5 Tips To Create A Great User Experience
Whether you’re building a website from scratch or updating your existing site, the user experience should be top of mind. Users look for websites that are easy to interact with, offer helpful information and have a logical structure. Without attention to UX (user experience) design, you might end up with a site that people don’t like being on, which can cost you business.
In this post, we’ll go over a few tips for creating a great UX design that will make your site stand out from competitors.
1. Understand Your Audience
The most important element of UX design is to understand your audience. You have to know what they’re looking for, how they find that information and what they need from you to be successful. A good way to measure these things is with a customer effort score.
These scores measure a customer’s interaction with your customer service team to show how easy or difficult it was to resolve a problem. They can tell you common problems your customers are facing, what resolutions they’re looking for and whether or not you’re delivering those solutions.
2. Question the Norm
Just because something works for most people doesn’t mean it will work for you. One of the biggest rules of UX design is to question everything when you start building an experience. It’s important to tailor your experience to your brand and platform, which means you’ll need to ask some critical questions before getting started:
- What am I selling and what is its value?
- Why do people want to buy my product?
- How do people want to buy my product?
- What information do they need before they buy my product?
These four questions will help you hone in on the most important aspects of the customer journey so you can tailor your design around what your customer needs.
3. Stay Simple
As you build a website, especially a large one, things can get complicated quickly. You might find yourself wanting to layer pages and functionality to give it advanced capabilities. However, sometimes all these bells and whistles can actually diminish the user experience.
You want to keep your design as simple as possible. Make sure your key elements, such as the navigation bar and primary call to action, are clearly discernible from other elements on the page like copy or images. The simpler your site, the easier it is for users to navigate.
4. Create Visual Distinctions
This tip comes partially from the WCAG 2.0 accessibility guidelines and is also a blanket good practice in UX design. It’s important to create a visual distinction between text and color on a website so people can easily read what’s on the page and discern where you want them to focus their attention.
It also helps to be mindful of color combinations that are difficult for color-blind or low-vision individuals to perceive. For this reason, high contrast is always preferred and focus states can even be helpful to help further highlight information.
5. Run User Tests
Finally, once you have a version of your website completed, it’s imperative to employ user testing to see if it works well. This is the best way to see if your UX design is successful or if it could use some more improvements.
Have users navigate around your website, clicking all the links and testing page functionality. You can even give them lists of tasks to perform on your website and see how well they accomplish them. This will give you insights into areas of your site that might be confusing or broken and gives users a chance to provide you with qualitative feedback.
UX design is a key component of creating an excellent website that supports your customers and their journey with your brand. Follow these five tips to ensure you prioritize UX design during your next project and pave the way for customers to join your brand. Good luck!
