A Beginners Guide to User Experience (UX) in Web Design

User Experience refers to the experience people have when they visit your website or use your app. Think about a website or app that you use frequently. Is it easy to find what you are looking for? Do you sometimes complain or get frustrated when browsing the website? Have you at one point left the platform because of this? Or did you end up leaving with satisfaction, having found exactly what you needed?

All of this refers to the user experience. Web developers and designers have as their main goal to make the website as easy and pleasant as possible for users. You can apply this to a lot of different aspects of your website, ranging from the products you offer to the delivery services you have in place. What we're going to focus on in this guide, is the user experience that is created by the web design.

Why is user experience design important?

People want to have a pleasant experience when they're visiting a website or app. This means that they are more likely to stay on your page and go through the whole conversion funnel. When they experience things that they don't appreciate, they might leave without having completed their goal.

There are not many users that won't immediately leave this website. Source: mockplYour user experience is important for your conversion rates, it's important for your SEO (Google loves good UX) - but most of all, it's important for your actual users. Having a user-centric design

Guidance

You want your customers to know exactly where they are in their journey. Your design should offer them guidance, so users know where they are on your website and what the next steps should be. Offering guidance to your users can be done through familiar patterns, that they already know how to use.

Buttons, for example, take them to other pages, arrows take them backwards or forwards and your logo makes them return to your homepage. By implementing these principles on your website your users will find it easier to navigate and they won't waste any of their precious time on your website.

Personal

Your users don't like interacting with machines. By offering them a personal experience you will gain their trust and you'll be able to build a deeper connection with them. It also offers you the opportunity to show your brand's personality.

Examples of offering a personal user experience include implementing features like chatbots, where you can offer live assistance on your website, or customer reviews, where they get another human input. But even simplifying certain processes on your website can lower the robot-aspect and add a more personal experience.

will ensure your website visitors have the best experience possible on your site, making them come back for more.

To create this positive experience, your design should be intuitive and it should meet the users' needs. The information should be clear and simple, and the users shouldn't be distracted by non-useful items. There are a few principles of UX design that we want to talk about, so you have a better understanding of the concept of UXD.

Easy

And that brings us to the third aspect of user experience. UX should always be straightforward, offering your users an enjoyable experience. This means you should avoid clutter at all times, removing every unnecessary aspect on your website.

And when we say that you have to remove the fluff on your website, we're also talking about your content. Having unnecessary content on your page might distract your customers or confuse them, making them want to leave.

A good way to keep your website as easy and simple as possible is by creating consistency. Ensure your menu is always in the same place, your buttons look the same and your branding is consistent.

What is the difference between UX and UI?

We know what UX stands for (User Experience). But chances are high you've also seen the term UI passing by somewhere. Although closely related, those two are not the same thing. UI refers to the user interface and includes the more visible part of your website.

Since the user interface plays an important role in the overall user experience of your website, we will focus on some important components of the user interface in this chapter. Understanding what's important for the user interface will give us a better understanding of user experience design and how this will take form in the user interface.

The structure vs. the looks

Simply put, UX refers to the structure of an app or website, while UI has everything to do with a website's look. The name speaks for itself: UI refers to everything that a user interacts with - be it as buttons, keyboards or icons.

User interface picks up where user experience leaves off. But even with a good user interface, your overall user experience might still be poor due to other elements. Let's look at an example to clarify.

Say you have a website where you can find information about certain touristy places in Australia. The way the website works, looks and feels all contribute to a good user interface. It's easy to select your desired destination and the information pulls up quickly. The fact that your overall user experience isn't good, might be due to the fact that the website only includes the major destination, which means you can't find any information about the place you wanted to visit.

Your UI and UX should work together, and we should optimise both to you guarantee a good website experience for your visitors. We'll have a look at some aspects of UI now that are a good example of how your user interface contributes to a better experience.

Principles of UI

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are a way of offering users visual guidance on the website in order to increase its usability. Navigational breadcrumbs show users exactly where they are in the hierarchy of the site and make it easy to go back to a different category or part of the website. It's often used in e-commerce websitesto show what category the user is viewing at the moment. Breadcrumbs don't require expert design skills but often just consist out of words and arrows.

Input controls

Input controls are mostly found on the website's forms and refer to every feature where users have to reply to a question. This can be a text field, a dropdown list, toggles, buttons or a file input box.

To keep input controls on your website easy-to-use, you have to make them as simple and clear as possible. Ask only for the information you really need and don't scare your customers away with dozens of questions to fill out.

Informational components

Informational components are elements on your website that offer users more information on an action or a page they're viewing. Examples are loading bars, notifications or messages - to clarify if an action is completed or if other actions are required.

You'll see that the concept of UI and UX are very closely related, and it's almost impossible to talk about UX without focusing on the user interface. We'll talk more about user interface later on, but we're first going to focus on some other aspects of UX.

Important aspects of UX

User Research

When you focus on the experience for your users, it speaks for itself that you have to start by figuring out who those users are. By conducting extensive user research, we can define our customer group and get an idea of their needs and pain points. With this in place, we can make strategic design decisions, without any guesswork involved.

User Personas

To get an idea of who your customers are, it's recommended to build buyer personas. Personas are highly stereotyped characters that represent a certain group in your target audience. In these personas you can include their need or problem they want to solve, and what they would expect from your company.

User Journeys

Once you have a user persona in place, it's time to look at the journey they go through when they interact with your product. By mapping out every step, it helps you identify the different ways users can reach their goal.

The journey will often consist of a number of web pages and decision points that carry them from one point to another. Understanding how your users interact with these different steps will give you a good idea of what aspects of your website should be in place to complete the journey.

Usability

Another important aspect of UX is the usability of a product. This means we have to measure and understand the extent to which users can achieve their goals easily with your website. And by optimising these processes we can guarantee better effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction.

Although this watering can might look pretty and is usable when it comes to holding the handle, it's usability is very poor when it comes to watering plants.

Usability varies depending on the intent of the user because this watering can would function well if the user had the intention of watering the can itself (are you still with us?). Same goes for usability on a website, where the user's intent and its environment determine the level of usability.

Visual Design

Even though usability is one of the most important aspects of UX, your visual design might even play a bigger role in this. Research has shown that post-use perceptions of both aesthetics and usability are highly influenced by a system's aesthetics. We know people are attracted to things they find aesthetically pleasing, so this will obviously impact the way they perceive a website's usability as well.

Visual design is a mix of graphic design and user experience design and focuses mostly on static images. It includes items such as illustrations, photography, typography, spacings and colours used to enhance the user experience.

We found another example for you to illustrate the importance of web design. This website has a very poorly chosen colour scheme, which doesn't only make it hard to read some of the text, but also just isn't aesthetically pleasing.

Now that you have known why having a user friendly website is important to your business, contact the Web Designing Company St Petersburg, FL to get a business-friendly website.