Designing Sites for Better User Experience

For the longest time, the digital marketing world has ignored the concept of user experience. But it’s becoming more important as the web and its users mature. These days, UX design is starting to become a design standard, not only because it improves the look and functionality of your website, but also because it translates to more leads, traffic, referrals and conversions.

So what Is User Experience?

User experience (or UX) is the firsthand experience that users have when they browse a website or use an application. Everything from load times, navigation, the organization of the content, the user interface, functionality, visual presentation, core message, to multi-platform compatibility falls under its umbrella. You can say it’s a loaded topic.

So how do you design sites for a better UX?

The first step is to reduce load times. Now that more people are using mobile devices to browse websites, you need to make sure that your website loads quickly for every device. Long load times result in high abandon rates and lower conversions. This can be done by using better servers, reducing image sizes, better coding, and compression of files.

The second step is to create a clean, organized, and relevant navigation path. Obviously, you will not be able to satisfy the needs of your entire audience, but you can definitely find out what your core audience is looking for and design navigation around this. Everything from using a clean font, organizing your navigation menu, to making the most important pages prominent will improve user experience.

The third step is to improve the quality and clarity of the design. Sometimes, it’s your design that’s getting in the way of good user experience. The header may take up too much space and attention away from the core content or there may be too many elements on the page which makes the website feel distracting to the user. Changing the visual design is simple but extremely effective in improving the overall UX design.

Those are just some of the main ways to improve UX for your website. There are many more things that you can do from adding cross-browser compatibility, formatting content better, defining objectives, to using more effective and efficient scripts. It can be quite a daunting task to figure out how to organize and implement a campaign to improve your website’s UX.

Message from the Author

If you need help with your UX design, let ArtVersion help you. We understand which key areas of UX to focus on to create significant results in a relatively short amount of time. We are a leading creative web design firm in Chicago and have helped all types of businesses, from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies. Web design is one of our strongest core competencies, and we excel in all aspects of design from graphic design, UX, UI, to branding.

Photo by Pankaj Patel on Unsplash