5 Ways to Improve the User Experience of Your Website

September 17, 2008

Design­ing a user expe­ri­ence is one of the most impor­tant aspects of build­ing a web­site. From infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture to usabil­ity, how your vis­i­tors inter­act and move through your site is as important—if not more important—than the look of the page. UX is over­looked far too often when start­ing new projects, some­times with disastrous or unin­tended con­se­quences. Here are a few ways to improve the user expe­ri­ence of your cur­rent site or next web project:

1. Orga­nize Your Site’s Infor­ma­tion
   Con­fus­ing nav­i­ga­tion and mis­placed or extraneous content will do noth­ing but con­fuse and frus­trate users. Most people will find your site through a deep link or come to your home­page look­ing for some­thing spe­cific. If it’s not immediately apparent how to get to, or search for the con­tent they are seek­ing, they will leave and prob­a­bly not come back. To be sure this doesn’t happen, make your nav­i­ga­tion simple, clear and easily acces­si­ble. Before your site goes live, per­form a few card sorts (maybe even have a friend or two do one as well) to filter out con­tent that doesn’t belong and care­fully think about the pur­pose of each page. Remem­ber, don’t make users think. Give them what they’re look­ing for and stay out of the way.
2. Com­mu­ni­cate with Your Users
   I’m not talk­ing about blog­ging or respond­ing to emails here—I’m talk­ing about inform­ing users about what’s hap­pen­ing on a site. Use active classes and bread­crumb trails so users know where they are on your site and how they got there (and how to get back, if need be). Use title tags and icons to com­mu­ni­cate what will happen when a par­tic­u­lar link is clicked. Will it take me some­where within the cur­rent site? To an exter­nal site? A pop-​up window (god forbid)? If you have a con­tact form, let the user know if the mes­sage was sent suc­cess­fully or not. The worst thing you can do is make a user spend time fill­ing out a form just make them wonder if you even got their message.
3. Remem­ber: Less is Always More
   Given the choice between func­tion­ally equiv­a­lent designs, the sim­plest design should be selected—Ockham’s Razor. User’s don’t want to see your splash page, or hear your music and they certainly don’t want to learn how to use your new­fan­gled nav­i­ga­tion scheme. This is just noise and static get­ting in the way of what the vis­i­tors are actu­ally look­ing for: your con­tent. Always make your inter­faces simple, unob­tru­sive and with as few “features” as possible.
4. Make Your Pages Acces­si­ble and Degrad­able
   The Inter­net is for every­one. If you are build­ing a site for mass appeal and want to reach as many users as pos­si­ble, making sure your pages are acces­si­ble is important. Accessibility not only means accommodating individuals with dis­abil­i­ties, but also making your pages avail­able in as many alter­nate for­mats as pos­si­ble. How does your site look on a mobile device? Have you ever used JAWS to browse your con­tent? What if a user turns of Javascript and stylesheets? You should be asking your­self these ques­tions on a reg­u­lar basis through­out the devel­op­ment of the site. As a first step, make sure you are using cur­rent web stan­dards in all aspects of the design. This will at least ensure that your pages will work across multiple platforms and degrade nicely when users turn off browser features.
5. Stick to a Consistent Visual Metaphor
   A visual metaphor helps drive the design and layout of your site as a whole. When a user moves from your home­page to an ancil­lary page, the expe­ri­ence should not change. The design can vary slightly—most often to sig­nify that the user is no longer on the index page—but it should retain the over­all look and feel of the rest of the site and not look like a com­pletely dif­fer­ent web­page. The keys to good design are consistency and sim­plic­ity. Build web­sites with those two things in mind and you can’t go wrong.

Design­ing a great user expe­ri­ence doesn’t have to be com­pli­cated or cumbersome. Take some time to think about your con­tent, design and how people inter­act with them—this will help you build inter­faces that look better and are sim­pler and easier to you. Finally, ask your­self one ques­tion: Does my web­site get in the way?

Tags: user experience, web design