Creating a Website That Puts User Experience First

User experience is the most important factor when considering the build and layout of your site.

The infamous phrase from the Bauhaus Design School “Form Follows Function” has never been as true as it is today. You might have a beautiful looking website with flashy animations and the works, however if navigation is a pain and calls to action are more like whispers – before you know it, your site is responsible for you losing customers.

So, let us take a look at some of the major rules of user experience. With their roots in traditional psychology, they are extremely relevant when studying how your customers navigate around your site.

We’ll take a look at how you could utilise some of these points to improve user experience on your site.

Ease of use 

Make things easy. Nobody likes long-winded and confusing tasks. Simplifying processes will help to get your visitors performing key interactions; like buying your product or subscribing to your services.

Reduce number of steps

The journey your customers take whilst navigating your website is very important. Similar to how Google Maps will show you the quickest route to your destination, your website should do the same.

The number of steps required to complete any task should be kept to a minimum. However, not at the cost of cutting important corners.

Clear calls to action (CTAs) 

Making your call actions stand out is vital in making a simple user journey possible. Users need direction when landing on a page. Pages deliver a crossroad of options to take. By signposting correctly, your users will like the ease of which they can move around your site.

We can apply The Von Restorff Effect when you think of building your CTAs. This states that when a user is presented with multiple options, the one that differs is most likely to be remembered. So you may be thinking that you want it to be spotted and used, not just remembered.

GDPR

In the last 24 months, GDPR and users privacy online has been a key talking point. It is vital to make sure that your UX allows for GDPR to be implemented correctly, and more importantly, legally.  

What can you do to improve your website users experience?

Use white space

Properly spaced elements are easier to read. White space within your layout gives the user a space to rest in between the consumption of content. It helps to set the pace whilst the page is being read. In turn, this encourages users to absorb in more of your content. 

Differentiate Hyperlinks

If it is a link this should be obvious immediately. There are many methods you can use to emphasise a link.

If it’s within a block of text, it needs to be consistent with the rest of its counterparts, whilst standing out as an action.

One popular method is to utilise underlines and colours, which does take us back to the early days of blue underlined links which littered the internet. But they worked, and because this became so popular (see our previous blog post on Why Is The Web So Blue) text set in blue is automatically believed to be a link. 

Avoid Sliders

Only 1 percent of users actually interact with slider banners, by either using the call to action or to view other slides within the banner set. With this in mind, it’s clear that you should avoid putting too much information on these.

If you’ve got a great offer but it’s on slide 4, it may take a minute or so for the auto slide to get there. It’s unlikely that someone will sit and watch the banners autoscroll for a prolonged amount of time and therefore miss that information.

Sliders also often require a lot of CSS and Javascript code to work and are usually placed above the fold on the homepage. This means that it is going to be the first thing that needs loading. If you can avoid this, it will improve your site speed and this is a sure-fire way to improve the usability of your site.