Reach out, we'd love to hear from you!
UX plays a vital role in shaping the customer journey, from the moment the user lands on the website to completing a transaction. This underscores the need to follow UX best practices, which, when ignored, can lead to missed opportunities.
However, it is crucial to understand that identifying the right UX design practices can feel like making a blind guess. With an overwhelming amount of advice on what works for whom, UX professionals can easily pick a strategy that doesn’t fit their specific needs.
In this blog, we’ve put together some proven, expert-backed, practical tips and tricks to UX design that can give your website a competitive edge.
So, let’s begin.
A UX design strategy is a long-term plan combining business objectives, user needs, and product goals while designing the website design playbook. The playbook focuses on company-wide alignment, highlighting a predefined direction that web designers and developers would follow as they build a customer-driven website.
A well-defined strategy keeps all development and design team members on the same page, ensures focus, and effectively solves critical problems.
Design principles guide developers through the iterative design process. Understanding and following the design principles thoroughly ensures better digital designs, faster development, and enhanced collaboration. Besides, it helps you understand the needs and preferences of your target audience and address them effectively.
When designing a website, it is essential to understand that the site’s sole purpose is to attract and convert customers. Thus, your website should be designed keeping your users first. The right approach to human-centered design is to start with meticulous customer research, plan your products and services accordingly, and find solutions to customer problems. With proper research and input, businesses can gain a competitive edge.
To ensure a more excellent user experience, the product or service should be useful, usable, and used. These three terms mean –
Useful: Enables users to accomplish tasks.
Usable: The level of ease at which customers can accomplish a task.
Used: Products or services that customers use most to complete a task.
Imagine designing a website feature that is entirely irrelevant to your target audience. It will be a complete waste of time, effort, and resources. Thus, focus on designs that are relevant to your users and market and are aligned with the web design trends.
Inaccessible websites compromise brand value and reputation. Your website design should focus on accessibility to ensure that visitors with varying levels of physical impairment can access it.
Keeping your design elements consistent will affect the look and functionality of your website. Also, consistency and familiarity add visual aesthetics and enhance customer experience.
Hierarchy is an important website element. A website needs to have a visual hierarchy to make it user-friendly. Hierarchy allows users to navigate pages effectively and get the required information quickly.
Tasks or actions with high cognitive load have a steep learning curve and complex interactions. Websites with higher cognitive load make it difficult and confusing for users. When there is minimal cognitive load, users are more likely to stick with it. To reduce cognitive load, consider avoiding unnecessary elements, using common design patterns, minimizing choices, using iconography cautiously, maintaining readability, etc.
User feedback is at the heart of UX design principles. Seeking user feedback gives you valuable insights into user preferences and demands. This data can be leveraged to improve products and services and make them more user-centric.
Following the UX best practices is necessary for every website. It not only increases visibility on the SERPs but also ensures that websites are relevant to the audiences and increases conversions.
A predefined design plan can save you time, effort, and resources. The UX design process begins with evaluating the user journey through in-depth research. UX professionals then use the research insights to design the website and optimize it according to your user preferences.
Your home page is the first place where your users land. This is why the user experience on the home page is extremely critical.
A home page should be attractive and convincing enough to let the user explore other pages. Besides, it should clarify how your new and old customers can navigate the categories and pages and use other website functions.
Ensure that your home page stands out, builds trust and credibility, and convinces users to take suitable actions.
Through your website navigation, your users can understand –
A well-thought-out and defined navigation is at the core of user experience best practices. Seamless navigation lowers visitor frustration and gives your users the confidence to trust you. It makes a great impression, affecting your website’s customer retention rate. Besides, it helps users quickly find what they are looking for, making your site more user-friendly.
It is no shocker that users hate long forms. Filling out long forms can be frustrating and irrelevant. A form’s sole purpose is to generate leads and gather relevant information that your executives can use to make sales calls.
Long forms can irritate users, which can drag down your conversions. Thus, keep your forms short and straightforward. Keep your fields to a minimum, and do not ask for unnecessary information.
As per global data, there are over 5.44 billion online users and around 1.1 billion websites. This revolutionizes the ways users interact with the internet today.
This highlights the importance of mobile-friendliness. Since most of your target audience comes from mobile devices, making your website mobile responsive will help you attract this share of visitors.
Besides, responsive websites perform the same across different devices and screen sizes and support your SEO strategies by securing higher ranks on SERPs.
Furthermore, learn the difference between the mobile-first approach and responsive web design. Knowing the key differences will help you find a suitable solution. Some of the effective ways to ensure mobile responsiveness are optimizing your images, reducing website load times, eliminating pop-ups, implementing a responsive layout, decluttering your website, etc.
Most users abandon websites due to complicated and long checkout processes. The checkout process is often neglected as a part of the CX design. However, it is one of the most crucial aspects to enhance user experience.
To prevent users from abandoning their cart, ensure an easy, seamless, and secure checkout process. Use trusted payment gateways to protect customers’ sensitive information and prevent financial losses.
Websites that take more than 3 seconds to load are mostly abandoned. A slow website frustrates users, and to reduce the loading times, consider –
Other tips to improve website speed include enabling Gzip compression, regularly auditing your loading speed, minifying CSS and JavaScript, using a speed-optimized theme, limiting plugins, etc.
In addition to the above, other UX best practices, like using filters to improve the product listing experience, conducting regular user testing, ensuring accessibility, and prioritizing simplicity, are worth considering.
To learn more about these practices and to implement them into your website, consider investing in custom web design services and designing the best website that enhances user experience and converts.
UX matters for your website’s success. Ensuring a positive user experience drives revenues up and fosters customer trust and loyalty. This results in more lead generation and sales. Thus, focusing on the UX best practices will help you craft a frictionless, delightful, and satisfactory web design experience that converts into sales.
It is essential to remember that UX is not a one-day job but an ongoing process. Frequent modifications and alterations simply enhance your website and drive a seamless user journey.
As technology advances and user behaviors change, staying attuned to the above-mentioned best practices will help you eliminate roadblocks and steer challenges. Backing your web design UX checklist through competitive analysis and user research will give you a competitive edge and will help you stay ahead of the market.
Get a No-obligations UI/UX Design Audit Today with Unified Infotech.
"Amit Adav is a Team Leader at Unified Infotech who blends creativity and technical expertise to craft exceptional user experiences. With his in-depth knowledge of design principles and user behavior, Amit leads his team in creating intuitive interfaces.”
UX strategy is crucial to web design and development as it ensures that the designs address customer problems, align the website with business goals and objectives, and deliver a positive user experience. Some of the key reasons include -
Consistency in UX design is crucial for -
To ensure that your UX strategy aligns with your brand identity, consider -
Your UX strategy should be frequently reviewed, preferably annually, monthly, or quarterly. When reviewing your strategy, consider factors like -
Regular reviews improve user experience, increase efficiency, and improve brand alignment. To review your strategy, frequently consider collaborating with a UX professional and discussing your requirements.
Yes, small businesses can significantly benefit from implementing a UX strategy. Here are the benefits -
Leverage Industry-Leading Expertise for High-Impact Solutions
Reduce Development Roadblocks with Specialized Talent
Expand Your Team with the Right Expertise, On Demand
We stand by our work, and you will too!
