Many factors affect how users perceive a site or an app. It is worth considering the correctness of its User Experience. Not only to improve the design but what’s most important – to increase interactions on the website (e.g. purchase, newsletter subscriptions, leaving a lead, etc.) But let me start from the beginning …
One rule to rule them all – User-centered design
All tricks listed below should be based on this one principle. This is one of the most important principles of digital product design and is a strictly user-oriented policy. When designing, we should make sure that the entire project revolves around the user. User Experience – his needs, goals, and intentions are the top priority. The business assumptions and design are to adapt to the consumer, not the other way around. Just following this one piece of advice will allow you to increase conversions on your site.
Composition rules when designing User Experience
1. Elements hierarchy
One of the essential elements of a well-designed website is focusing on what is the most important for the user visiting our portal in terms of the nature of the items, their size, thickness, or color.
With the high knowledge of our users, we are able to tell what is most important for them. What features, content or form of showing your product/service will make them interact. In the perfect situation, it is based on the user-research and Gestalt Principles. Basically Gestalt says, that the human eye makes sense of things by seeing the whole rather than the individual parts. The principles of Gestalt were created to help designers create more complete and compelling visuals. There are 6 principles where each covering different types of relation between individual parts: Similarity, Continuation, Closure, Proximity, Figure/ground, Symmetry & Order. They are very helpful in setting the right visual hierarchy and relation between elements.
2. Similarity and contrast
Consistent interface – for example subpages should have a similar structure – easy to use. For example, buttons should be designed in one style. If we decide on illustrations it is better to keep the chosen style on the whole site.
Another element is contrast adjusted to the importance of a given element. It is worth to stick to WCAG rules which will be described more in detail in another article. If you want to differentiate two elements you should consider the color, size, and depth of the element you want to put attention on. It is worth to spend some time on it, as you wish to have a better conversion rate.
3. Intervals
‘Adding air’ is always the right choice while designing the website with User Experience principals. Appropriate separation of unrelated elements, giving lightness to the page by, for example, white background. The page should not be overloaded with information – it should breathe, be light, and give the user the content he is searching for. It is good to remember about so-called ‘white space’ which in simplified ways refers to margins, paddings, gutters, space around graphics and images, line-spacing and letter-spacing within text content, and space between columns
4. Rhythm
Rythm means determining the speed of getting through your website content. When it’s structure is repeatable, have the same style, colors, shapes, sizes of different pieces of the text, the rhythm is consistent. It’s essential to keep the rhythm throughout the site, not just on a single page. You should also know there are a few types of rhythm – regular, flowing and progressive.
5. Proportion
To provide good User Experience, there’s a harmony between elements of the website. If we decide on changing the size of one element, the rest should also be changed at the same rate. As for the whole site, the proportion of elements should increase or decrease depending on the device and size of the screen.
6. Simplicity
Less is more. Striving for minimalism is a must-have from the design and UX principles’ point of view. Too much can make your user feel lost on the website. This applies to paragraphs, pictures, buttons, icons, and other items on your web page. We should rather focus on the essential information for the user, and for us, from the business point of view.
7. Typography
Shape, color, size, selection of fonts, and care for readability. It is also worth considering the number of characters given in a paragraph, so as not to exceed the length optimal for the page. So the same as above – if you want to deliver a good UX, the less is more. For example, you should deeply consider the font family you want to use, as it should be consistent on the whole site. It is also important to decide on the font sizes for different elements to keep consistency. Also, colors should be complementary to each other.
Using these 7 simple rules will make your user feel good on your website, and will allow you to increase conversions so they can become your clients. Soon, we’ll prepare some more in-detailed UX tricks, so keep updated with our blog 🙂
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It is good to follow good patterns, so here you can find some examples of sites with a really good UX:
https://www.reallygoodux.io/categories/appcues
