Why UX is Important

A common mistake that most people do is mix-up User Interface with User Experience. There is a fine line drawn between UI and UX, because the latter is ultimate outcome of UI and other important factors of a website. If you are sitting on a sofa, the arms, the foam and the design is the UI, where as the comfort and relaxation you achieve from that sofa is the UX.

Just as though, websites are based on the similar principles that determine their attractiveness and appeal to the person visiting or operating them. A website ought to be more visited if it manages to please its user, or remain in the darkness of dust and cobwebs if it lacks the factors that contribute to a good UX.  How can we measure or calibrate the deficiency of such elements in website? And how much are these factors affecting the productivity of a website in terms of conversions and revenues? We will find out below.

Appearance

A website is as beautiful as its weakest function. This is where many developers and designers stumble and lose track. If you are selling a product that is attractive by looks, but fails to perform its basic functions cannot survive the market for long. Similarly, your website cannot make through without the usability it promises by just exhibiting a good design. It will most definitely invite the customer and might even prompt him to action, but how far that customer goes is a haphazard your business simply cannot afford. If you want your ecommerce website design to serve the optimum lever of User goodness, make sure your website has the right mix of design, text, images, videos, buttons and other elements for an all rounding experience.

Hubspot has used the right mixture of attractive themes and functionality to display their UI by elegantly adding a template with the CTA buttons so the user can easily navigate to the desired page.

Responsiveness

What if told you that the number of mobile users from the last five years has increased by 600%? I know you’re going to look it up but it’s the truth. After conducting numerous surveys the global number of mobile internet users has sky rocketed to 788.32 million compared to the 13 million users in 2010. If your website is not responsive by now it’s nothing but a measly waste of space on the internet that nobody will care about. With the progression of technology, it has become imperative that your website be equipped with all the necessary gear to compete with efficiency. If your website cannot open on mobile or handheld devices, how is it going to reach the majority of the users? Integrate responsive design and features to get the maximum exposure worldwide.

A responsive website spans on a Smartphone perfectly without asking the user to scroll or maximize as shown in the image below

Diversity

Sometimes user experience of a website is a selective reception for everyone. People have their tastes and preferences and you simply cannot bend them to like what you have in mind. People tend to react differently to content and that is why your website must be a mix of multi-prospect elements that can lock and key perfectly when combined together. It can be a difficult task coining and composing such factors into a polynomial of expressions, hence you need all the help from your designers and developers you can get. Draw the blueprints, hit the trials on staging and then test it on real time and only then you can acquire an evergreen UX for your customers.

A well adapted website design with modest use of colors has allowed Graze to display their snacks and sweets on the landing page without concentrating on a specific audience for their products.

CTA

Call to actions or CTAs are textual instructions that trigger response from the audience to perform a certain action with the help of button and links. It is rather a clever use of verbs as fireworks to signal or prompt the customer in to purchasing a product from their store. My advice would be to make the best of these mechanisms in your website as appropriately as possible. Spamming or flooding your content with call to actions would not be any different than selling your merchandise with a gun pointed on the client’s face. Let your customer choose with positivity as freely as possible because organic conversions have the potential to last longer than a 100 improvised leads combined altogether.

“Remember Everything.” Visitors can immediately understand that message the moment they land on this page. The design on Evernote’s website makes it super simple for users to see quick benefits of using the app and how to actually sign up to use it. Plus, the green color of the main and secondary CTA buttons is the same green as the headline and the Evernote logo, all of which jump off the page.

The simple and interactive design of Evernote has enabled its customers to take their desired action through textual triggers and attractive buttons on its UI.

Error Messages

Nothing is more distasteful than showing error message to your audience relentlessly and pointlessly. Most websites are carelessly designed to remind the customers about using the correct input methods in form fields such as numbers, texts, checkboxes, radio buttons and other types of fields. If the customer misses one or enters the wrong information in a field it would be wise to show an appropriate error message that tells or even clues the user about the correct method of input. One of the prime reasons why abandonment rates keep climbing on a website are its mal designed and poor choice of error messages in checkout pages. Deploy area specific and purposeful error messages and use well found text to persuade your client into completing the checkout.

A bad error message fails to verify the problem and appears the same on every wrong input. You must use the right text in error messages to guide the user into entering the correct field.

Color Combinations

Black font color against a pitch black background? Are you trying to blind your customer? The contrast and text color is one of the leading factors that send away your audience cursing you all the way. The colors you choose not only affect the visibility of the content but also your intellection to the viewer. A good balance of colors does not only bring the right combination for your Dubai web design, but also invites the customer to explore you pages even further, increasing your site engagement. Through my experience, a site that has a combination of 3-4 colors in its theme design has a better chance of getting a healthy flow of traffic than a site that has a dozen different colors. In order to pick your colors modestly, use them on a piece of paper with your design and check if you see equilibrium. Your font, contrast, headers, footer and other parts of your website are significantly dependent on it. I prefer lighter shades.

The following images show how much a bad and good color combination can impact a website. On the top poorly structured website is shown with indiscriminant use of colors. On the bottom, another website shows how colors are best used along with the theme.

White Spacing

I’ve seen it myself on numerous websites how the landing page fails to grab the viewer’s attention and sends them back to the result pages. If you want your website to win the affection of your customer in the first look, never mistake the use of white spacing in your website. A poorly optimized website that has content meddling with every element in your page will not only be incomprehensible for your audience but will also loose Google’s favor in ranking it to the top results. White spacing is the boundary that separates the content of the website with the surrounding counterparts and allows the user to easily view the pages without compromising owner’s ability to sell products. Using it modestly allows your website to bring a cleaner and profound presentation while enabling the user to browse the website with ease.

Two images of the same background are shown, one with the spammed black boundary and the other with appropriately spaced content and image. The right image shows the correct application of Negative spacing.

Conclusion

There is a lot a customer can tell just by looking at your website, because a website is the embodiment of your ideas. By taking these tidbits and incorporating them into your website you can not only dedicate the ideal UX to your audiences, but also get top class rankings on popular search engines such as Google. Google gives preference to websites that are well optimized in terms of UI while giving the optimum functionality as well. Remember, when the customer visits a website, its UX may be invisible, but its absence sure isn’t.