No wonder users are becoming increasingly demanding, looking at the number of options available to them, they are expected to be choosy. When there are so many options to pick from, you cannot afford to be disregarded because of poor performance. To assure this does not occur UX comes into the role. It plays a crucial part in reaching your business objectives.
Every business should be aiming to enhance the overall product experience and provide quality service to satisfy client requirements. But to improve your website´s UX you will need a good web design agency that has a whole bunch of aces up their sleeves.
If however you do decide to look into the mater yourself, here are 6 design steps, crucial for designing a good user experience.
1. User Research
To move forward with your UX design process, you need to constantly think like your users. Understanding their position can only be attained by working with a genuine user while conducting deep user research. You can say, it is the first phase of a user experience design process. This phase includes figuring out how the target feels to meet their ideals. User research is usually accomplished simultaneously with stakeholder interviews. This way, you have insights into the business vision and what features clients wish from the product.
There are 2 fundamental aspects that user research includes:
- Audience Persona – a critical element in UX experience designing. The audience persona includes a few things, such as demographic details like age, gender, education level, etc.
- Audience Journeys – another key component of designing UX, allowing you to learn the audience’s viewpoint. By this, you can have practical perspicuity into how you must build the flow of actions from one point to the other so that everything drops in the proper zone and your users can finish tasks effortlessly.
2. Visual Designs
Visuals are one of the important UX design elements that revolve around the aesthetics of a website or app. However, it is not only about the ‘glance and feels’ aspect; the design should be compelled by the usefulness and functionality aspects as well. Designing a pleasant UX experience is optimizing the customer journey while supporting them to find what they are looking for through a reflexive approach. In UX design, user-focused design is a more prevailing practice.
There are a few more things you should also watch out for while designing your UX designing. For instance, it should be based on real user. Also, it cannot be done in isolation as it needs to be connected to the overall UX experience the entire website has to offer. Ultimately, the layout must keep all the elements of the companies visual identity and use the same shapes and elements to guide the user during their journey.
3. UX Audit
UX audit is a process of locating spots that require improvements in the digital product. It allows disclosing which elements of a site are generating issues and interfering with conversions. Also, UX audits employ practical modes to offer analytic suggestions for revisions or user-centric improvements. Eventually, this lets you increase conversions.
A site audit contains an extensive checklist of components to confirm based on the distinctive conditions of your website. Some of these components are key user-specific actions that should be easy to detect on the site, for instance, objects, activities, options, menu, etc. Furthermore, ensure that the primary navigation is clearly labeled and concise.
4. Sitemap and User-Flow
Now next step is to implement the knowledge acquired in the previous phases by creating the sitemap. A visual sitemap is a user-focused means to show the site structure in the easiest way possible. Building sitemaps can be valuable for lots of reasons and useful in many ways, such as for website planning.
After building the sitemap, you have to guide the user from one point to another, and this is easily feasible with user flow graphs. In this, the user navigates through from the product, until reaching their decision. To create the user flow, you need to observe your users. When determining how to get visitors to get in contact with your services in a flow-like condition, learning the user’s needs and reasoning lets you produce a relevant options.
5. Mockup
A mockup carries the primary designs with added content and basic personalization, like branding color, fonts, etc., in the wireframe layout to get feedback from stakeholders before moving to prototypes. Mockups become essential when high-fidelity sketches are chosen as fleshed-out site designs. There are lots of useful design tools you can use to build mockups, like Figma, Adobe XD, etc.
6. Prototype and Testing
After creating the mockup, it is now transformed into an engaging demo site. A prototype site simulates a final site’s appearance and manners as closely as possible, but it is not the final coded site. Developers use prototypes for user testing to get useful feedback concerning the site’s practicality.
The prototype site should be tested out with various user groups and conduct usability tests. These tests will verify whether that site fits the users’ demand or not. Besides this, you can involve other team members as well to get various other prospects and ideas.
After this phase, you can use your UX design for coding and head off to the launching phase where you move your website or app from the local server to the live server. There still be some components that need repairing but do not be stressed, the web design process is an ongoing approach that demands regular maintenance and optimization on the road to building seamless user experiences.
