Creating Your Website with the User Experience in Mind
Creating a website is a great way to showcase your personal or professional brand. The website’s layout, theme, and overall design elements can leave a lasting impression - good or bad - so it's important to understand the user’s wants, needs, and expectations. The User Experience is about the user’s feelings, thoughts, and experience while interacting with a product. In this case, the product would be the website’s design, your product/services, and your brand. Here are some ways in which you can create a website with the User Experience in mind.
Research is key - get to know your target audience
By getting to know your target audience, you will be better prepared to design for them. Market research, conducting surveys, and social media polls are just a few ways in which you can engage with people to get to know your audience better. During the design process you’ll be able to integrate the information you’ve collected during your research in order to create an outline for your design. It’s also beneficial to keep these questions in mind during the decision-making process: Who is the customer/user? What do they want and need out of a website? How can you shape your design to capture their attention? How can your design keep them engaged and wanting to see more? Once you’re able to use your research and knowledge to answer these questions, you will have a strong foundation on which you can build a successful website.
Start at the drawing board - literally
Drawing out your website’s initial layout, themes, and designs can be a fun way to start planning the website’s flow - and you don’t have to be an artist to achieve a great mockup. Using simple shapes, arrows, and writing out your ideas helps you start to visualize the project and can help narrow down the best ideas. A large part of the user experience is taking what you learned in the research stage and implementing it in the navigation and layout decisions of the website. This is where the design flow will start to come together for the project. The design process can sometimes feel overwhelming, but by breaking it down one step and feature at a time, it will start to take shape before you know it.
Note: If you’re unsure what kind of layouts may work for you, website design platforms such as Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress have great themes you can also choose from and customize. They offer user-friendly designs, offer lots of support for beginners, and some even offer advanced settings with HTML coding to further your customizations as your design skills grow.
Choose your color palette and design elements
When deciding on your website’s color palette, it’s important to choose colors and shades that reflect your brand but also keep the user experience as a priority. Although bright or bold colors may be fun and engaging, they can sometimes be challenging for users with visual impairments. This also applies to website components such as fonts, buttons, and other elements. You will want to make sure that background, forefront, and texts are readable when paired together. Colors and design elements are great ways to engage users, just keep in mind that too many animations, transitions, or features may cause some accessibility issues as well as distract from your website’s mission. Testing your website with accessibility tools could help get a better understanding of the user experience while deciding on your palette and visual elements.
Encourage click-through and website flow
An important part of the design process is to work on a product’s usability. Make sure the website navigation makes everything easy to find, and that the user can accomplish the goal of their visit. A good way to evaluate usability features is to think about your own user experience on websites. What features motivate you to continue to click through the website’s options? What features frustrate or confuse you? Establish the most important purpose and function for the website and then determine how to implement those features into your design. You want the navigation to be straightforward. When the user doesn’t have to excessively search to find things, they are able to better appreciate the website and design itself.
Make it mobile-friendly
Many users will be using their smartphones and tablets to view your site, it’s important to test out the website and make sure that the tabs and buttons are easy to find and click on. Make sure whatever platform you create your website with is able to support a mobile view. The photos and text should be able to size themselves correctly from desktop to smartphone. As you design, take time and review it through the mobile website to make sure it’s coming together as you create. This will also give an opportunity to make sure that bodies of text are not too overcrowded for the webpage space for mobile visitors.
Design for accessibility
Find ways to design your website that is user-friendly and keeps accessibility in mind. Screen readers, color filters, and other devices may be used by some website visitors and it’s important to make the design and layout of the website easy to follow for any accessibility devices and browser extensions. You can use a screen reader to make sure it flows and that the text is not overwhelming the pages. Simple doesn’t mean boring or unengaging, but rather keeping a layout and design easy to navigate and more friendly to all users. Another great way to design for accessibility is to add alt text to your images on the website. This allows individuals who use screen readers to know what the image on the screen is.
Note: To find out how to ad alt text, visit the website design tool’s accessibility section and they should provide information on how to add alt text through their platform. You can also see if your browser offers accessibility extensions for screen readers and color filters so you can check your website’s accessibility for users.
Get feedback - continue to grow
Having people review your website and give you feedback on their experience is important. By listening to the reviews, you can make changes that enhance the user’s experience. It’s important to view the website not just from your point of but instead to really consider the user. A big part of User Experience (UX) design is determining if a design is equitable. This essentially means making the design with all users in mind and if it provides the tools needed by people of diverse backgrounds and abilities. A website should always be improving and growing with your brand, and to meet the needs of users as they arise. Continue to listen to user feedback, reflect on your growth, and implement changes that accurately represent the mission of your website. By listening to your audience, implementing changes, and designing for all users, this will not only allow you to reach a larger audience, but shows the website visitors you care about every user’s experience.
