User Experience

Cultivating a positive user experience is essential if you want to engage your users.

User experience (or ‘UX’) is concerned with the user’s interaction with a website, ensuring that they can easily access the content they need and making that process not only simple - but enjoyable. This might entail clear visual indication of important information, remembering a user’s details between visits or automatically recognising their timezone and location. Cultivating a positive user experience is essential if you want to engage users, maintain their interest and encourage them to become a regular visitor.

There are some core elements that make up UX:

User interface

First impressions count, and for a website that depends on building an effective user interface. The interface must be consistent, responsive and intuitive to use. As the saying goes, the devil is in the details - and by taking care of those details for the user, we can ensure their site interaction is a pleasant experience. For example, transforming a potentially dull form into a visually engaging interactive experience can go a long way towards making a user happy.

Usability

This relates to how easy a website or application is to use and is affected by several factors, including logical layout of content, clear navigation and the structure of the site itself (i.e. the various sections that make up the site). A user can become quickly frustrated with a site if they can’t quickly locate the section they need. Usability can be measured and improved through various methods including usability testing, using mouse tracking software and studying site logs to see which pages a user visits (and which ones don’t).

Visual design

Style is everything, but it’s purpose is not purely to make a site look ‘nice’. "Quality Of Design Is An Indicator Of Credibility" (Smashing Mag - 10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines). Elements of page styling including typography, colour usage and imagery help to communicate the key messages, brand values and information to the user.

Accessibility

Sir Tim Berners Lee created what we call the world wide web. "The World-Wide Web (W3) was developed to be a pool of human knowledge". His desire was to provide universal access to human knowledge and so it is vital to ensure that content on your site is accessible to as wide an audience as possible. Adhering to predefined standards such as WCAG makes a site accessible to users with visual or aural impairment.

We have a firm understanding of what it takes to create sites with a great user experience and we can help you understand more about how it impacts your web project.