Design for User Experience(UX)
September 22, 2014 written by Nishanth Babu
One of the most important things about web design is ensuring that your user experience is top notch. You can design an absolutely stunning, unique website, but if the user experience(UX) is lacking then it will harshly impact the website’s traffic and click-through rates.
It is important to cater to every single question a user might have when they load your website. Like “Where is the contact info?” , “How do I register an account?”, “Where can I find answers ?”. If the answers to these questions are not obvious and immediate the user will likely get frustrated and navigate away.
Sometimes it is important to re-design or even completely modify an existing, visually appealing design just to increase UX.
Firstly, lets understand what good UX is. The first requirement for an exemplary UX is to meet the exact needs of the customer. Next comes simplicity and elegance that produce products that are a joy to use.
I have often encountered people who produce visually stunning websites, but completely lack in UI and UX design. This flaw can be overcome with practice and sound understanding of the psychology behind fonts and colors. Did I just say fonts? Yes I did! The right font and color palette is the backbone of good design.
Firstly, one must choose a font that goes hand in hand with their design and compliments it and keeps the user’s attention as they read through the information. This can be done by first choosing the right font and then using the letter-spacing and word-spacing attributes in CSS to fine-tune it. As always good design comes with practice, patience and a lot of research. Secondly, choose colors that makes the content easy to read. you may have chosen an amazing palette with colors that fuse and compliment each other very well but that will all fall flat if the text is not readable!
The Internet Academy Courses on web design place a heavy emphasis on these factors and help students understand the difference between regular design and effective UX design. If you can put yourself in the shoes of a customer and accurately guess how they think, you are already half way there.
So, the next time you boot up PhotoShop to design a killer website, pause and think at each step at how a user would feel when they first access your website!
