Enhance the User Experience

Are you setting out to create an app or website? If your app or website has bad UX (user experience), chances are your users won’t stick around. As you work through your next app or website project, be mindful of the topics below to provide successful UX and eliminate common UX annoyances.

CONSIDER YOUR AUDIENCE

Your audience should have a gigantic influence on your UX decisions. After all, you should be focusing on their experience, right?

First, consider them as humans.

Before you begin thinking about the details of your audience, realize that they are all humans and, for the most part, share many traits. Humans are lazy, impatient and prone to making mistakes. Don’t make your users do extra work. Create an intuitive navigation that doesn’t force them to dig for the information they’re looking for.

Additionally, many find it quite frustrating when an app doesn’t let you use it without first creating an account. Allow users to postpone account creation so they have a chance to experience the app first.

When creating forms on your website, landing pages or within your app, require only the most crucial information to reduce incomplete signups. We recently conducted an A/B test using two forms, one requiring a phone number and one not, that had to be completed to download an eBook. The form that didn’t require a phone number had a higher submission rate 100% of the time. If you don’t really need a piece of information about someone, don’t ask for it.

Then, consider them as individuals.

If you have access to previous site/app metrics, take a look at the data to find out what pages your audience frequently visits and use that information to organize your content.

Take your current users’ and target audience’s demographics into account – i.e. age, education level, interests, etc. This will help you as you being making design decisions. For example, if your target audience is adults aged 18-30, chances are they need less instruction on how to use the app than if your target audience is aged 50-60.

CONSIDER FUNCTION

This is especially important for the navigation of your website or app. The only purpose of the navigation is to get users from one point to another as efficiently as possible, so if there’s any possibility that a design element will make it less usable, its best to just leave that element out.

Don’t overlook the small visual indicators and functions, such as loading animations, “undo” buttons and “X” buttons. Animation can be used to enhance these visual indicators and make your app feel polished – transitions between states can feel abrupt and uncomfortable when there is no animation to ease the state change. When a user presses a button, its nice to have some sort of indicator that the button has been pressed. Animations can make your app more enjoyable, but it’s important to keep them subtle and ensure there’s reasoning behind them.

CONSIDER CONSISTENCY

Consistency throughout your website or app will help users become familiar with where and how to find things, as well as learn about how the website or app works. Stay consistent with tone, design elements (buttons, form fields, colors, etc.) and basic structure.

There are certain actions that have become common within apps, such as pulling down to refresh, pinching to zoom out and swiping left to go back. There are website elements people have become familiar with, as well, such as the three horizontal lines that indicate “menu” or “navigation.” People would be confused if they were supposed to execute these actions differently from app to app – stay consistent.

Creating a seamless user experience and making it easy for your users to interact with your website or app is critical. Remember to design with your users in mind! Interested in taking a look at some examples of websites and apps with great UX? Check out our portfolio! Give us a shout if you’d like to learn more — we’d love to talk with you about your website or app design needs.

Updated: Apr 13, 2022