It’s Monday and as per the usual here I go with my thought again. Today I am going to speak about something called user experience aka UX. This is something that most potential clients don’t think about very often because it sounds technical. UX is in fact a technical aspect of web-design / web-development but it’s simple to explain to potential clients. Keeping it simple I would go with a very loose definition “It’s the journey / experience your client goes thought when browsing your website”. I am going to list a few tips on what UX should be like for your website visitor.

1. UX Should Be Straight Forward With Zero Explanation Required

As soon as someone lands on your website they should be able to know how to find what they are looking for without anyone showing them how to use the site. As an example, if I was looking for the services you offer than I would expect that as I look thought your homepage I should either find a section that has a heading that says Our services and then under that a section describing your services using a bit of text and maybe an image for each service. If you have a lot of services, you may either want to put four services per row or just have four in one row initially and have a button under that saying see more services. Another way might be having a dedicated services page shown in your main menu as “Services”. My point obviously being that you shouldn’t need to explain to me where to get more info on your services if that’s what I was looking for.

2. Make Your Design Clean And Simple

This is a real simple tip. Don’t overcrowd your pages with flashy texts on the left or right side, or anywhere else for that matter because, if you do than I am probably not going to read the main content because my eyes and mind will be distracted by all the bells and whistles. Subtle effects to grab attention is a very cool thing when doing web-design but, use it wisely and strategically so that the user doesn’t lose focus.

3. Make Navigation Easy And Obvious

Again, a very simple tip. Don’t make people look for the menu or other navigation. There’s a reason why the way menus are placed on most sites on the web is basically always the same, people know where to look for them period. Removing a menu from your header and placing four pictures in a row that say Home, About Us, Services and Contact Us may be a dead giveaway that if I click on them it might get me to where I want to go but if I am a person that surfs the web even sparsely, it wouldn’t be immediately obvious that it’s actually the right way to get around the particular website.

4. Give People A Place To Start

Give people a place to start the journey you want to take them on. That is why homepages were invented. You control the sequence of the story you want people to experience. That’s why the sections of your homepage are placed in a specific sequence so that people live the events of the story in a logical order.

5. Make Your Content Look Good

Last but surely not least make sure the content you put out is great whether it’s images or text or both in combination. Your web-developer/designer can clone or copy the design of the coolest websites in your industry, but it still may not look as beautiful as that site simply because the imagery or text you provide doesn’t come close to the quality of that other site.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at info@georgenicolaou.me