What is the role of user experience in web design?
First things first… What is user design?
User experience considers how visitors feel when interacting with a website or desktop software system. This design strategy responds to user behaviour and provides them with an optimised browsing experience across all browsers and devices. User experience is driven by principles that reflect the user journey: discoverability, usability, accessibility, attractiveness and usefulness.
Why is user experience important for web design?
User experience takes into account important factors, such as the value a website provides for the user, how easy it is to navigate and whether it fulfils the purpose of the website visit. It helps businesses to understand the considerations a visitor makes when deciding whether to become a regular user [or not].
Over the past decade, advances in technology have led to increasingly complex websites. Regardless of how much website designs progress and advance, the success of a website still depends upon how users perceive and value it, so the user experience is a critical element.
What are some of the benefits of incorporating user experience?
A website centred upon user experience automatically has a competitive advantage over those that don’t.
User experience creates a positive connection between a user and a product or service, influencing how they feel when interacting with a website. A good UX design will entice visitors to stay on your website for longer and perform the calls to action. By offering a seamless user journey across the pages and making it easier to perform a desired action, such as signing up for a newsletter or completing a sale, user experience-driven design helps to drive your conversions.
The bottom line? If you want to create a successful website and seamless user journey, you must incorporate user experience principles.
What does user experience involve?
Website developers, designers and user experience (UX) designers evaluate a user’s experience of a system and how easy it is to use, as well as its efficiency in performing tasks. This process involves assessing the processes and subsystems to see whether users find the online process straightforward and satisfactory [or cluttered and tricky], such as looking at the checkout process on an e-commerce website. It also considers how a website performs across devices and browsers to reflect the diverse ways in which users now access websites.
Understanding customer personas
The first step of UX design is knowing your audience. Without a grasp of your audience’s needs and experiences, you’ll fall short of creating experiences that reflect their requirements [and exceed them].
Evaluating current systems
When reviewing user experience, a designer will typically begin by looking at the current system and identifying any issues that may be impacting the user benefit, before suggesting fixes.
Making a content inventory
UX designers use content inventories to identify all of the pages on a website and suggest any proposed changes to the architecture that may enhance the user experience.
Creating wireframes and user journey flows
Based on the findings of the evaluation, UX designers develop wireframes with a variety of options for the new, optimised website layout. After the wireframe is in place, the UX designer will also consider how a user should move through the system, ensuring that reaching their end goal is a straightforward [and enjoyable] process.
Providing a content style guide
To create a memorable user experience, your website and content need to be consistent. By creating a content style guide, UX designers provide clarity and guidelines that ensure website content is on brand and align with the business goals for designers and copywriters.
How does user experience affect conversion rate optimisation?
Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) focuses on how many website visitors are successfully converted. To increase your conversion rate, you first need to understand who your visitors and customers are, what they need and [crucially] how to provide it.
CRO increases the percentage of visitors that perform a desired action on your website, such as signing up to your mailing list or purchasing a product. A website optimised for user experience helps to boost CRO by focusing on what motivates and persuades your customers to convert so that you can give them the best possible website experience.
A user-optimised website helps to generate more interactions and conversions, in turn improving your overall conversion rate.
Need a helping hand from Ketchup’s [visionary] web designers?
The shift towards human-focused content continues to grow at speed, focusing on placing brands in their audience’s shoes and addressing their problems through useful and engaging content. As a result, so too does the need to deliver a satisfying [and exciting] user experience. Our website design dynamos and [terrific] tech experts work closely together to bring intuitively designed and user-experience-optimised websites to life.