What Influences UX Design
When building or improving your site you should always have user experience in the forefront of your mind. A good user experience can do wonders for both your website and your business, these benefits can range from keeping users browsing your pages for longer, to improving your conversion rate and anything in between.
UX in it’s entirety can be quite overwhelming, to help you navigate this, we’re going to be breaking it down starting with what influences user experience and what these influencing factors mean.
Accessibility
Accessibility is when your site is designed to cater to users with disabilities, whether that be permanent, temporary or situational. A site that is accessible means you have truly considered all users and their journeys.
Accessibility is an incredibly important aspect when it comes to your site’s UX as it ensures you are truly catering to your visitors in the best way possible and that inclusivity is at the forefront of your site.
When working on your site’s accessibility it’s vital to have at least a basic understanding on the main categories of disabilities and limitations that your users could potentially be affected by. Understanding these allows you to better improve your site with these users in mind.
The key categories of disabilities that can impact how users might use your site are the following:
-Visual: Visual disabilities can range from blindness to those with vision limitations such as being short sighted or colour blind.
-Hearing: Hearing disabilities can range from those who are deaf to those with limited hearing.
-Motor: Motor disabilities can range from those who have previously undergone amputation surgery (such as their arm) to those who have a broken arm.
-Cognitive: This can consist of those with learning disabilities such as dyslexia.
Enjoyability
This will likely be the most obvious one on the list, but none-the-less is still important to keep in mind…And that is enjoyability! Is your site an enjoyable experience for the user and are there typically positive associations between your site and the user.
When designing or improving your site, really put yourselves in the users shoes and think about if your content will insight a positive reaction.
Is your page design delightful to look at? Does your content keep the user engaged?
Equability
When you are designing your site to be more equitable, it means you are designing to take those who have been historically underrepresented into account. A site that is equitable has taken into consideration a number of user attributes such as gender, age, sexual orientation, language, race etc. ensuring the design captures diversity and inclusivity.
Designing a more equitable site means you will be required to look at and understand your current biases. Upon identifying these, it’s important to figure out the best solution to ensuring these biases don’t impact your site’s design.
Usability
Usability is essentially how easy your website is to use/operate and how simple your goal is to achieve. A general rule of thumb when it comes to site usability is, the easier it is for the user to complete a task, the more likely they are to do so.
When looking at usability, you shouldn’t just look at specific stages in the users journey, but instead the entirety of their journey from start to finish. Are certain pages hard to navigate for the user, causing them to drop off? Is your checkout too complicated, triggering a large amount of checkout abandonment?
When trying to improve the usability on your site, ask yourself the following questions…
- Is my site clear on what I offer/what the user needs to do?
- Do I take the user down a clear path on what actions they need to take?
- Is my content consistent?
- Do all functional elements of my site work i.e. buttons, forms, page layout, checkout options etc.
- Are forms easy to submit or if your site is ecommerce, is the purchase process easy to complete?
- Do I have a good site speed?
Monitoring your sites usability on a regular basis is important to ensuring your users experience is a positive one. There are a number of ways you can do this, from reviewing tools like Google Analytics for pages that generate a high bounce rate or drop off and individually testing these pages. To asking for feedback from your site visitors, also known as user research.
Useful
Finally, is your site actually going to help the user and address their needs?
Let’s say you offer end of tenancy cleaning services and a user is coming to your site looking to hire a local end of tenancy cleaner. It’s important that your site clearly addresses this need and provides the user with enough information and context to help them.
Tackling each of these influencing factors in UX is an ongoing battle, but is a battle worth fighting if you want to truly take your business to the next level.
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