The Importance of User Friendly Website Design

It’s so important, it has its own job title. Of course, we are talking about UX designers. The role of a UX designer is simple – make the website easy to use and help consumers make choices that match the goals of the company. Okay, it’s not that simple, but maybe we can break down what that means.

In web design, it’s hard to determine if consumers drive design or design drives consumers. For instance, most websites have navigation at the top. Therefore, many users expect to find a menu at the top of a website. There are still thousands of websites who disregard this norm and use the top of the page for different purposes. Take craigslist or Wikipedia for example. These websites are so massive, there’s almost no point to having a menu at the top of the website. There are far too many pages to categorize in a succinct navigation.

How do you know what’s right for your website?

One of the roles of a user experience designer is to hypothesize ways to improve the site, set up a/b tests, analyze web traffic data, and review behaviors. These tests will watch one or two key indicators to see how they change (if at all) to the adjustments made to the website’s design. Through robust, statistically significant tests, your designers can roll out permanent improvements to the website. Over time, you’ll know the best positions for your menu, menu structure, images, text, and layouts.
What if you can’t afford a UX designer or don’t know where to start?
Digestible Content
Many websites will benefit from applying principles found in a sound search engine optimization strategy. One of the basic tenets of SEO is to make your content easy to digest. For instance, there are several text formatting options at your disposal including italics, bold, font sizes, underlines, and HTML tags like headers and bulleted lists.
For instance, this article leverages these layout techniques by having sections in a logical order, titled, and formatted.
Accessibility
Another tenet of search engine optimization is accessibility. Your website should be compatible with any and all phones. This includes making it lightning fast. Websites that fail to load or load slowly receive high bounce rates. Many visitors will click the next website on the search results page for a better experience.
Popups and Lightboxes
In general, avoid these annoying, obstructive, and invasive popups. Some websites are setup to ask users to view their location. Imagine getting the Chrome pop-down in addition to your pop-up asking them to sign-up for your newsletter. Annoying! As a side note, we’ve found the best place to ask visitors for their emails is at the end of an article or in the middle INLINE with the text. Visitors can swipe right on through without being too annoyed. Plus, it’s a lot less programming and will make your website faster.

What’s the most difficult part of the user design process?

Nothing can ruin a website faster than poor decisions based on bad data or the misinterpretation of good data. Like we mentioned earlier in the post, the UX designer will make tests and decisions based on the data. If the data is wrong or if the designer doesn’t gather the full picture, incorrect assumptions about your web traffic can be made.
For example, one business came to us with a leaky website (meaning visitors were exiting the website left and right). They were “losing” hundreds of customers a day. The designer made some small adjustments to the calls to action in hope of scoring a larger conversion rate, based on our recommendation. Simultaneously, the company’s mobile application had been overhauled by a separate company.
It took only a few minutes to find the problem. Their panic was quickly relieved when we told them that their traffic was clicking on links that took them from their site to the new application owned by the same company. The tracking on the mobile app had not been set up properly. Once things were reconnected, it was clear that the changes made by our recommendations had improved the website’s conversion rate.