User Experience and User Interface are some of the most commonly confused terms in the website development field. And although it is important to hire a web UI developer to help design and build the website’s interaction aspect, it is also critical to consider roping in a UX designer because UX is a subset of UI, and it tends to touch many other areas.
In fact, a digital product without an intuitive UX design is like a driver hitting an interstate highway without knowing their destination. Plus, you might also have heard people saying that a particular app has poor UI and excellent UX.
Which then begs the question, what is the difference between UI and UX in WordPress development? What role does each play? And more importantly, why is UX more important than UI?
In this article, we are going to answer all these questions. While at it, we are also going to look at how UX can help increase conversion on a WordPress website.
So, what is the difference between UX Development and UI Development?
User Experience development is the process of improving a particular framing of an application or website to meet the users in mind. It mainly emphasizes on restructuring and wireframing a website’s components and elements, to ensure it flows efficiently.
On the flip side, User Interface development entails improving a website’s or an application’s presentation and interactivity, with the main emphasis being the screen, page, buttons, or any other visual elements users encounter while using a website or an application.
Importance of UX/UI Design
One of the biggest goals for every business is to accelerate growth and boost sales. Both UX and UI design helps a lot towards achieving these goals as they improve user experience, customer satisfaction, and help generate more leads.
Additionally, businesses offering a huge array of products or service choices to the users need to grab their attention by hitting the bull’s eye within a very small span of time. And with 47% of customers indicating that they wouldn’t hesitate to leave a website with more than two seconds of loading speed, it is important to ensure that you optimize the UX design.
Great UX/UI design helps make a solid first impression and builds the user’s confidence. This compels them to use your application or website more often, ultimately improving your bottom line.
7 Effective Tips to Improve the User Experience of a WordPress Website
Let’s be honest – we love freebies. When designing and building your website, you may be more than happy to take advantage of the FREE themes offered by WordPress. However, one of the biggest challenges of the free themes is that they have limited functionalities and skewed code structures.
On the flip side, premium themes have great code quality and an exceptionally flexible structure. Along with that, they also have a wide assortment of functionalities to complement the design of any website.
- Keep Your Design Clean and Simple
A bad WordPress developer places more emphasis on creating a pretty website rather than a product that is functional. The only problem with this approach is that it tends to be confusing to the users as most prefer function over form.
When designing your website, always ensure that your UX developer returns to one simple question, “Will the site confuse visitors?”
Although an intriguing website design has the potential of winning awards, it may end up being a nightmare to the users. Why? Most people like predictability. As such, they naturally expect to find certain website elements placed in certain places, and once they don’t, confusion and frustration sets in. Then they move on to the next.
To avoid this, ensure navigation through your website is easy and obvious by presenting the end-user with navigational elements. Here are some of our recommendations:
- A navigation bar;
- A categories list in the sidebar;
- A search box in the sidebar;
- An Archives page.
- Use the Right Font
This may sound like a no-brainer suggestion but it does play a crucial role in improving the UX design of your website. And although setting up custom fonts is a time-consuming affair that needs extra effort, it reflects directly on your brand’s personality and elevates your site’s authenticity. Moreover, custom fonts also come in handy in improving your rankings, allowing you to stay ahead of your competitors.
- Give Your Website an Accent Color
Choosing the right color for your WordPress website also plays an important role in the success of your site. On top of being aesthetically crucial, the color of your website also saves you time when retouching the overall design.
When it comes to choosing the right color, it’s not about going with your favorite but the one that complements your brand.
- Create a Good Logo
Having a good business logo is the cornerstone of establishing the identity of your business. A logo also helps convey the values and ideas driving your brand. The primary properties of a good logo include- Uniqueness, readability, simplicity, longevity, and scalability.
- Eliminate 404 Error
Nothing disgusts website users than the 404 Error. As such, catching and eliminating it allows your site visitors to enjoy a better user experience.
- Website Security
According to a 2020 report released by Who Is Hosting This, WordPress powers approximately 34% of all active websites on the internet. This massive number is largely driven by the rich WordPress ecosystem that boasts of different themes and plugins. Moreover, even people without special programming know-how are able to build a website.
Unfortunately, the popularity of WordPress also makes it a prime target. For example, intruders often try to build visually attractive themes and give them out for free. These themes are injected with malicious scripts capable of stealing site traffic or even personal data.
Providing excellent security guarantees to your website users helps them enjoy a phenomenal; browsing experience as well as assure them to trust you. With these robust website security protocols, you are also able to attract more and more customers, who then help you to get potential leads and conversions.
Helpful Tips for Rolling-out the UX Process into WordPress Development
Whether you are planning to create a new website or introduce UX to an existing product, the approach is almost similar.
Below, we have listed five steps on how you can kick-start the process:
- Empathize: Start by asking the potential users of your website about their needs and how they are currently achieving their goals. Above all, also ensure you ask them about the moments or points in which they struggle the most while trying to achieve a goal.
- Define: Once you have mapped out and created an avatar of their needs, you need to prioritize their most impactful areas of need to ensure that your solution targets and solves their most urgent problem first.
- Ideate: Formulate and conceptualize methodologies of how to solve those problems and create an early visualization of your solutions. These ideas can range from very basic to more advanced ones and it is at this point that brainstorm and let your imagination run free to come up with cool solutions.
- Assemble your team: In full stack UX development, assembling the right team is a critical matter. This is because you need to have people with both the technical and practical experience if your product is to be successful. It is also at this point you get to know how much UX developer salary you will be paying out.
- Prototype: Once you have your team fully assembled, the next step is to create and test prototypes of your product in line with the user’s needs. Also, it is important to show the prototypes to the potential users and request for feedback on how well suited the solution is against their needs.
- Validate: Last, you need to iterate on the feedback received and make changes to your prototypes and deploy.
Final Thoughts
There you have it. Tips on how you can improve the user experience of your WordPress website. Once you have nailed down the above concepts, you rest assured that you have a thoroughly engaging website with a positive user experience. And although we have included what we would consider being the most important considerations, there are many others that we haven’t covered.
In line with that, we would love to hear out your suggestions in the comments section below. What additional measures do you think enterprises and webmasters alike should take into consideration in order to create a seamless user experience for their site visitors? Let us know!
