7 UI/UX Design Principles For Building A Competitive Website
What users expect from any website is an easy, functional user interface (UI) and a seamless user experience (UX). But many UI/UX designers make the mistake of crowding the interface with complex visual elements. A design-fluffy, complex UX design makes the website slow and tiring to navigate. It not only ruins the overall user experience but also leaves a dent in your brand experience.
Here are 7 UI & UX design standards you can follow to craft websites that deliver a high-quality user experience:
1. Stay user-centric
Your UI design process should begin by visualizing your ideal users. Knowing the target audience first allows you to make relevant design decisions and create a website that users will love. For instance, getting insights like when users are more likely to click would help you place the call-to-action button on your web page.
Begin by creating an empathy map that can guide you to understand users’ behavior at various touchpoints of the interaction journey.
By effectively forecasting–what really matters to your audience, their emotional touchpoints, what difficulties they might face–your design will accurately meet the expectations of users.
The bottom line is that your design journey should focus on what the users want and how they would interact with your website rather than what you want the users to do. It is best if you can build on this idea from stage one.
“By integrating user experience into your web design at the earliest possible stage, you will end up with a site that is genuinely user-centric.” — Nahla Davies.
2. Stay consistent
Consistency is a crucial element of effective UI design. It asserts on keeping functionality and designs the same across all the web pages. The goal is to create a clear and easy-to-navigate interface for users. If your users need a manual to browse through your website, you have missed the mark by a long margin.
Giving users a contrasting feel on each page would lead to a confusing and inconsistent user experience. Remember,
“Website is one, unique product and all its internal interfaces should reflect one, consistent design language.”
Second consistency protocol that designers should remember is to use famously adopted design elements. Users feel comfortable when interacting with websites that resonate with templates followed by the market leaders. The sense of similarity helps users to get familiar easily. For example, the floating action button you see on Gmail, Google Drive, or Twitter has become a standard digital routine.
Hence, no need to create an out-of-the-box interface every time. Make the best use of what’s already working for your users and sail through with simplicity.
3. Maintain Hierarchy
The hierarchy principle focuses on keeping the flow of information smooth and natural. Imagine your site as a single page with multiple folds. Every fold contains some content and visuals. If all the folds are not aligned properly, users cannot find the desired information. That’s when the concept of hierarchy comes in.
The hierarchy approach helps you organize all the functionality and information on your website in a tree-like site map. Your site map includes every little detail you want to build into your website.
Once you know the site’s content and visual hierarchy, you can effortlessly create an easy flowing interface for your users.
4. Make it contextual
The contextual aspect of your UX design makes a huge difference when you want to build a website that stands out in every situation. Users will access your website from a variety of devices in different environments–from a mobile device in a crowded café or from a notebook sitting at a desk.
Your site design should live up to all usability conditions like locations, devices, and emotional state. A prominent way to ensure the contextual design principles basics is by mapping the user’s behavior, as discussed in the first principle.
5. Ensure it is accessible to all
Designers are responsible for making sites accessible to users of all abilities. To make sure the site is accessible to people with visual or hearing impairments, you must take extra care to simplify the design of your pages.
It might be an additional task for designers. But if your site delivers an equally great experience for all users, it can be an advantage for your site compared to competitors who ignored this aspect.
Moreover, when you make your site’s design this simple, you are already taking the user experience a notch higher for the normal visitors.
6. Follow the content-first approach
Content plays an important role in steering your design journey. When you start designing any page, having a copy at hand makes it easy for you to make decisions like creating a section or putting graphic elements, effects, or typefaces that complement the text.
Designs built with Lorem-Ipsum and placeholders are far away from the real user experience. Because what you see with dummy content is just an abstract idea. With actual text and images, the design might look completely different than what you visualized.
Therefore, a logical approach is to let the content lead your way into designing.
7. Get it tested from the real user
Often designers blindly trust their own judgement of how the site performs. It is like creating a design that you like and assuming that your users would love it too. In most cases, they won’t. Because designers must realize the fact that your users are not you. And users interacting with your website would come with different purposes, different thought processes, different mindsets, and different backgrounds.
Getting your site tested by the real users is the best strategy to stay relevant. It would help you design digital products that are right for your end-users. Also, it is essential to know that building a successful design is an iterative process. You need to continuously measure and analyze how users are interacting with your site–what is working for them and what’s not.
The key is to validate your designs with real users and ensure you don’t build your products based on assumptions.
The Conclusion
The essence of all UI & UX design principles lies in one simple fact: design for your users. You need to think beyond the visual aspect and drill into every detail affecting the user experience. And if you follow these design basics, the final product will be closest to what your users want.
Want to explore more secrets of successful UI and UX design? Check out the case studies of Blue Shark Solution. Learn how we helped our clients build modern and responsive websites to gain great competitive advantage.
