The way online users perceive your website or application is essential towards attaining a successful online presence. Therefore, whether you’re a freelance web designer or a website owner who wants to learn the tech side of things, you have to know how to fulfill web users’ needs in terms of user experience or UX design.
What Is User Experience Design?
When it comes to web and mobile browsing, user experience is a critical aspect. User experience (UX) design refers to the design process in creating features and products that provide relevant and meaningful user experiences. Design, function, usability, and branding are all in mind when it comes to UX designing.
UX design is an essential component of your website or app development as it can either make or break the experiences of your users, which can significantly impact your entire business. If you want your products and services to have a competitive edge, giving your web users a convenient, immersive, and valuable experience is of paramount importance.
User experience (UX) is often confused for user interface (UI). While these two are vital elements of a well-designed website, UI prioritizes the tangible elements of a website, involving its look and function.
Step-By-Step Guide On How To Fulfill Web Users’ Needs
So, how do you proceed with the UX design process with the web users in mind? Remember that web users can be eCommerce sites, app, and software program users, too. Basically, web users entail all users using the Internet or online channels.
Here are the important steps of the UX design process to help you meet your web users’ needs:
Step One: Conduct A UX Research
Guesswork and assumptions threaten usability, affecting user experience negatively. Hence, UX research is paramount before any strategic planning in improving user experience. The research process ensures a seamless roadmap creation to convert more visitors into loyal customers and brand ambassadors.
UX research methods include quantitative research that provides numerical data and qualitative research that provides helpful insights on user behaviors. In addition, UX research methods include attitudinal research or hearing user’s thoughts and opinions, and behavioral research or real-time observation of users’ behaviors.
You can check this guide by Laughing Samurai to learn more about UX research methods.
Step Two: Determine The Right UX Tools To Use
It’s vital to know the right tools that can help you improve the user experience. For instance, an eCommerce website for an online store should have social media widgets, SEO tools, plug-ins, and fillable forms to monitor progress and secure transactions.
User experience designers use purpose-built software programs at different stages of UX design. These tools create digital or physical representations of a UX designer’s ideas. For instance, prototyping tools help apply design principles and record ideas that teams can use during brainstorming sessions.
Here’s a list of UX tools to consider in a UX design process:
- Questionnaire Tools: You can use these tools to collect information and feedback from users in quantitative research.
- Flowcharting Tools: These tools predict users’ thoughts, behavior, and needs to align them with business needs.
- Wireframing Tools: They help create seamless visualizations of prospective solutions to UX problem statements.
- User Interface Design Tools: UI tools help create sophisticated design visualizations.
- Usability Testing Tools: These tools help test the accessibility and usability of solutions.
- Handoff Tools: UX web designers send finished design works to developers using these tools.
Step Three: Consider User And UX Design Challenges
What do users struggle with most often when using a product? UX designers consider the types, reasons, and ways of how to use a product use. Identifying the reasons why users seek a particular quality or feature stimulates users’ motivations for using a product, such as a software program, website, or app.
Here are some tips to address UX design challenges:
- Set Expectations Early: Start a new project with a stakeholder meeting to explain the things you’ll be doing and the reasons behind them.
- Understand The Real Issues: Users should be able to relate themselves to realize their need to use the product. Less tech-savvy, first-time users usually struggle on functionality. Therefore, the functionality design should be accessible, user-friendly, and aesthetically pleasant. This way, you’ll be able to provide a fluid and seamless experience to users.
- Good Communication Process: Prevent issues and gaps between product design and development by communicating early and regularly. Involve the developers early on to detect potential issues before the handoff.
Step Four: Continuous Testing, Monitoring, And Updating
Before putting your website live, testing should always occur first. Many businesses commit the mistake of skipping this step and proceeding to their website launch, and they remain unaware that the lack of testing slows down visits and conversions. One of the most important aspects of website testing is user experience (UX) testing.
To measure your website’s UX for the first time, perform a user experience testing that focuses on various aspects of your user experience. This way, you can determine how your website and its elements should interact with users. Also, website testing can help ensure that your users won’t run into trouble, like this example of end-to-end testing.
Lastly, testing the usability of your website isn’t only for finding mistakes and weaknesses incurred during the website creation. Most importantly, UX testing allows website creators to discover opportunities in improving the website’s design, as well as to learn more about users’ behavior and preferences.
UX design doesn’t stop upon launching a website. Continuous monitoring and updating are crucial to ensure resolution of all design flaws. Real testing takes place when multiple users use the product. For instance, it takes multiple users to gauge the real capability of apps or websites.
Check the following considerations when monitoring and updating UX design:
- Continuous collaboration with developers
- Emerging business needs
- User feedback
- Adjacent and projected UX issues
Conclusion
Understanding the needs of users following these steps will help you create the best UX design that can drive return on investment (ROI). Provide user-friendly features and test design several times using the right tools until you observe excellent results before launching a website, app, or software program. A successful UX design all boils down to how users perceive the search and usage workflow for a product.
