a project you want to discuss, why not contact our user experience specialists?
