Defining the User Experience in a Digital World

You may hear the term ‘user experience’ or ‘UX’ used a lot when talking about websites but have you ever wondered what that actually means in greater detail? Of course, you understand that it is referring to the experience that a website user has when visiting a website but what defines a good UX and how can web developers and webmasters improve the UX?

Here are a few of the main points involved:

Understanding your users

As well as all of the technical parts involved in UX, to start with it helps to build a good understanding of the users. By this, we mean in terms of what they want to see on your website, how they want information to be provided to them and what they want to get out of visiting your website. It helps if you understand the typical audience that your website is used by, looking at data such as demographics to help you learn more about what they want.

Performance

How your website performs in regards to page loading speeds is a critical part of the UX. Waiting for pages to load is a very frustrating situation for users, so this is obviously not providing a good user experience. There are a number of different factors that influence website performance and one of the biggest is the web host and the service it provides your website. If you have opted for a free host, for example, you are going to have poorer performance than if you have had paid for shared hosting. Other things that can slow down your pages are images that haven’t been optimised and have big file sizes.

Navigation

Another big frustration for users is not being able to easily move around a website. Maybe the menu isn’t very clear and there is no easy way of moving onto the pages they want to visit. A good website UX will involve easy navigation, with clear page titles and everything that the user wants to find is logically placed and straightforward. They don’t want to go round in circles looking for contacts or any other type of information. Sitemaps are a good addition to help people find all of the pages within your website or for larger websites, a search functionality can help.

Simple is better

A website that is cluttered can confuse users and your carefully crafted call to action will get missed. Although you will want to impress users with your sleek features and your best promotion/service, don’t go over the top. Too many images, plugins or content in general can overwhelm a user and give them a poor experience. Many websites with good UX have plenty of whitespace to help to make absorbing information easier for the user. Also the use of simple language, which is completely separate to UX design but instrumental in making the experience easy for the user.

When you provide a user with too many decisions to make, they will just look at your page and usually do none of the things that you were trying to encourage them to do. It is better to have one clear CTA for example, that stands out and explains exactly what you want them to do and what they will get from it.

Only use images that are related to the page content, don’t pick an image because you think it looks professional if it doesn’t relate to anything that your company does. Images should always emphasise a message.

Readability and colour contrasts

The layout and presentation of text is probably more important than you think. Take a look at your pages and see how your text is displayed. Is it in nice, neat blocks with sub headings and lists to break up large sections? If the answer is yes, then you are going the right way about making your content readable to your users.

Also, do your colour contrasts work okay? Sometimes you visit a website and they have a lovely image on the landing page with text over it that you really struggle to read. Don’t risk giving the user a bad experience just because you think the image looks nice!