Good website design is essential for engaging visitors to your website. One of the best ways to retain visitors is to provide a great user experience. Anything a visitor to your website wants to do such as order, browse, or find your store hours should be immediately accessible and easy to find. A frustrated user is not likely to make a purchase or return to your website. In this article, we’ll go over several ways you can use design to provide a great user experience.
User Friendly Design
Both Google and Facebook push user friendly design; and since they’re such big companies, they must be doing something right. No matter how cool the design may look, we need to remember its purpose is to deliver the content the user wants. Consider your target audience: what are they interested in? Focus on making that content as easy as possible for the user to interact with.
Make sure you also consider your industry. If you are a restaurant, make sure your hours and menu are one of the first things that a visitor to your website wants to see. If you are a retailer, make sure your sale items are displayed prominently.
User Friendly Navigation
Navigation is one of the most important elements on your page. This is how the user gets to the page he wants and finds what he’s looking for. It’s also one of the most used elements. Therefore, navigation needs to be easy to find and easy to use. If you’re following the Responsive Web Design trend, make sure your navigation buttons are formatted properly for touch interaction on a mobile device. Don’t forget to use your color scheme to highlight your navigation buttons through the use of contrasting or highlighting colors. One final note, make sure your menu titles are accurate and easy to understand.
Content Placement
It’s also important where you place your most important content, such as a call to action button, because this is one of the top things a user will look for. Place your most important content towards the top of the page, so that it will be easy to find. This way, your users will see what they’re looking for right after loading your website. Other important content would be high impact graphics, navigation, and special promotions or discounts.
Proper Spacing
Users on the web today tend to scan quickly through a page instead of reading it slowly. Large chunks of cluttered words or other content will confuse the user. Spacing content can be just as important as content placement. Spacing between words, lines in a paragraph, or even separate design elements are all very important to create a clean design. Whitespace can also be used to space elements, including words in elements such as a logo. Easy to read content goes a long way in giving a user friendly impression to your website visitors.
Conclusion
Today’s web is all about the user experience. If you want the best website, focus on the user and the user’s preferences (The official titled for this is user-centered design.). Make important elements such as navigation easy for the user to find and use. Keep in mind how people view the web. They won’t spend 10+ minutes reading through every bit of content on your website. They want to scan through your site, find what they need, and be done quickly.
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