Designing for user experience has become trickier than ever. Why? Because to make users feel right at home, designers have to deliver beautiful yet simple and functional designs.
At the same time, the designers have to follow the guidelines of the brand pattern their clients already have in place, all while accommodating the needs of the audience they are designed for.
Designing for user experience can quickly go south if any of the above-mentioned aspects isn’t addressed. This is why we have decided to step in and share some of the best practices that will delight your users and make them feel right at home.
Design for People’s Psychological Needs
Over the past years, we have all been moved away from the reason that got us into the design in the first place – designing for people. You can easily see this by looking at the demands of our clients. The most common are – “I want people to spend more time on my website” and “I want to significantly increase conversion rates on my website”.
If we stick to these goals only, with no respect for basic psychological needs of the audiences we are designing for, the results we expect won’t follow. Instead, we have to craft the user experience by taking into account the intrinsic motivation of our audience.
To help users feel natural, we have to adhere to their needs to feel competent, relatable, and autonomous. This means an overall intuitive design, simple menus, no popups, and a carefully chosen color palette.
Use Everything at Your Disposal to Build a Personality
Did you know that people tend to treat services and products as people? Yeah, our distinctive character, or personality if you prefer, is made up of an authentic combination of characteristics.
Whenever we interact with something we tend to project some of these characteristics onto the person or object we are interacting with. It makes us feel more relatable, relaxed and gives us a sense of belonging.
As UX designers, we have to deliver experiences that not only engage the users but help build a bond with the brand and the design. Something that will relate to their personalities. To do so, UX designers have to get to know the target audience they are designed for.
This is why we recommend that you ask your clients a few questions about their audience before you decide whether some of the designs such as the Flat 2.0, Material 2.0, or sharp typography and a lot of white space are going to work best.
Free Chatbots Can Help a Lot
If you haven’t heard about the chatbots, you must have been living under the rock until now. Why? Because chatbot was definitely the buzzword for 2017. This software powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning has a lot to offer to UX designers when it comes to enhancing the experience of their users.
Take for instance SnatchBot.me, the best free chatbot platform out there. You don’t need cash or a technical background to use it. In fact, you only need a bit of time to master it.
What does it offer in return? Access to dozens of prebuilt chatbot templates that you can customize to your own liking and integrate into any of the desired channels – live chat on the website, Viber, Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, and more.
What’s even more important, chances are that your audience has already used a chatbot in the past. If not, they are used to communicating with one thanks to Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa.
Make sure to use the opportunities the best chatbot platform offers to engage your users and make them feel right at home while they are exploring the service capabilities of your newest UX team member.
Decrease your Website Loading Speed
Over the past few years, instant gratification has become the modus operandi of online content consumers. Your website speed significantly affects brand impressions. What does this mean for you? To enhance your user experience, your website has to become best pals with Barry Allen. In other words, it has to become the fastest website alive.
Slow load times are a big issue – one that has to be addressed quickly. Slow loading is usually caused by big images, bulky code, media from external sources and too much flash.
Decreasing your website loading speed is not hard and you have several options available. Start with the most effective one – enable compression. After you’ve enabled compression, you should minimize HTTP requests and minify and combine HTML, CSS and JavaScript files. This should significantly boost your website speed and make it more enjoyable for modern internet surfers.
Design for Mobile First
Did you know that mobile devices account for 50% of web page views worldwide? This means that every second person arriving on your website is going to be viewing it on a small screen of a mobile device. If you want to help your users feel right at home, designing for mobile should be your priority.
Responsive grids, layouts, and menus will help you deliver a consistent experience to all of your content consumers. While the responsive images and media will help your mobile users experience the same loading speed as your desktop ones do.
Are There Any Mistakes to Avoid?
As in any other line of work, there are some mistakes that you can avoid when designing for user experience. The most common one is user experience inconsistency across all channels. If a company has a mobile app, a website and social media presence, all these channels should deliver the same user experience.
In fact, even your marketing campaign should reflect your overall UX strategy.
People also forget that user experience design works hand in hand with visual design. Don’t get stuck in UX, only to discover that your visual design is far from engaging.
To design for user experience, you must understand basic human psychology, know the best practices in UX design, and the latest technologies – free chatbots in our example – that can further enhance user experience. Keep in mind that this process will take some time. Use it well to study your audience so that you can deliver the things that they need and desire.
