Whether your product is a website, a mobile app, or something else, outstanding user experience is paramount. But, if you want your product to prosper and grow, you need to make sure that your UX design clicks with your target audience. Here are 4 essential UX design tips to help you provide the best user experience::
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1.You don’t have to reinvent the wheel
UX design principles are all about improving engagement. In fact, no matter the digital product, engagement is the top priority of any designer. Yet, some UX designers often believe that they must reinvent the wheel to achieve user engagement. Spoiler alert: they are often wrong. There’s a good reason why most websites and mobile apps look the way they look and do what they do today: users like it this way. And it’s not necessarily the fact that they like it this way, but they are also used to this structure. When accessing a website, for example, users subconsciously expect everything to look like what they are used do. To be more precise, they want to find the features of the web design where they are used to find it. This is the psychology of perpetuated habit, which is why users aren’t huge fans of changes. Usually, those UX designers, who wrongfully think that they must innovate everything, do things such as adding needlessly unorthodox layouts, add flashy color schemes or unattractive fonts in all the wrong places. Now, there’s one more colossal mistake they do: they create intricate navigation patterns that users aren’t used to. For example, relocating a navigation bar from the top to the bottom of the page will confuse users and most likely make them get annoyed by this unfamiliar structure. This approach of reinventing the wheel is all about differentiating one product from all the rest. Yet, it often results in hurting engagement by scarring off users instead of making the product stand out of the crowd and attracting them. So, it is better to use tried and tested layouts because they’ll surefire make users familiar with your digital product. However, it is also essential to include minor tweaks that fit your particular goals, such as call-to-action spots or “you might also like” teasers.
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2.Avoid designs that are “too much”
Like it or not, when your design is just “too much” for users, they will bounce off elsewhere. And, we’re guessing that that’s the opposite of what you want. But what exactly a design that is “too much” means? Those are the designs that follow familiar patterns but have too many complicated elements that confuse the user. For example, a website that is literally jam-packed with features and has distracting typography will most likely scare users away. These types of designs tend to confuse users and stop them from achieving their goals when accessing your website or app. Moreover, too many elements can make the design be unresponsive and make it load slower. And, let us tell you a secret, page loading time is crucial for user engagement and retention rates.
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Data shows that 40% of people would abandon a site if the page takes more than 3 seconds to load. Moreover, it takes only one-second delay in page response to reduce conversions by 7%.
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So, it is always better to keep your design responsive and straightforward. How do you do that? There are a few strategies to keep your design user friendly, including:
- Give each page a single definitive purpose
- Make sure the purpose of each page is easily understandable by the user
- Inessential information should go on the bottom of the page to avoid confusing the user when they access your website with a specific purpose in mind
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3.Understand the users’ needs and demands
Understanding the needs and requirements of your targeted audience seems like a pretty obvious UX design tip. Yet, hear us out. There’s much more information you need to find out about what the users want when using your digital product than you would think. And, identifying users’ needs and demands is often a tricky challenge for designers. Why? Because you may be influenced by the false assumption that since you are operating in a specific market segment, you already understand the audience’s wants and needs. Therefore, you don’t study it thoroughly. Now, while some assumptions about what users want might hit the mark, some of them won’t. So, how do you really understand what users want from your digital product? You use research design to get this vital user experience information. Gather information about your audience and feedback through interviews, surveys, online research, diary studies, and even field work.
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Research should give you answers to questions such as:
- Who are your users?
- What are their needs?
- How do you meet their needs through your interface design?
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4.Maintain a fluid user journey
The best way to engage users when using your product is to make sure that you help them have a fluid user journey. To be more precise, your design must be structured in a way that allows users to actually engage with your digital product instead of wasting time figuring out how to do it. For example, if a user accesses your website and wants to find a specific product, page, or element on it, they must be able to see the search bar within seconds. And, for them to be able to do that, you must ensure that the search field is visually distinct with the word “search” and the looking glass icon next to it. Also, navigation tools need to be at hand, ideally at the top of the page, and it must include all the significant sections of your website or app. This way, the user will be aware of their current location on your website or mobile app, and they will know where to click to go to another section.
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Long story short: the structure of the design should spare users from thinking about how to find or do something and allowing them to simply do it. And, in order to create a user-friendly design, you need to ensure that all these essential elements are at hand.
