UX Best Practices

UI/UX design is a new and upcoming field in the digital media world, but its concepts have been around since the creation of interactive media.  Great UI/UX, or user interface and experience, is a balance of both high convertion rates and ease of use.  These two are great together because it means more business for your company and there is a lack of frustration with the software that can immediately leave a bad taste in a customer's mouth.  Thankfully, there is a lot of research out there for what makes great UI/UX. For your next web design project, try some of these suggestions out and see how they work out for your client's business.

1. Know Your User

This is a no brainer.  You need to design for the user and not yourself.  Context plays a big part in the design.  What is the site about?  What is the purpose?  What is the end goal?  Design these things with both the user and client in mind.

Also, while you may know how to use a website because you designed it, your users might not have the same intuition to click something.  Make things more intuitive.

2.  Surprise The User

While I just said to keep things intuitive, surprise the user occasionally.  This will provide a better user experience and it will stay in the user's mind.

3.  Solve Problems

One of the many reasons you have been hired as a ui/ux designer is to solve problems.  A website or product can be a great tool for solving problems.  Solve these problems through design, but keep things intuitive and don't over-complicate.  Everything on your website is there to help the user.

4. Keep a Consistent Navigation

One of the easiest ways to confuse a user is to switch up the navigation.  You may think that your navigation gets boring if it remains the same across all pages, but really it is quite comforting to know where the navigation is, know where the links are within the menu, and where they are at within the site.

5. Rethink What You Just Designed

There are multiple ways of designing something within every aspect of your design.  There are thousands of fonts, colors, shapes, layouts, progressions, forms, etc. etc. etc.

For example, instead of a three column layout, try out a one column layout.  A one column layout will keep your layout more focused.  It leads to a better narrative and better attentiveness.

For more of these examples, there is a great blog called goodui.org.  I recommend reading every one of their posts.

Web Design Basics

I'll just begin by stating it.  Great web design is tough.  It's a delicate balance of pleasing aesthetics and usability.  You could have an extremely impressive and beautiful website, but if users struggle to navigate through the content, then you have failed as a web designer.  Like with any form of art, there are some basic principles behind the design that have existed for decades.  I really wish to say centuries here, but web design has only existed for the past two decades or so.  However, web design is pretty much art; the principles behind art have existed since the beginning of time.

Anyway, let's not get too caught up in being correct with our wording here.  There are some basic principles behind web design.  Follow these principles and you should be able to make a great interface and web experience (UI/UX).

1. KISS (Keep it simple, stupid)

Simple, flat design

Play KISS music on page load.  Actually, that is an extremely bad idea.

Simplicity is really overlooked with beginning designers.  It's easy to get caught up in adding flash and thrill to a design, but really it's just unnecessary junk that is taking away from your work's usability.  Ideally, beginning artists or designers should work with minimalism for a large portion of their learning experience.  If you are able to make an attractive design with minimal materials/shapes/lines, then you have the potential to be a great designer.  But back to web design, keeping it simple will definitely help make your site easily navigable and it will just flow so much better.

2. Don't Make Users Think

Yeah, I'm going there with the stock photography

This is a continuation of KISS.  Making users have to think about how to use your website is going to cause some negative thoughts about your site, which could potentially harm your brand.  Having a really complicated design might look great, but it could cause problems in some users.  Just because you think something works well doesn't mean everybody else will have the same opinion.  You have to remember, the web plays host to all sorts of skill levels.

3. Remember Conventions

This is like a design principle within a design principle.  Following conventions works because, well, it's a convention; it's just the way something is usually done.  For example, when first loading a page, most users' eyes will travel to the top left of the page because we have been taught to read from left to right.  Most people expect the site's logo or home link to be placed there.  It's really something we are so used to and we don't have to think about it.

Explore a handful of websites and pick up some of the conventions they are utilizing.  However, this doesn't mean you have to play by the book 100%.  Deviating from the norm is actually a good way to explore your creativity, but ignoring several design conventions in doing so could lead towards poor usability.  In other words, the sites that deviate from the norm still apply some of the basic web design conventions.

4. Stay Consistent

For some, a website is just another tool to represent a brand or an idea.  These brands have already made decisions for their color schemes, typography, etc.  These visuals stay consistent across all forms of media and it's comforting because we can still recognize it as the original brand.  Your website shouldn't be any different.  Using 15 different fonts, different spacing rules, different layouts, alignments,  or pages that don't look similar to the original index page can cause users to question if they are even looking at the same website.  It can cause usability issues as well. You want to stay consistent with your page design.  You are creating a set of rules within the first few seconds of a page visit.  Users will understand these rules quickly.  But if you can change the way the site works or feels, you are really causing some problems.

5. Get Inspiration/Explore!

There is no better way to learn than by learning from your peers or competitors.  Visit as many websites as you can within your site's field and see what trends are popular, what conventions the sites share, what layouts are working, and what doesn't work.