If you are looking to design a new website (or even to modify an old one), it is important to know that having a design that is both enjoyable and useful should be one of your top priorities. Read on as we delve into some tips for designing a website that employs features that will both improve your audience’s user experience and reflect well on your business.
1) Keep Your Interface Consistent
One of the top design principles for creating a good user experience is to keep your interface consistent throughout the entire site. The overall look and feel of your website should be carried across all of your site’s pages. It is important to note that you should always make your design usable first and foremost. Without a properly functioning site, design becomes a moot point. Once you have the usability portion of your website perfect, you can then jump into creating a consistent and beautiful design. Keeping things like navigation, color schemes, writing styles, and fonts consistent can make a huge (and positive) impact on both user experience and usability.
2) Make Navigation Easy to Use
Navigation is key in creating a website with high levels of usability. Because it is the main interaction technique on the internet, having good navigation can ensure that your visitors can find exactly what they are looking for. Outlined below are some practical tips for creating user-friendly navigation within your site.
- Limit your top-level navigation links to seven choices at most, as the average number of objects that a person can hold in their working memory is about seven. In addition, make sure you create sub-navigation options with clear categorization.
- Clearly label your navigation options by using familiar words in your menu. This helps visitors to better understand the categories on your site.
- Include navigation options in the footer of your website, as this is a place where visitors expect to find both navigation options and contact information.
3) Change the Color of Already-Visited Links
Links play a crucial role in the navigation process. When visitors are clicking through your site, it is a good idea to change the color of the links they have already visited so that they do not unintentionally revisit the same pages over and over. For consumers, knowing your past and present locations makes it a whole lot easier to decide where to go next.
4) Make Your Site Easy to Scan
When users visit your website, they are more likely to do a quick scan of the page instead of reading everything on it. In order to create a site that makes it easy for visitors to do this, you need to design a good visual hierarchy. Visual hierarchy refers to the arrangement of elements in a way that tells the eyes where to focus first, second, and so on. Some items to keep in mind when employing this principle are listed below.
- Avoid walls of text. Chunking information into smaller groups makes it easier for users to visually digest. You can use headers or bullet points to achieve this.
- Make important elements (such as call-to-action buttons or login forms) have more visual weight. Making these elements focal points can be as easy as using different sizes or colors to draw attention to them.
Copy is equally as important as the design of your site. In fact, more than 95 percent of information found on the internet is in the form of written language. Regardless of how beautiful your site is, it is no more than an empty frame without quality content. Your design should work to complement and aid the content. It is also important to note that your content should be relevant (irrelevant content lacks value for visitors) and avoid the use of jargon (users should be able to easily understand the content you are putting out).
6) Double Check That Your Site is Error-Free
A beautifully designed site can be easily tarnished by small errors. Some common problems include broken links, typos, and loading errors for media content. Broken links can cause user frustration; typos can discredit your business; media content that does not load properly can detract from all of the other goodness your site has to offer.
7) Engage Users to Scroll
Scrolling sends your visitors deeper into the page and causes them to invest more time in the experience. This increases the chances that users will convert. The content at the top of the page (i.e. “above the fold”) is extremely important. It serves as the first impression that your business will have on potential customers. It also sets the bar for what your users expect in terms of quality. People do scroll, but only if the above-the-fold content is promising enough.
Good web design can be tough to perfect. Sometimes, hiring a skilled third-party company is the best way to implement the above tips. It is time to show your visitors that your business is just as snazzy as you claim it to be through fabulous design and a great user experience.
