A business needs to find a way to interact with its customers. Considering that we live in the digital age, every business must also have a website. But simply saying that isn’t enough. Businesses have to focus on providing customers with the best possible user experience. And that’s exactly what UX stands for.
UX is important as without it, websites will see visitors leave the moment they arrive. It is a factor that many websites ignore, but doing that is an obvious mistake. So that’s why we’re here to give you our 4 steps to designing a strong UX. With all that said, let’s start.
Try To Think Like A Potential Customer
The goal of UX is to provide website visitors with the means and ways to have a good time while spending time on your website. This means that you need to make every piece of information they require easily available. But how do you do that? Considering that both UX and UI are relatively new practices, not everyone is an expert in these fields. But you don’t have to be one.
By simply thinking like a customer you will be putting yourself in a good position to know exactly what to expect from your website. Every customer visits your website for a specific reason.
No one just randomly Googles and finds you. Depending on what you do, you will need to think about what sort of actions your visitors take on your website. Do they look to buy products, come to read information, or something else entirely?
You’ll need to write these actions down and figure out exactly what your customers do on your website. Once you get that over the line, it’s time to simplify the process for them.
No one will bother going through ten pages just to get where they want. When your customers land on your homepage, you’ll need to create a pleasant experience. One of the rules of UX is to make sure your visitors complete an action within five or fewer steps.
The first step is the homepage, the second step is the product category, the third step is the product page, and the final step is the checkout page. If you manage to create a seamless experience in four steps, then you’ve already designed a strong UX.
Take Into Account The Emotional Part of Website
Before your customers complete an action, they will observe your website. They will take notice of the visual queues as we use them to evoke certain feelings. Website visitors need to feel welcomed once they’re on your website; this is an important UX principle. More so, you want them to instantly recognize your brand by noticing the visual queues.
Let’s assume that your business sells hand-made arts and crafts. To design a strong UX for this niche, you’ll need to make your visitors want to purchase your goods before they even know they want to do it. How? Well, you can do that by focusing on the design aspect.
By evoking certain feelings through design, you’ll make it much easier to turn a visitor into a customer.
Sketch Each Website Page
Sketching is an important step in the website design process. We sketch each website page before the website goes live. Why? Well because you’re making it easier to figure out what you want to do with your website, what features to have, and how to look.
Sketching goes before designing. And to do that, you can use all kinds of free software. From Figma to any whiteboard app, your options are limitless. To easily approach the sketching phase, simply think of how you want your website to look.
Do you want your visitors to instantly see your products once they visit your website, or do you want them to know more about your business first? By sketching each website page, you get a better sense of where to place each CTA button, how the header menu will look, etc.
Sketching also helps YOU better understand YOUR sitemap. A sitemap visually helps you understand the pages of your website. With a sitemap, you know exactly which page links where and what it will take for your visitors to reach specific pages.
Test First
And the last step to user experience design is to do some testing. You’ll notice that testing is the only way to make sure your website has a strong UX. Without testing the features on your website, you’ll never know if you’ve designed a strong UX.
Furthermore, by testing your website, you make it easier to change things before it goes live. Depending on your budget and resources, you can run all kinds of testing. We recommend either A/B testing or pre-launch user experience research.
Both are great for figuring out how strong your website’s UX is, and both help you and your customers reach your respective goals. A/B testing simply means comparing two different versions of your website. The two versions aren’t meant to be vastly different.
The differences can be as small as changing colors on buttons. Pre-launch user experience research is all about finding your target audience and letting them test your website’s UX. The great thing about this form of testing is that your target audience provides valuable feedback.
A/B testing is a much more affordable option. That’s because it can be done with family, friends, and even your coworkers.
What’s important to understand is that testing is necessary before launching your website. Don’t make the obvious mistake of having to make drastic UX changes on a live website.
Instead, invest the necessary time and resources into testing every little thing on your website. From button colors to headers to paragraph font and size, everything matters when it comes to user experience.
Lastly, we should mention that UX doesn’t have to sound like rocket science. Furthermore, you don’t have to be an expert to do it. You can design it yourself and get your friends and family to provide valuable feedback.
1 Comment
Great breakdown of actionable steps—research, prototyping, testing, and iteration. I particularly liked your emphasis on research as the foundation; too many skip it and pay later in redesign costs. A dedicated user experience designer makes the process structured, ensuring insights from research are carried through every design stage.
From your perspective, which step in the UX process do businesses tend to undervalue most—research, prototyping, or usability testing?