User Experience can be the defining characteristic that separates your website from your competition. A fine-tuned UX design can help minimize customer frustrations and reduce the challenges they come across on your platform. It helps create solutions and experiences that match what the customer is seeking. In this article, you’ll learn how to craft an intuitive UX design.
This article will help you understand how to craft an intuitive UX design. From testing to goals and objectives, to the final product— we have you covered from start to finish.
If you are looking for a company to help with the user experience and interface of your website, take a look at some professional web design companies in your area. Make sure to look at their portfolio and results to make sure they will align with your own goals.
Table of Contents
- What is UX Design?
- How To Plan Your UX Design
- Crafting Your Design
- User Testing
- Conclusion
What Is User Experience Design?
User experience design is the process of creating your website/app to take the user on a proper journey throughout your platform. How will your user experience this journey? Will they feel after it’s complete? How will your product impact their life and will it fulfill their goals? This is what UX design is all about.
UX is different from UI, in that user experience is solely about gauging the user’s emotional experience through visual artistry. We mix in a bit of psychology and try to gain a deeper understanding of how our designs impact our users.
The term “User Experience Design” was coined in the 90s by psychologist Donald Norman who was working at Apple at the time. He looked at how well the experience was of the user from the initial purchase to the setup and use of the product. Mac computers at the time came in massive boxes, were heavy, took a while to set up, and the overall experience leading up to actually using the computer was not very good. He came up with the foundation for how Apple tests and creates its product designs today.
This is UX design in a nutshell. You need to not just look at how a product helps someone’s life. You need to look at every step from the initial entrance on your website, to the purchase process, to how the product helps them in the end. Everything needs to go full-circle.
Crafting a good UX design requires more than just some good design skills. It takes a firm understanding of how your customer thinks and how they will traverse your platform emotionally. This takes a good amount of testing and research. Find what the best process is to take them through to their end-goals.
How To Plan Your UX Design
The planning process for UX design is both similar and different from traditional design formats. You still need to incorporate wireframes, mood boards, and utilize branding elements in the overall user interface design.
The difference comes in how you incorporate the user’s needs, and end-goals into all of this while making sure to keep their emotions in play throughout it all. How will their journey start, where will it lead them. So, will you make sure they meet their goal at the end of the journey? How will they react emotionally to this journey? How will the product impact their life after purchase? This is how you create a successful UX design.
Remember, user experience encompasses all aspects of the user’s adventure with the company, from its services to its products. User experience also depends on how the product is used, so have a firm understanding of how the product helps the user in their life and capitalize on this.
- A sketch of our plans for the Iteration Insights website
Don’t Design For Yourself
Don’t begin designing the website based on your needs. This is called “false consensus”, where you think of designing a website/app in a way that you can traverse it and get to the end-goal.
You are different from your user in every way. Stay away from thinking about yourself or what you would do on the platform. You need to have a firm understanding of your audience and how they will interact with the site.
Crafting Your UX Design
After you are done planning, it’s time to start crafting your UX design. Work with your team to come up with the best decisions that will keep the experience of the user high and above the competition. The aim here is to increase conversions, reduce bounce rates, and satisfy customers, so they feel the need to come back to your site or refer it to others.
Now, we will go over a few ways to help you employ a successful UX design across your projects.
Make Your Design Usable, Useful, and Accessible
“88% of online shoppers say they wouldn’t return to a website after having a bad user experience.” – Small Biz Genius
The experience of your user should be amazing while maintaining simplicity. The more steps that you involve throughout the flow of your site, the more users will be lost along the way.
Even the addition of one more field in a checkout form can mean the difference between securing a user and losing them. Keep things from getting too complicated. Each and every aspect of your design flow should serve a purpose, be usable, and accessible to any user.
Iteration Insights is a business intelligence company with the goal of streamlining their partners’ data to create more efficient processes and offer critical insights into their data. Their website walks their potential customers through the process and how they can benefit from their services in an easy-to-use interface that offers a great experience.
With their website design, we wanted to do a few key aspects for their user experience that would separate them from the competition:
- Proper segregation of content types in the site structure – i.e. services, community involvement, articles
- A primary focus on the content hierarchy on prospective customers looking for services
- Secondary focus on information and community engagement
- A home page that addresses each of the user types
– Our first homepage mockup design for Iteration Insights
The website needed to look professional for prospective clients, but it also needed to be a hub for BI consultants to learn and engage through their articles and events. It needed to position their company as a reputable team of experts in their field.
- The second half of our first-page mockup
Look At The Emotional Impact Of Each Design Aspect
“Better UI could raise your website’s conversion rate by 200%, and better UX design could yield conversion rates of up to 400%.” – Forrester
From the color of your checkout button to your call-to-action sections on the homepage; everything has an emotional impact on the user. Before you can start A/B testing, you need to try to understand your user’s emotions and how your elements will impact them.
