Over the last few years, much has been said about user experience or UX, which, in a nutshell, pertains to how a user feels about using a product, application, service, or website.
For webmasters, the concept of UX just got real when Google announced that it would be an official ranking factor beginning in May 2021.
With Google rolling out page experience signals in ranking, it has become imperative for webmasters to ensure that people get nothing but the most helpful and enjoyable experience when visiting their sites.
So far, the best way to improve website UX is through web design. From boosting site speed to improving readability, here are some web design tweaks you can make to enhance the user experience.
Improve Page Speed
Internet users these days expect web pages to load in three seconds or less.
If loading your pages takes longer than that, they will likely bounce off to a website that loads faster.
If you’re not sure about your page speed, use Google’s Page Speed Tools.
As for web design tweaks that will help improve your page speed, some of the things you can do include optimizing your images and keeping the use of heavy graphics, custom fonts, and pop-ups to a minimum.
Make Website Navigation Easy
Bad website navigation can make a business lose customers. With the poor user experience that difficult-to-navigate sites provide their visitors, them bouncing off a website is understandable.
Website navigation needs to be easy to provide a good user experience. Some of the web design adjustments you can make to improve navigation include:
- Making all navigational elements clickable
- Featuring drop-down menus
- Putting up a working search feature
- Anchored navigation bars
- Internal linking
- Linking the logo back to the home page
Use The Power of White Space
Your website can offer a much better user experience if visitors find your content easy to read, and that is something that white space does very well.
Also referred to as a margin or negative space, white space gives your content a lot of breathing room, making it look more enticing to read than walls of text.
Aside from making pages more readable, white spaces also provide harmony and balance to your page. More importantly, white spaces make your calls to action (CTAs) stand out because the page no longer looks cluttered.
Keep the Design Clean
For a web designer, it’s easy to give in to the temptation of showing off their graphic design skills and end up with a website that’s practically begging for attention with the wanton use of animations, flashy colors, and other loud visual design elements.
Aside from slowing your website down, unnecessary visual elements also turn people off. In this day and age where minimalism is already a thing, keeping your web design simple and clean will always win people over.
Rid your web pages of unnecessary stuff, and you’ll have a much cleaner interface that will unfailingly enhance the user experience.
Make Mobile-friendliness A Priority
There are three billion smartphone users in the world today. Mobile users have long outnumbered desktop users, and they deserve every bit of effort you can make to make your pages look great on their devices.
Mobile users, in general, don’t relish the idea of pinching, zooming, scrolling sideways, or tapping on very tiny buttons of non-mobile-friendly sites. If your website forces them to do that on their devices, then you’re not providing them with an excellent user experience.
You can change that by switching to responsive web design, which will make your website adjust to the size of the screen people are using. Responsive web design gives mobile and desktop users alike an optimal browsing experience, which leads to a better UX.
These are just some of the ways you can enhance UX through web design. Partner with a reliable web design agency to make the necessary adjustments to your website design, and you’ll discover more ways to make the user experience even more remarkable for your visitors.
About the Author
Shawn Byrne is the founder and CEO of SEOPhoenix.net. Shawn started his career in I.T. troubleshooting workstations, servers and networks, then went on to doing SEO as a side project and quickly found success in ranking websites. It was easy for him to grasp not only the algorithms but also the technical side which most SEO strategists miss and neglect because of its complexities. SEO Phoenix then grew based on its own rankings and referrals.
