What is UX?
User Experience (UX) is the way a person interacts with a digital product. In our case, the digital products we’re referring to are websites.
Why Does User Experience (UX) Matter?
How users interact with your website is just as important as how they think it looks. It’s possible to have a great website design and terrible UX design. If users can’t find what they are looking for, it doesn’t matter how pretty the site is.
How do you make great UX happen?
- Think about what you want your website to do for you. If you’re selling products, you want users to quickly and easily get through the steps to the order confirmation. If you’re a service business, you want to get the users to see what services you provide and get them to contact you.
- How will users expect your website to be laid out? The way your pages are arranged (hierarchy) is incredibly important. We always start with a basic outline of a site in the projects we work on to make sure that they pages are laid out logistically and in a predictable matter.
- Be consistent. While this may be considered more of a design principle, consistency in websites doesn’t just look good. It helps users to quickly navigate. If you’re constantly changing the font style, color, background image, etc., users get distracted and tend to get discouraged and leave the site, resulting in a lost conversion.
- Use common patterns. This is most important in online shopping scenarios. People expect certain things when shopping online: multiple photos, size charts or dimensions, ability to select quantities, easily understandable pricing, shipping options and policies, etc. Make sure to have both a checkout button and a view cart button. I was recently on a website doing some online shopping and I needed to remove a certain item from the cart. They only offered a checkout button and I was confused as to why there was no “edit cart” option. And if I, a web developer that spends all day online, was confused, think about the general public.
This is just a quick glance into UX design. For more information, check out these links:
http://uxmag.com/
http://ui-patterns.com/
http://uxdesign.com/
http://thenextweb.com/uxdesign/2015/07/07/10-dos-and-donts-of-ui-and-ux-design/