What is User Experience Design and How to Make It Right

“The customer is always right.” So says the shrewd businessman who intends to retain his clients and maintain healthy long term relationships with them. No matter which sector your business belongs to, your buyer is at the front-end of your marketing strategy. If he is satisfied, your business is safe. Running a business in the digital world requires the adoption of a similar approach. Immense focus must be place on user satisfaction in order to ensure that the usability of your product/service is efficient.

What is User Experience Design?

The concept of user design centers on the interaction between you and your client: to make sure it is both swift and pleasing. The correlation between good user experience (UX) design and successful websites has proven to be quite strong. As long as the user has an easy and comforting experience with your service/website, he will develop a feeling of trust with your brand. Not only this, but he will come back again. This will increase the number of unique users on your website and make your website more optimized for search engine results.

Image Credit: SourceYour service may be the same, but the user’s preferences will keep changing. And taking into account the amount of competition out there, you will have to keep up with minute details that each new visitor is paying close attention to (sometimes subconsciously). This creates the need for a well-thought out micro UX design strategy that focuses entirely on the customer. You may need to research your customers regularly, and look out for what they prefer in a design or service or app. Keep up with your rivals and analyses what they’re doing to direct traffic towards their website. Is there anything you are not offering that others are? A simple placement of tabs, social media icons, drop-down menus, and pop-ups will leave you vying for lost customer base.

UX design agencies can be helpful in offering visual ideas and images that bring together user knowledge and design analytics to create a website that assures the best standards of user experience. Some of the most sought-after UX designs include flat designs: a minimalistic approach to UX design.

Flat VS Fancy

While this may come off as a timeworn design, with no extravagant 3-d effects, shadows or gradients, it is often an extremely eye-catching one even without the fancy fonts. Flat designs are stimulating and firm, displaying content in a crisp manner.

Flat Website Design

The use of a single color (in varying hues and shades) gives off a minimalist look, and at the same time emulates a professional facade. UX design companies are always ready to provide templates which can help you visualize plain tabs and single toned backgrounds to see how they really increase the overall functionality of your website.

Skeuomorphism: Not The Way To Go Anywhere

This is in contrast to skeuomorphism which creates digital images that are spitting images of their real life counterparts. Although they may look visually more appealing at first, the limitations to their functionality cause them to lose their edge. Often loading time increases which is detrimental to user experience – remember the long term goal is to retain your customer and give him not one excuse to exit your webpage.

Also, skeuomorphic images, when couple with flat design visuals, tend to make the whole display look out of place, and limit the design of your webpage. Significant portions of the web page, such as content and writing on tabs can appear to be less visible in the presence of a highly animated visual. This destroys the real purpose of the design and distracts the user from the real message.

This is not to say that your web page needs to be a flushed out image with no creativity or complexity. Various images can be made with an angled illustration showing, for instance, an open door. Flat designs are made for on-screen displays, keeping in view the limitations of dimensions. But you should stick to the real purpose: creating an original, minimalistic design that brings together your ideas and services and present the user with joyful experience. Make the image more friendly for the customer as excessive ornamentation will slow down codes and limit adaptability to other screens (such as mobile apps).

Designing Your Design Strategy

Image Credit: Source

 

When you start out with a UX design, think about the color first. A minimalist theme works beautifully with a monochromatic layout. These days, the most popular combination is usually trichromatic: a neutral or white background, with a pop of color in the form of a highlight (on tabs, etc.) For instance, a home page designed in a combination of white and black, with an orange header would really bring out the web design in full swing. You can even use colors as a guide akin to using a highlighter on a black and white printed page. Your user will be directed to the color image instantly, telling him where to go next. Product images work especially well on a white background. Any image will act as a contrast to the background and stand out to the user. This will create an overall clean and comforting feel.

Move To Interface Design

Once you have the color, go for fold effects and drop-down menus. To make the experience more user-friendly, create icons to assist your customer all the way. Not only will this speed up the response time, but creating icons will also prevent the user from being distracted by other imagery.

Remember, your screen is a limited dimension, and you want to provide the user with the best service, in the fastest time possible. And a skeuomorphic design might get in the way of doing just that.

If you’re looking for a UX design agency, don’t be tempted by one that sells glossy attributes to you. Look around to note that minimalistic designs are bringing a new wave of web design – they conform to crammed spaces on both desktop and mobile screens, and some of the biggest brands are sticking to a flat design. It’s working for them, it’s time to work for yours.