A well-designed website should include a user interface that is accessible, intuitive and efficient for users. No matter how good your content is, if your site is designed poorly, users may leave with a bad impression of your company. These seven tips can help you improve the design of your site and its user interface.
1. Determine the Purpose of Your Site
What your company wants the user to be able to accomplish when using your website should be the guiding principle for the rest of your design process. You should begin your investigation process by asking the key stakeholders questions such as, who the site is for, what they want users to be able to do, and the primary purpose of the website. Use the answers to these questions to create a set of goals for the project.
2. Do a Content Audit
Once you know what you want to achieve with the site, you need to take stock of what is already there. Make an outline of the navigation scheme of your website and the types of content under each navigation header. If you have a very large site, it may be useful to use a tool that can crawl your site and automate some of this process.
3. Know Your Brand
When designing a site, it is important to design it in such a way that it fits your brand. You will need to familiarize yourself with your brand attributes. Attributes to consider include, the culture of your company, the personalities of your target customers, your company's communication style and what makes your brand unique. You can determine these attributes by interviewing stakeholders, conducting customer surveys and other methods.
4. Use White Space
What you do not put on your page can often be as important as what you do. Using white, or negative, space appropriately can help make your site easier to navigate. For example, using margins around text blocks can help make text and images stand out on your pages. The use of white space can also make your site appear more attractive and professional. You will want to find the right balance between including valuable content and using enough negative space to enhance the usability of your site.
5. Optimize Your Page Speed
Users expect pages to load quickly. Just an extra five seconds of load time can result in 20% more of your users leaving your site without accessing any of the information you want them to see. You can improve page speed by compressing all of the images you use, eliminating unnecessary plug-ins, and optimizing your site for use on mobile devices. You should test how well your site performs on the slowest connection speed your customers are likely to be using.
6. Focus on Functionality
It can be easy to succumb to the temptation to design an aesthetically pleasing site with lots of bells and whistles and forget to make the site functional for the end-user. You should begin by making sure your site meets the needs of the user and designing a functional interface and then add on extras to make the site more memorable and aesthetically pleasing. However, you will need to keep testing to make sure that whatever you add to the site doesn't compromise the functionality.
7. Hire a Professional
Most companies do not keep professional web designers on staff full-time. If your company is one of them, you may want to hire a professional to design your site. This process can be made easier by using a service, such as talentpowered, to locate and evaluate potential designers.
A well-designed website can be an invaluable asset to any company. However, a poorly designed site can leave potential customers with a bad impression of your company and may send them to your competitors. These seven tips can help you design a user-friendly, efficient, and memorable site that can enhance your brand, increase customer satisfaction and portray your company as trustworthy and professional.
Publish Date: April 22, 2020 9:45 PM |
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