UX Design Best Practices – A Quick Start Guide

You want everyone who visits your website, downloads your app, or logs in to a self-service portal to successfully interact and engage with your digital spaces. That’s only going to happen if these spaces offer an easy to use, enjoyable experience where users can meet their goals, whether it’s finding information, making a purchase, or paying a bill. That’s where UX design comes in.

To help you create amazing online experiences for your customers, we’re sharing some UX design best practices to get you started.

Don’t have time for a DIY project? No problem! Reach out to our team to talk about how we can help you improve customer experiences on your website or app.

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Understand Your Starting Point

Before you start making changes, you need to have clarity into where your problems are coming from and what kind of gaps and opportunities you’re facing in your current design. Consider factors like:

  • What are your goals for your website/app/portal? Do you want customers to contact you directly, make a purchase, or perform a specific action? Once you know what your objectives are, it can direct you to how you can facilitate this through your digital process.
  • Who are your users? Get clear on who your ideal customers are and see your digital space through their experience. Are they older? Tech-savvy? Using your product for work or personal use? Once you know your users, you can tailor the UX to their specific needs to create a more positive experience.
  • What do analytics say? Take some time to look at your analytics and see how users interact and navigate your product and where they leave without converting.
  • Overwhelmed by analytics? Get an overview of what the numbers mean and how to interpret them.
Learn Google Analytics

Heuristic Evaluation for Beginners

It sounds complex but “heuristics” really just means guidelines. A heuristic evaluation is a usability engineering practice in which several people use a set of guidelines to evaluate the interface of a digital property to look for issues with the usability. By having a small group examine and interact with your site or app, you’re more likely to find areas of concern.

If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design.

Dr. Ralf Speth, CEO
Jaguar Land Rover

Create a simple checklist of interactions and objectives for your testers and have them record their experiences and thoughts, particularly areas where they ran into difficulties.

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Ensure Website Accessibility

While you want to design your website for your ideal user, you can’t forget the importance of accessibility for all users. This includes those with different abilities, specific needs, or even situational impairments, like being in a moving vehicle or a loud space where it’s hard to hear.

For example, users with vision impairments who use adaptive readers still need to get the full experience of your website. Ways to improve their experience includes ensuring all images have alt text, buttons are clearly labeled, and adding labels to form fields.

Download our Accessibility Checklist

The Not-Secret Connection Between Accessibility and SEO

The top priority of accessible design should be ensuring that all users of all abilities can interact and use your property. It also includes a bonus of boosting your SEO rankings.

 

Accessibility allows us to tap into everyone’s potential.
Debra Ruh

It’s important to note that while website accessibility itself is not necessarily a ranking factor for Google, elements of accessibility, like adding alt text to images, using headers to break up content, and clean navigation are ranking factors.

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Stay Up-To-Date on UX Trends with Our Podcast

Diving into UX can be overwhelming. To cut down on some of the stress, we created a weekly podcast where we take a UX trend or topic and break it down. We talk about what it is, why it’s important, and how you can implement it on your website, app, intranet, or portal.

Do You Really Need A UX Podcast?

Yes.

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Professional UX Services

  • UX Audit
  • Journey mapping
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  • User testing
  • Prototyping
  • High-fidelity design
  • Graphic Design
  • Accessibility audit
  • UX strategy
  • Customer surveys
  • User research
  • Persona development
  • Information architecture
  • Wireframing

You’ve got enough on your plate, and we have a team of experienced UX designers ready to transform your digital property to delight your users and increase your sales. Connect with our team and let’s talk.