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Your site can be one of the most powerful marketing tools that you can use at your disposal. It can serve as your 24/7 salesman, a powerful asset, and the centerpiece of your marketing efforts.
Your website can leave a lasting impression on your customers; whether that’s good or bad will depend on many factors. Your site’s user experience helps uplift your business in more ways than one.
Also, contrary to what you might think, your site’s UX experience could be a major game changer. In fact, a good UX experience is key to building a strong brand.
What is UX Design?
User Experience Design enhances user satisfaction by increasing the usability, accessibility, and efficiency of user interaction on your website. A UX design is to make a site easy to build and use and not to confuse users.
At Sytian Productions, (web developer philippines) we always tell clients that the main goal in developing a site with the user experience in mind is to tour your visitors around your company, telling them precisely what they want to see and understand a particular point in the navigation process.
Here are the eight UX design best practices when creating a website:
1. Structure your design considering accessibility
A UX site needs to consider people with disabilities and how they affect them when browsing site pages. A person with visual impairments can find your website’s font too small, cursive, or low contrast, making it hard to read.
Web Content Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has a guideline that lets you know the main points when building your site design.
2. Keep things simple and consistent
Simplicity is crucial when it comes to boosting your site’s SEO. A simple UX design should be intuitive yet organic at the same time. Meaning you should have a clear homepage that’s simple to navigate. A straightforward website architecture allows Google to index your pages, and users prefer a simple design. So, eventually, this is a win-win.
It would be best if you also focused on quality over flashy graphics. Make sure you utilize usability testing as often as possible to know what works and doesn’t.
Here are the main things that you need to think of when building your site architecture:
Page layout: Dropdowns and navigation bars need to be user-friendly, making it easy for Google to index.
Relevance: Make it simple for searchers to find what they’re looking for, and avoid making readers browse through any unnecessary content.
Originality: Make sure you’re unique to stand out easily from your competitors. Ensure that your site provides you with the best information and functionality.
Links: Integrating links will help boost your SEO and traffic. Incorporating links into the user experience promotes better engagement.
Speed: Make sure that you keep things fast and simple. When it comes to creating an excellent UX, time is always key.
4. Make your website mobile friendly
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More than half of all your web traffic comes from mobile. So, if your site isn’t mobile-optimized, users are five times more likely to abandon it. This means that you’re leaving out a large portion of your customers if you’re not optimizing your site to make it have the best mobile experience.
Another group that you need to remember apart from your clients and prospects in search engines. Search engines will crawl your desktop and mobile sites, using them to index your site. Regarding SEO, having a mobile-friendly site allows you to perform better.
5. Whitespace is your friend
One of the easiest ways to enhance your design is whitespace. Even adding subtle whitespace allows your designs to look more polished.
Remember that your background color doesn’t necessarily have to be white. Instead, it’s only the space between your site’s elements. It adds simplicity and elegance to your web pages.
Here are handy ways how you can use whitespace to improve the UX of your site:
Enhance the line space for your text in the body
Increase white space in long blocks of text on the left and right margins.
Avoid placing images in line with text rather than positioning them on top or under text blocks
Group and surround related objects with white space
6. Create a clear and easy-to-use navigation
If prospective buyers can’t easily find what they’re looking for on your site, they’ll simply leave and visit your competitor’s site instead.
Navigation in your e-commerce site is a great tool that helps users move in the right direction, helping them navigate through the product catalog.
Ensure you streamline your menu for users to make fewer clicks when looking for products.
Make your categories and subcategories clear as well. Your navigation menu needs to be accessible on any site page. Furthermore, your site pages need to be within four clicks of the home page.
7. Keep copy clear
You don’t want to keep users guessing what you mean. If you label the button as “Show Now,” users expect that you’re taken to the product page, where they’ll be shown the ability to buy.
Meanwhile, with the “Join Now” button, users will likely have questions. Why do they have to join in the first place? What are they joining? Ideally, your copy should be clear and concise if you’re writing for users.
In the same way, it should be accessible- your copy should be at the eight grade level and shouldn’t always require any specialized knowledge. For instance, there’s an error message. It shouldn’t necessarily explain why your page isn’t loading but should say, “page cannot load.”
8. Organize elements to optimize usability
It would help if you also gave intuitive navigation to anyone that accesses your site. You should also organize elements by following a visual hierarchy. It would be best if you positioned it in a way that focuses on the primary texts, buttons, and CTA.
Similarly, every page on your site should be designed considering what step you want users to take. Whether it’s subscribing to a newsletter, downloading an ebook, or buying a product. Adjust graphic elements, the size of your images, and words. You can also place some text in bold or a different color to highlight it.
9. Perform A/B testing
Let’s say that you want to build your site from scratch without a lot of information about the profile of our target audience. If this is the case, it can be harder to decide what color, image, font, or template to utilize.
One way you can make this easier is via A/B testing, wherein you create more than a one-page version, such as changing the call of action position or the color scheme.
The next thing to do is to test every version comparing your data to determine which one performs better. A heatmap will let you identify which changes have caused the most impact.
Over to You
So there you have it. The key to making an excellent UX design is to make it work for your users and the platform. A well-designed user experience is about leading users to the information or resources they need, removing anything that might stand in their way.
These UX design tips will help you find the key elements that make your design work with your target demographic, making it useful for you and the users to interact. Good luck!
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