Archive for category Website design

As you are designing for users, you need to understand better how they interact with the web and what they expect to get from your website. These nine principles will help you create more effective websites that are designed for the user, not the designer.

• Don’t Make Me Think

For most, the Internet is a form of entertainment. We don’t want to think when we are entertained. Make everything on your site obvious. Your user should be able to access your site and clearly see its purpose and how they can access information. This requires a clear structure, links that can be recognized and strategically placed content. Your user should know the instant he logs onto your site what you are offering him

• Don’t Make Me Wait

Intro videos, forms users must fill out before accessing information or endless ads they must watch before getting to the page all frustrate users because they take time. Users don’t want to wait. They want information quickly.

Consider letting your users interact with your site for a while before you throw a barrier, like a form or video, in their way. If you do need registration, make sure it takes no more than 30 seconds and does not require the user to scroll.

• Show Me Where to Look

Focus your user’s attention where it needs to be. Avoid cluttering the page with distracting elements, like videos or photos, that are not where you want his focus to be. When your user logs on to your page, he should instantly know what you want him to see.

• Show Me What to Click

Links need to be obvious on your site. Large buttons, clear steps and hyper-linked text are effective if you want your visitors to do something once they reach your site. Site structure should also lead users to the desired action.

• Get Straight to the Point

The content on your site needs to be concise and well written. Consider the following:

1. Use clear words and short sentences
2. Avoid flowery or overly promotional language
3. Utilize bullet lists and subheadings to make copy easy to scan
4. Organize copy into uniform text boxes

• Keep It Simple

You’ve heard of the “keep it simple” principle, and this applies to web design perhaps more than any other field. Users want something from your site. They do not visit to appreciate its artistic design. Make the design lovely, but also usable and simple, so users can access what they want.

• Use of White Space

White space, or blank space on your design, helps guide the user to the information you want. It protects the user from having to think too much, allowing him to avoid being distracted by backgrounds, images and other visual stimuli.

• Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

Design elements that work well on other websites will work well on yours too. Do not dismiss them as boring or outdated. There is a reason conventional designs work, and you might as well use them on your site as well. When you follow tradition, users feel that they can trust the site or that they are viewing a reliable page.

• Test, Test and Re-Test

You cannot over-test your design. Usability tests will show you problems on your site that you can quickly fix to improve the user experience. If you do find a problem, test it again after you have fixed it.

Consider having an outside source test the site. You are too close to the project and know everything about how it works or should work. Use an independent tester to get a true view of how easy the site is to navigate.

How to design a website for users

You are an artist at heart. If you weren’t, you would not be able to design beautiful websites. As an artist, you view the world, or at least the World Wide Web, differently than the rest of the world.

As designers, we look at a website in a unique way. Most designers do the following when viewing a website:

• Enjoy every aspect of the design
• Take in the balance of the page
• Appreciate the surprises the designer built into the site
• Look at the complete screen to appreciate the way the overall design flows

We view a website as a work of art, and of course it is. When we stare at the page, we see the ways the colors interact. We appreciate the layers. We can practically feel the textures. Soon we stop seeing what the typical users see, because we cannot get past the artistic merit of the site.

What we need to realize, however, is real people use web pages much differently than we do. Our users:

• Are impatient – they like to get their information quickly and do not wait for pages to take a long time to load
• Move quickly from one page to another, not taking to time to stare at the completed page
• Skim through content looking for clues as to where the information they want is found
• Continue searching for the tools or information they need if it is not quickly found on the page

These differences are huge, and we must realize that we are designing for our users, not ourselves.

The problem is that we don’t approach the web like a typical user. Because of this, most of the websites on the Internet are not user-friendly in their design, and many fail to perform their tasks efficiently because “normal people” simply don’t take the time to stay on the site. We must learn to think like a user, rather than an artist.

What This Means for You

So how can you take this knowledge and use it in your everyday work so that the sites you design are more user-friendly?

First, you need to sympathize with the users you are creating the site to reach. While you will not be able to retrain your brain to think like them, you must accept them for who they are and start designing for their needs. You must learn the following things:

• Habits of real-world Internet users
• Environment most people use to access the Internet
• What you as a designer can do to make the process of access the site user-friendly

Remember, your goal as a designer is to design for people who are accessing the web every day. They might not have the greatest new browser or the fastest Internet connection. They do not appreciate waiting for hours for a page to load. They want information quickly and without a lot of clutter. When you embrace this fact and start using it in your designs, you will be able to create much more effective websites.

“How to design a website for users” is a tough question and as users become better educated, the solution is ever changing.

Have you designed a website the successfully met your users needs?

Leave us a comment and tell us how you did it.