Strategies to Ensure a Great UI and UX
User interface (UI) and user experience (UX) are finally getting the attention they deserve. Gone are the days of low competition markets when a site could simply launch and find success once enough people knew about it. Today, a website has to offer a great experience and be easy to use or people will move along to something else.
The average internet user tends to exhibit a short attention span and limited patience. These strategies for UI and UX should help sites to maximize the value of their traffic and improve their chances for long-term success.
Top Marketing Blogs
There is a big difference between a blog and a site selling products and services, but the top marketers who keep their own blogs have a lot to teach. Even if their content is of little interest to web designers, how they lay out their blogs can offer strong clues on how to layout a site for maximum visitor retention. Most will follow a similar pattern of white backgrounds, black text, solid internal linking, and enough multimedia in the form of pictures and videos to keep visitors engaged and motivated to view more than one page.
Accept that people don’t read long pages. Nearly everyone reads headlines, but fewer people read the first paragraph, and even fewer will continue reading through an entire article. Messages must be clear and easily explain the benefit of continuing on. This applies to product descriptions just as much as it applies to any article throughout the site. If the purpose of a product is not immediately made clear, many people will click away and look for something else.
Speed Saves
The often overlooked component in UI and UX has to do with speed. Internet speeds on computers, tablets, and smartphones have gotten to be incredibly fast in recent years. Websites should reflect this newer and faster internet. Compressing images, using clean and minimal amounts of code, and hosting sites on quality servers capable of handling high traffic loads all improve the speed of a website. Anything more than a couple of seconds is too much for many people.
UI and UX may seem like daunting processes, but they can often be distilled to a few fundamental principles. Focusing on speed, simplicity and the tendencies of the average visitor go a long way towards creating a great site that is easy and enjoyable to use.
