5 UX Design Principles to Introduce You to User-Friendly Design
Are UX design principles a foreign subject to you? When you’re confused about how to provide the best user experience with your website, know you’re not alone.
If you visit many websites, you’ll find websites that still haven’t taken their designs beyond the desktop to mobile-friendly. There is more to think about than creating a mobile-friendly design, and learning the principles is going to make everything else easier.
Continue reading this article, and we will show you some of the most important UX design best practices so you can win with your website.
Is User Experience Really That Important?
Before we get into the article, let’s talk about why UX is so important. When you understand the importance of UX, it makes it easier to implement best practices because you know you’re investing your time wisely.
Whether you’re working with a UI design agency or you’re working on your UX design by yourself, UX plays into everything. UX goes beyond buttons, graphics, and how things operate when people visit the site. UX could go all the way down to how the customer service speaks to your clients when they call for help.
User experience tries to anticipate the needs of your visitors and helps them be happy with doing business with your company for years to come.
Now that you know the importance of UX, let’s get into it.
1. Designs Need to Focus on User Experience
When you start designing, it is easy to get lost in the beauty of your creation. You see how cool the animations look when people come to visit the site, so you throw a couple in and then a couple more.
How does that affect the site though? Likely, it makes the site run slow, which hurts the user experience which is the opposite of the effect you hoped it would have.
While you do need to make sure that your website matches your brand, beyond how your website looks, you need to make sure it is serving the purpose of serving your visitors when they land on your site.
2. No One Reads a Whole Website
If you’re writing your website thinking that people are going to hang on every word that you write — it’s not going to happen. Instead of reading an entire website, most people hop on your site and scan through your headers to find what they are interested in.
To make sure that you’re giving the visitors what they want, you need to create easy to find and understand headers. Those headers should have straight-to-the-point supporting information so people understand the message you’re trying to convey.
3. Consistency Is Key
When you visit websites like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other popular websites, you have a specific expectation for each of these websites. If Google started looking like Facebook or Twitter or vice versa, it would all be very confusing.
Beyond staying consistent with the way your website design looks with colors, fonts, and images, you need to be consistent with your style of writing for your copy and other elements of your site.
When people know what to expect from your website, they feel safe and trust what you have to say more than if your website was lacking consistency. Look at your current design and see if there are areas that you need to fix so they are more consistent. Even small changes can make a big difference when it comes to creating a user experience that people will love.
4. Confirm, Confirm, Confirm
How many times have we accidentally hit the delete button? We know that we’ve done it more times than we can count. Our hearts automatically go to our stomach from sheer terror but alas — there’s the please confirm message!
When you’re creating a design that is going to be exactly what your website visitors need, you should have confirmation on anything important. If you don’t have confirmation on important things like deletion or making a purchase, you’ll likely have to deal with a lot of errors.
Errors often equal unhappy and confused customers so make sure you create these confirmation messages and make everyone’s life easier. Make a list of confirmation messages you run into on a regular basis and see if they will be useful in your own design.
5. Have a Clear Hierarchy
When you go to the best websites, you don’t think twice about hierarchy. You just know it is going to be there. The website is going to be easy to navigate because it makes sense when you look at why pages are placed where they are placed.
Beyond how the website navigation hierarchy is laid out, you also need to make sure things are placed with their proper hierarchy when it comes to headers and other content.
Use different fonts or larger and smaller fonts to show your visitors what is what. The easier you make it for people to figure out the order of things, the better the user experience is going to be.
UX Design Principles for the Win
Now that you know about these important UX design principles, you are well on your way to successfully designing an amazing website for your visitors. Why stop learning here? We have many other articles on our website that can help you as you’re improving your online presence.
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