User experience – 5 easy tips to improve your website

It is important to understand how to create a better user experience as the end-user will more likely return to the product, or recommend it to others.

What is user experience?

User experience (UX) affects the overall success of your product. This can be applied to many products or services.

To some, this will be the design of the physical product itself. However, as a digital product studio, we are breaking down 5 easy UX tips that improve your website.

What is your user demographic?

To solve any problem you need to be able to diagnose what the issue is. UX is no different. With a website, the first problem is “who am I targeting?”

This is more closely related to overall design work as the reason that you attack this first is that you need to understand what the needs and goals of your audience are. Which can subtly create a hierarchy of issues that need developing for your user experience. 

Some examples are, if you are targeting a younger demographic then a more formal corporate image would not be reasonable.

Understanding your demographic can nicely flow to our next point…

Talk to your audience

Do not hesitate to talk to your end-users; observe their usages by questioning them. Ask open, non-biased questions.

It is possible to skip this step, however, we recommend a discussion with your audience as this will prevent the possibility of cognitive bias. Cognitive bias in this instance would be solving a problem that you personally think is important. However, your audience does not.

By asking open-ended questions allows for the potential discovery of new issues not previously seen. Dissecting open-ended questions can take a bit of finesse. Sometimes, it is not what is written as a response from the audience but instead from the sentiment of the answer.

What is the user experience problem?

Diagnose what the problem is. 

By questioning your end-users, and dissecting their answers, you should have a better understanding of their pain points. Lovely problems to solve.

Pain points for the user can greatly diminish the experience of the end-user. Without figuring out what the problems are is like throwing a dart to a board blindfolded. It is possible to hit, but more challenging, and potentially with more bumps in your process. The more bumps that you have can reduce the effectiveness of your time and money. 

It may seem like a slower way of designing a better user experience, however, you will have a justifiable list to follow.

The 3 C’s of user experience

Now you should have an actionable list of problems to solve. Remember to use the three C’s. Be: Clean, Clear, and Consistent. 

Clean

To be clean means not having too much clutter on each page. Not only does clutter make a website unappealing to the eye, but it can also cause a web page to be too bloated and affect load speeds.

Clear

To be clean means not having too much clutter on each page. Not only does clutter make a website unappealing to the eye, but it can also cause a web page to be too bloated and affect load speeds.

Consistent

Brand guidelines should be followed for the entire website. Each page should have a consistent brand style, so to the user the visual “flow” is unbroken. An example of a problem that could be turned into an actionable point could be navigation. Experience has taught us that having a clumsy or unintuitive navigation system for your site can deter users from your site.

Iterative user experience design

Most software companies follow the same rules when it comes to creating software. Small iterative steps are better than fewer bigger ones, or leaps. 

The same can be said for UX. To develop a UX improvement, build it, and test it. If amendments need to be made, they can be. After which, test again.

This works better than giant steps, as you can never tell if the improvement is due to one change or another. If you do too many changes and something does not work with the UX update, you may not know where the fault lies within the changes. 

Small iterative steps can help identify where a fault in an update lies. This makes it easier to reverse the changes without affecting the web page in a big way.

So what?

In conclusion, these five tips can help you improve your UX. You can perform them from top to bottom, in order, to great effect. By doing so improve the user’s experience. This means that they are more likely to return to the website later or recommend it to others.

To learn more about user experience check out this article by Interaction Design Foundation. Worth the read!

Get started with identifying your demographic and work your way from there!