Along with the usability, the visual aesthetic of a website is also something that reveals its success or failure. In a market, where you have billions of folks and agencies like ramotion to compete with, you need to assure that the design of your website is optimized for usability and user experience. A great user-centered design has been incepted as a standard approach for the successful and profit-oriented website. Well, there are multitudinous factors that affect the usability of a design. However, to help you out, we have collected together a quick list of some useful guidelines. You can implement these guidelines on your next web design venture.
Before diving into those guidelines, let us analyze how users interact with websites and what are the basic patterns of a user behavior.
How users move through the design?
In general, it is seen that visitors scan some of the text and click on the link that attracts their attention or somewhat resembles the thing they are looking for. In fact, there are some sections or parts of the design, they even do not look at.
There are some users who search for something interesting and clickable, however, if the website does not meet user’s expectations, the back button is instantly clicked.
Users often look for authenticity
If the website page offers users with some sort of quality-rich content, they are ready to compromise it with ads and design. This, in turn, makes it clear that content is quite important than the design.
Users just scan
While analyzing a web page, users often target some fixed points that eventually guide them through the content of the page.
Website design guidelines for an incredible user experience
Visual hierarchy
Visual hierarchy is all about structuring website elements in a way that visitors naturally are drawn towards the most important element first. When it comes to optimizing the website for usability, the objective is to let visitors take the right action. This can be done by positioning and adjusting the size, color, and position of certain elements. This will help draw the attention of visitors naturally.
Uninterrupted navigation
Having an easy navigation on your website is important for ensuring visitors find what they are actually looking for. In general, a visitor should be able to arrive on the website and quickly find their way to their desired location. To implement the same, it is important to keep the structure of primary navigation simple. Use of breadcrumbs navigation should also be encouraged. A search box near the top of website also aids visitors in searching anything with keywords.
The design should have a limited number of navigation options. It is good to keep navigation to not more than 3 level deep.
Ease in accessibility
According to the report by comScore, the internet consumption on tablet devices has expanded by 30% since 2015. Meanwhile, the mobile internet consumption grew by 78% during the same tenure. The point to be remembered here is that in order to offer a consistent user experience, any website needs to be supportive of multiple devices, operating system, and browsers that visitors are using.
This clearly indicates the importance of having a responsive design. Responsive design is the need of hour. With a responsive website design, content is automatically reshuffled to accommodate the dimensions of the device a visitor is using.
Similarly, the use of alt-text to all your images is also another factor for improving the accessibility. It is extremely important for a website to deliver great experiences across various platforms. This means sticking to platform-specific design conventions.
Consistent design
To keep the website navigation consistent, it is important to have a look and feel that is consistent across all the website pages. Consistent design includes attractive background, typefaces, color schemes, etc. These are some of the elements where being consistent can leave a positive impression both on usability and user experience.
Other than this, developers should try to keep the layout of each page different in specific to the requirements. This means that the layout of the landing page should be different from the layout of the informational page and so on. If such layouts are used consistently, it will become hassle-free for visitors to understand the type of information they are likely to find on a given page.
Focus on microinteractions
Microinteractions have become a trendsetting aspect in website design. Without having used them, the design goes bland and boring. Microinteractions add delight, surprise factor and offer something engaging for users.
They provide clarification about something and help users accomplish a task. Microinteractions can simply be integrated with the user experience to offer smooth functionality.
Design for readability
An enticing website design should be readable. The typeface needs to be visible enough to draw the attention of visitors. In order to make the text stand out, usage of color contrasts like black text on the simple white background should be used. This will make it easier to view the text.
Visual clarity is also required
The use of interactive elements like icons and images should be done in a way that they elicit an action. Icons and images have a better and clearer impact. Images can often convey a message quickly and more emphatically than text.
The major objective here should be to arrange different elements on a web page to encourage swift user experience. Also, include designs that get you a message across. In all cases, the story must be told. Designers must focus on a design that has font choice, color, images working together for a clear and straight message.
Learnability
Learnability is another important aspect of a great website design. The UI must be interactive and intuitive in itself. Interfaces must not require instructions to move through. This can only be achieved if you have a design that is easy to comprehend and understand. These days, people are familiar with a lot of designing concepts on the web. If designers keep using these concepts frequently, they will be able to meet customer’s expectations. Any kind of new concept used in a design must be implemented frequently and offer people great assistance during the initial learning phase. In short, the design and visuals must help people to remember new concepts.
Bottom Line!
Though designing interactions might seem a cakewalk. However, a lot of efforts need to be implemented to get a head start on designing interactions for your service or products. With the aforesaid tips, one can easily acquire effective user experiences and engaging UI. Your site will then be updated for uniqueness, visual appeal and comprehensiveness.
