A great website visually appeals and functionally performs. When we say so, we are talking about the aesthetics and the performance laced in the architecture of a website/app/prototype. The way a website looks and the manner in which it performs, are the greatest determinants of its being. When clubbed together, these two aspects make up for the User-experience of a website. A great UX design boosts up the social reputation of your website as well.
Simply explained, User-experience (UX) lays emphasis on the experience of the users when they interact with your website/app. It is a sum total of the online users’ expectations, their personas and buying journeys, and the delivered performance of your website. Hence, your website’s mobile experience will determine the conversions driven by your online site or a mobile app.
A report states that over 52% of users are less likely to engage with a company and its website if the mobile experience is bad. In such a scenario, with so much at stake, how do companies, brands, and individuals make sure that their designing principles really help them create a flawless mobile user experience for their users?
Let’s find out.
Seamless Navigation
The most important thing to be kept in mind while designing a site’s mobile version or even the website is its navigation aspect. When the visitors land on your mobile website, they should be well-guided to move throughout the website and easily get back to the homepage without having to put in a number of clicks. A seamless navigational design ensures that the mobile site has breadcrumbs which easily guide the users about their current page on the website. A mobile website that is capable of taking visitors for a spin without confusing them is always a clear winner.
Optimum User Touch Control
This great UX design principle is about ensuring that mobile browsing a website should be smooth. Given the small size of mobile devices, it is obvious that users might click on something else when they are trying to access some other tab on the same screen. A flawless mobile design will feature optimum user touch control so that users do not have to deal with such issues.
Minimalism
The cluttered design is a big mood-killer. Gone are the days when you were supposed to bombard your website with a patchy and compact design. The rule of the current digital trend specifies that ‘Minimal’ design is the best option for a great website.
Minimalism is about a substantial portion of white space, less cutter, and loud & clear content. It ensures that users/viewers do not have to go deep-diving throughout your site for the information they are looking for.
For example, consider having the ‘Search’ tab on the homepage towards the right corner so that it is easily noticeable.
Consistent Design
It is very important to maintain a consistent flow of typography, graphics, and design throughout your site so that users/viewers have a great impression of your business/company. For example, stay uniform while placing the logo on all of your site’s landing pages. If you have chosen the left bottom corner of the landing page to put up the logo, make sure that all your future landing pages follow the same. If you are an inexperienced blogger, maintaining the same format for blog posts is a crucial practice.
In a similar manner, maintain the choice of font, font color, and typography so that the aesthetic appeal is maintained and the audience feels connected to the design.
Support for Touch Gestures
If yours is a complex or highly-dynamic mobile website/app, consider adding support for touch gestures so that new users do not have a hard time figuring out things. This mostly applies to game companies. Alternatively, other businesses can provide touch gesture support so that people new to the mobile devices find it pretty simple to go through their website and learn about moving ahead within the site as well.
Loud & Clear CTAs
Mobile screens are relatively smaller and so is the attention span of the audience. If you want your audience to convert after experiencing your mobile website, put up a loud and clear Call-To-Action (CTA) button on the homepage itself, in larger fonts. Having them in the front-center will make them easily noticeable and lead to higher chances of conversion.
Seamless form Submission
An amazing website will offer a mirror experience on its mobile responsive version as well. Since Forms are a tad-bit complex part of the equation, they need to be properly ideated and put up on the mobile version of the site.
The UX design should be such that the users have well-guided options to help them fill the forms, eliminating complex data entry points. If a user is filling out their ‘Date of Birth’ on the form, the form fields should display the simplest calendar for making the choice of numbers/months/year, and so on.
Enable Site Access Without Registration
Conversions are the key drivers for putting up a great show on the website in front of your business. Each and everything that site owners do is about driving in conversions and increasing sales.
A lot of sites request registration accounts so that they can better serve the audience in regards to the purchase history, tech support, and other similar topics. However, if the registration process is time-consuming, visitors abandon the site altogether. So, it is a great idea if your mobile site allows the users to make a purchase as a guest or go through your website without having the need to register for a new account and confirm their emails.
The Essentials
Well! The above-mentioned points are definitely some of the most important UX design principles. But, here are the 3 basic requirements which ensure that your audience truly has a flawless user experience.
- A Fast loading website: If your website takes more than 2-3 seconds to load, your site will have a higher site abandonment percentage. Make sure that you optimize your site well, use trusted themes and plugins, keep clearing your database at regular intervals, and optimize images as well.
- Security/SSL certificates: The Audience and the existing customers might like the way your website interacts with them in the initial stages, but if it fails to provide them a secure manner for trusting you with their sensitive data, things will start falling off. Having an SSL certificate on your site notifies the users that your site is safe for interaction, exchanging sensitive information or their payment-related data.
- A great web hosting service: A compulsion; a great web hosting service makes your website even more secure, reduces downtime, and ensures that it is accessible to requesting visitors around the clock. All these factors are a prerequisite for delivering a great user experience on your website.
Conclusion
The end-users’ experience with your website’s mobile version is equally important as that on the web one. Crafting the best mobile user experience for your website audience can be a task and will involve a deeper understanding of the customer’s needs and limitations, the goals of your business website, and accepting the fact that your website imparts value to both the parties. Once you have figured that out, you can go on to follow the above-mentioned principles in order to create the most flawless mobile user experience for your audience.