Again, user experience is not all about how the user gets from point-A to point-B. it’s how they will feel about their experience from initially entering the site, to when they have received their product and its impact on their life.
By having a firm understanding of the emotional impact of the different elements within your site, you can begin making optimal decisions ahead of time. Proper UX design will help increase click-through rates right off the bat and lead to more conversions.
Design With All Devices In Mind To Craft Intuitive UX Design
“While nearly 75% of users prefer a mobile-friendly site, 96% of consumers say they’ve encountered sites that were clearly not designed for mobile devices.” – Think With Google
With SO many devices available to consumers today, it’s extremely important to craft the design of your website for each device. The experience of a user on a desktop should be comparable to your mobile or tablet designs. Don’t discount a device out of laziness or because you think it lacks importance.
Because of how many websites aren’t properly designing for their mobile users, it leaves the door open for more people to come back to your site if it offers an exceptional experience. Think With Google has also stated that 74% of users will come back to a site if it offers a mobile-friendly experience.
How To Test Your UX Design
“Only 55% of companies currently conduct any UX testing.” – Small Biz Genius
Testing your website or app is a crucial part of UX design. You should be prioritizing testing as soon as you can, even if you only have a small part of your design complete. The earlier you begin testing your platform with real users, the better your product will be at the end of the project. Proper testing can also put you ahead of the competition.
Here are some tips to properly testing your UX design:
Use Real People That Have Agreed To Help You Test
It’s great touse friends and family, but they aren’t your best option for trying to create a successful UX design.
Find real people that would use your product in real life, and give them the opportunity to get behind the scenes and test your product out. You can do this by creating an invite form for people to sign up on, and outreaching to different places you think you will be able to find people willing to help.
Different places you can find testers are:
- Firstly, Reddit
- Secondly, LinkedIn
- Online Forums
- Finally, Blogs
Schedule Live Testing Sessions
It’s highly recommended that you come up with a set date and line up your test users to do all of their testings in a live setting where you can track all of their findings in real-time. Conduct small studies to gather important information that can make or break your product.
It’s very important that you follow-up with each of your test users to make sure they will make the date of your study. The best way to do this is to create a follow-up email that confirms they are still available and interested in testing your product.
Utilize Your Study’s Findings to Craft Intuitive UX Design
Completing a successful study means nothing if you don’t utilize your findings. Carefully take your data into account and commit changes to your design the best way that you see fit. So, your testee’s frustrated with how hard it is to find a product on the site? Are they having trouble finding credibility within the brand? Are the visual aspects appealing or do they miss the mark? In addition, these findings are incredibly important to crafting an intuitive UX design.
Understand How The Human Mind Plays A Role
Humans are both rational and emotional creatures. Everyone is different in this regard. Some users may be more rational in their thoughts and how they act throughout their life, while others are driven by emotion.
Catering your design to these two different aspects of the human mind can help you further understand how an optimal UX design is one of the keys to success in the digital world of today.
When you are testing your users, try to keep an eye on how their emotions or rational influence their decisions. This can give valuable insights into how the mind works when traversing your platform.
A/B Testing
After your website or app has launched, the work is not finished yet (nor will it ever be usually). As time goes on, people’s perceptions and expectations change. In order to stay ahead of the times and the competition, you must continue to deploy changes and A/B tests to find the best possible solution to increase conversions and click-through rates.
A/B testing typically involves the use of two or more different pages that serve the same purpose. But are designed differently with minimal changes. Shown to different sections of your audience. These pages might have small changes like subtle color differences or big changes such as the layout being completely different between the two. But they all serve the same goal and are used to find what creates the most conversions.
This is where you can find better and more unique ways to influence a user’s emotion to help raise conversion rates dramatically. A/B testing is otherwise known as “statistical inference”. But it has a larger role to play than just statistics and data. This is where you can test different UX aspects to try and find what evokes the user. Gets them to their end-goal the quickest while gathering valuable data for use later on.
Craft Intuitive UX Design Conclusion
In order to craft an intuitive user experience design, it requires lots of effort, planning, and testing. From the initial planning efforts to the testing and research studies conducted. To find the best possible solution to a problem, it can be a ton of work.
Most people get the definition of UX wrong straight off the get-go. Thinking it more to be along the lines of UI than anything. But UX is much deeper than how users get from point-A to point-B. It’s how they emotionally react to the journey you have created for them. If you can get a strong emotional reaction, you are on your way to becoming a great UX designer.
Always remember that UX goes further than just the website you are designing. UX continues to influence a person’s life even after they have the product. So try to understand the meaning of the product you are designing for and all of its benefits.
