Website design has a lot of technicalities associated with it. However, the actual process of producing a user-experience rich website, is more of an art than a science. Why is that? Because most end users don’t appreciate the science of web designing, and that's fine. However, they do empathise with a website that offers them a satisfying user experience ,and they return to that website because of that.
So, what are the characteristics of a great website user experience, and what web site design features contribute to a richer user experience? Read on to find out.
Enhancing Website User Experiences
As we mentioned earlier, the art of designing web sites isn’t without its technicalities. However, it is about how a web designer uses those technical tools and skills that really enhances or reduces a website user experience. So, without further ado, lets take a look at 5 user experience enhancing web design ideas:
1) Keeping it Simple
The cardinal rule for delivering great website user experiences is simplicity. Before your web design team starts developing the website, you should have a conversation about the following:
- Fonts and text: These should be legible and well-spaced
- Graphics and images: Make sure your web design agency only uses them in appropriate context. Embedding a video or image where it doesn’t add value will significantly degrade the user’s experience. Make sure everything is test on smaller smart phone screens and on slower internet connections e.g. 3G on a smart phone.
- Colours and transitions: Like a PowerPoint slide that is filled with every colour in the rainbow, and uses every style transition available, an “overly colourful” and unnecessarily “loud” website will drive users away. Make sure your web design service moderates the use of colours and other bells-and-whistles. Think about your customer - what do you want and need on each web page?
2) Making It Easy To Navigate
Difficult to navigate websites tend to frustrate users, leaving them with an unfavourable user experience:
- Ensure your web designer uses website 'breadcrumbs' throughout so that website visitors can see what website section they are in and how to get to 'parent' sections/pages and other pages
- Use navigation aids at the top header, as well as in the footer of each page
- Don’t make navigation too flat, but it shouldn’t be too deep either. A 3-level deep navigation structure is often ideal. Discuss your overall content with your web design agency and you will arrive at a good understanding of your website content and how it should be arranged and divided
- Add intuitive search capabilities throughout the site so that website visitors are not getting frustrated that they can't find what they want
- Have your website designer keep the number of navigation options per page to a sensible limit so that each page does not contain an overwhelming number of different button/link options.
3) Offering Ease Of Accessibility
With the proliferation of multi-device usage, one of the best ways to enhance a user’s experience is to enable websites to be accessed via multiple (all) devices - tablets, smart phones, laptops, desktops…and more.
To enhance your website user’s experience, consider working with a website designing agency that has experience with multi device websites. Additionally, consider if it makes sense for your website to provide additional website accessibility to users with disabilities. To do this, you could offer , for example, the option to make the font a little or much size bigger, to make a solid contrast between background colours and foreground text, to have "alt tags" in place for all photos so as to explain the photo itself for those who can't see the photo etc.
4) Standardization
A serious point of frustration for website users is lack of standardisation across a website. If it feels like your website designing team used variations on the themes/templates throughout your website, users will wonder if they are browsing through the same site, or if they are hopping across sites or sister sites.
In addition to visual standardisation, you need to ensure that your web design agency understands what your corporate image is all about, and that they convey it using standardised messaging throughout the site.
5) Consistency
There’s nothing more confusing for a website user, than to find that “right clicking” on one page of a website causes you to do one thing; while doing the same on another part of the page (or site) results in a completely different outcome. This behaviour produces a negative browsing experience for visitors.
Most professional web design services follow a consistent design approach across a site. Make sure you discuss website experience consistency well before your web designers start developing the website.
User Experience Benefits
Ask any experienced web design agency about referral traffic, and they’ll confirm that a large proportion of website users visit a website based on someone referring them to it. But that’s not all. Not only is designing a great website user experience professionally desirable, it also makes good business sense.
Most web designing services aim to design for SEO purposes – both in terms of in-bound and out-bound links. However, if your website doesn’t provide a satisfactory user experience, other sites may not be keen to link to it. And they may also decline requests for you to link to their site. Both these situations can impact your SEO rankings.
If users are left with a fulfilling experience from visiting your website, they’ll not only bookmark it and return frequently to the site, but they’re also likely to recommend your site to others within their social networks. A web site designer who designs for user experience, also designs for sales conversions for your business. The more visitors you are able to convert, because they are repeat visitors, the better it will reflect on your bottom line.
Give us a call on +353-1-6216866 or email info@myit.ie if you have any questions about your website and using it to grow your business.
