User experience, commonly abbreviated as UX, is made up of many elements that are crafted to facilitate positive impact and how your website visitors feel when they visit your website. You could say that UX is an analytical based metric that can be applied to a website as an important part of your marketing strategy. As a web designer in Canberra, I am aware that a seamless and enjoyable user experience is becoming an integral aspect of any online marketing strategy. Very soon the end users’ experience will win out over price, product and service as the most important deciding factor between you and your competitors’ websites; a poor user experience can lead to increased bounce rates and the user will simply click away to a competitor’s website.
UX in web design is all about making the positioning of your website elements both aesthetic, friendly and easy-to-use for your website visitors. At the end of the day it comes down to more than just great website design. How your website functions and easy and consistent navigation are what help potential customers find the information they are looking for; therefore, this needs to be as smooth and seamless as possible to have optimum impact on customers.
Many businesses that are already successful with implementing their UX strategy will integrate several elements, including value, usability, functionality, adaptability, navigation and design. While varied testing also plays an important part in their implementation, for example using heat maps to log user behaviour. A large percentage of businesses that currently don’t use this type of testing on their website will start doing so over the next year or so.
We can take a closer look at the UX elements you need to consider to create a great user experience for your website visitors and potential clients:
Value is based on whether potential customers can easily and clearly see the value & benefits of your products or services you offer. Your website design should clearly reflect the value of what you offer to visitors on your site that differentiates from you from your competitors. So, these aspects need to appear in a prominent position in your layout.
Usability refers to the structure of your website and how responsive it is, this needs to anticipate your customers’ needs before they even realise them. Addressing your customer’s needs can be an important factor between gaining and losing a customer for your business due to poor usability.
Every design element of your website should serve a specific purpose that is made clear to your visitors, these things should appear obvious to your users. Justify the use of ALL design elements so they make sense and are not in any way confusing to your visitors. This applies to both desktop and mobile versions of your website.
You should be well aware by now that having a mobile responsive website is important going forward and future proofing your website so it is able to adapt to almost every screen size. Therefore, your website must be responsive across as many types of devices as possible. The content on your website and its performance should be consistent whether the information is accessed from a desktop, iPad, or android smartphone, in fact the user experience on mobile devices may need to be even more streamlined.
This is covered well in the other elements I have described, but your website should be easy to navigate, consistent from page to page and guide customers to the information they are looking for with minimal clicks and without hassle.
The most important aspect of UX is the web design itself. It should grab the user’s attention immediately without containing distracting elements like unnecessary clutter, pop ups, distracting animations or motions that pull them away from the information they are looking for. Colour choice here is also very crucial, colours should be well thought out and considered. As a rule of thumb, no more than 3 colours should be used, but some research here could really help to find out what colours people respond to in a positive way.
