Tips on Designing an Effective UX

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4 years ago

Tips on Designing an Effective UX

If you’re looking to design a product, be it a website, application or any other interactive software, the most crucial element up for consideration is user experience. The UX should be the driving factor for any product design but many designers fail to implement such importance into their blueprints. On the other hand, some UX designers fall into the trap of various myths and misconceptions that revolve around user experiences and thus, end up building something that would later be rendered obsolete.

The truth is, if your UX design clicks with your target audience, then your product is deemed to prosper in the market. However, if it fails to impress the audience, then it’s back to the drawing board for you and hopefully, the following tips for an effective UX design will help you get it right the first time. They also intend to make you a better UX designer for future current and future projects.

Maintain consistency of user flow

UX designers should always try to maintain consistency in the user’s journey. Flow is generally defined as the user’s journey from one section of the website to another. This helps users achieve their goals quicker and smoothly as if they had done it before very many times. Every website flow also needs an end goal such as a subscription button, which offers users the promise of future valuable content.

Making the elements of the design stand out

A designer should ensure that their designs have a visually distinct page layout as it is an essential element for any UX design. This is an excellent way of engaging user experience. Here are a few tips on how to make this happen:

The most crucial information on the page needs to be unique and stand out from the rest.
Users need to be informed of their location on the website or application using navigation tools.
Action buttons need to stand out from the others and clearly describe their purposes.
The search field should be clear with the word “search.”

Try to keep things simple

Nobody ever said that making the design complex with many features and “entertaining” properties will make it more desirable to consumers. Well, the outlook may look attractive but the level of engagement that comes with it may put off the users. When things become too complicated for their good in the UX design, it becomes a significant issue and therefore, the design fails to work. When users interact with a page loaded with many elements and distracting typography, they tend to leap elsewhere, which is contrary to the intentions of the design.

Henceforth, it is much better to keep things user-friendly and straightforward to maintain the user’s focus on your website or software until they get what they need. The faster they achieve their goals without any distractions the quicker you will achieve yours as well. The following are some of the features of a simple UX design:

Every page contains a single definitive purpose like the contact page, which would only contain contact details.
The goal of every page and every feature it entails is easily and instantly understandable by the users without any need for further explanations.
Any extra information that is deemed inessential is located at the bottom of the page.

Understand the needs and demands of the users

The goal of every product is to cater to the needs and demands of the targeted users. Similarly, UX designers can’t create the perfect design scheme without getting to know the needs and demands of the targeted users; otherwise, the designs implemented would be useless. Many a time, many UX designers have the false mentality that since they operate in the market segment, they automatically understand what the audience wants and requires without having to research on it. This is a gambling move that doesn’t work out most of the time.

You would need to gather feedback from the users of your product through surveys and also observe how they use your products or others related to it. From the survey, designers can acquire much necessary information, such as:

Their users from a demographic point of view, thus enabling them to sort and analyze the data.
The many types of users’ needs and how appropriately to approach them with their relevant solutions.
How the correlation between the users’ needs and the designer’s intentions is expressed in the design.

Don’t try to fix what’s unbroken

When it comes to UX design, the primary concern has to do with engagement which is among the essential factors of application development. However, UX designers tend to have a habit or mentality of trying to fix the unbroken also known as reinventing the wheel. Most users are used to the typical structure of various websites and software devices such as mobile phones. These two items seem to work just fine, considering they all have a general or standard layout. This explains the perpetuated habit. Most UX designers need to understand that users don’t usually fancy the idea of change as they are used the standard mode of presentation and find it hard to adapt to something new.

The idea of reinventing the wheel can be seen in unfamiliar and sophisticated layout, odd color formats, off-putting and misplaced font styles and much more. As much as the aim for change is to different products, it deals a significant blow to engagement and thus ends up chasing away the target audience. It is therefore, recommended that you use tested layouts throughout a p11roduct design with minor changes that still achieve your intentions. This approach familiarizes users with your platform and enables them to use it easily without being stressed out by unorthodox layouts.

Stick to what is known and used instead of trying to fix something that isn’t broken and, thus, ultimately breaking it yourself.

Final words

If you would like to make things work for you and your design, you need to make an effort for it to make it work for the users more. These tips will help you achieve the goals you so desire for an effective UX design.