10 Easy Ways to Engaging User Experience

10 Easy Ways to Engaging User Experience

“I often compare the work that I do as a UX designer to an architect. Like the architect who builds your home, my UX team builds a comprehensive blueprint, which outlines every single detail of the site’s features and functionality.”

– Irene Pereyra

There is no way of overstating the importance of user experience when designing an app or website.  It is, basically, what the website truly boils down to. If the user will not enjoy browsing it, or using the app you designed, well, no amount of clever graphics, intricate vector animations and such will make the user come back and make it successful.

The term user experience has been floating around in our vocabulary for some time, and has its roots in human factors and ergonomics. In the late 40s, the field’s focus was put on the interaction between human users, machines, and “the contextual environments to design systems that address the user’s experience”.

That last bit was a mouthful. Personally, we think Shigeru Miyamoto beautifully summed up what UX is, when talking about making or developing games.

Our job as the game creators or developers – the programmers, artists, and whatnot – is that we have to kind of put ourselves in the user’s shoes. We try to see what they’re seeing, and then make it, and support what we think they might think.

But just because you know what something is, does not mean you know how it works. That is why we went on the interwebs, and started doing a bit of research, to see what specialists recommend we should do when designing UX. We have selected a few of what we think are the best pieces of advice, but we will, of course, link the articles where they’re taken from, so you can read everything the specialists had to say. 

1. Less is more

from Irene Pereyra for CreativeBloq

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You may think this is obvious and doesn’t need further explanation. But most sites and applications still manage to get it wrong. The key is to cut down tasks required by users to the bare minimum. I can’t stress this enough. Get rid of all that extra clutter that doesn’t add value, or worse, distracts and confuses the user.

Know exactly how you want users to travel through your site or application and then guide the user as if you were holding their hand through the entire process. Again, users want things to be as simple, worry-free and fast as possible. If they can see what’s coming next before even clicking on something, they’ll be happy users.

2. Do your homework

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Listen and absorb. The more conversations you have with clients, the better informed you’ll be. Dive deep into every piece of documentation, research their field, examine all content with a fine-tooth comb, understand the client’s goals, document thoroughly all of the client’s wishes (no matter how small) and talk to as many people across as many departments as possible. Only then will you have the most complete and accurate picture and be prepared to move to the next phase of the project.

Another crucial part of listening comes from doing a thorough analysis of what competitors are doing in the same space. Are there any innovators that you can learn from? Have they made any mistakes you want to avoid? Is there one universal component that ties all of them together? Were there any missed opportunities? Use the answers to these questions as inspiration in your own project.

The types of sites you may look at during this analysis phase can vary dramatically. You could even look at sites that sell cat food as points of reference when designing an application for audio equipment. It’s still relative and can be helpful because the user behavior could very well be the same for cat food sites and audio equipment sites. Either way, you can learn valuable lessons from UX best practices across completely different industries and form factors.

3. Focus on one feature

from Rahul Varshneya for Entrepreneur

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The design of the application, and by design I mean the user experience and the look and feel, should reflect the focus on that one feature that is the core of your app idea. Your users will engage with whatever you lead them to engage with on your app. Make sure it is that one feature that defines your app.

4. Engage the individual user

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Building a social networking-based app is probably the most difficult task today, primarily because one user’s experience of the app depends on how many other people he/she can connect and interact with. On day one, this is the most challenging task when you have your first 100 or 1,000 users but little or no interaction between them. This is where you need to build some engagement by means of a feature in your app that can hold the interest of early adopters.

5. Responsive user interfaces

from Danielle Arad for Idyeah

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In Web UX design, we must adapt products to be responsive to several platforms. If you visit the Facebook site via a simple mobile phone with browsing capabilities, it will instantly re-direct you to a mobile-friendly version, which is greatly simplified in terms of browsing. On the other hand, if you visit the same site via a smartphone, then it will redirect you to a touchscreen-optimized version, where almost everything is available with a simple flick of the screen.

6. Constructive feedback

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In Web user experience design, feedback is just as important. Don’t hesitate to tell a user when something goes wrong, but make sure to do it in a helpful and pleasant way. Create an original 404 page to notify your user that something is wrong and guide them to the correct page. Do you find your users getting lost in navigating your site? Design useful tip balloons that will give them advice as to how to get to the desired location.

7. Make it easy to find and search content

from SpyreStudios editor-in-chief and founder Jon Phillips

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It amazes me to see that many sites don’t have a search bar. I think this is a no-brainer and it will dramatically improve the user experience. If your website doesn’t have a search bar, please add one, your users will thank you!

There are other ways to make your site easy to search. For example you could add a list of categories or even a tag cloud. If you run a blog this should be fairly easy to do as most blogging software (WordPress for example) use categories and tags to categorize content.”

8. Easy to use navigation

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There are lots of things to consider when designing a navigation bar, from the position on the page to the style of the menu itself. The most common place for a nav bar would probably be around the top of the page, above the fold and just below the logo. This is very common for one good reason: it works. We’re used to it being placed around there.

9. Think pages

from Frazer Cooper for Creative-Jar

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The site map should only represent pages. Keep it succinct. Sitemaps should show how content explicitly relates to structure and hierarchy; don’t get sucked into contaminating the site map with ideas, promotional panels or concepts.

10. Create a taxonomy

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Ensure that you use common themes and ideas throughout your sitemap. Avoid mixing ideas and metaphors, if a user is engaged they will naturally want to read more and explore all that you have to offer. Users will find it easier to dip into content to a level that they feel comfortable, allowing the user to come back for more if they deem it necessary at a later time when they need more.

That wraps our article on 10 easy ways to engaging user experience. We hope that the tips given here will help you make awesome websites, for us to spend all day on. Be sure to check out other great tips, by clicking on the links to see the full articles. Also, don’t forget to leave us your thoughts, in the comment section below.

About

Claudia Radau is passionate about marketing and photography. Loves to travel and has a soft spot for dogs. She handles PR for Pixel77.com and Inkydeals.com. You can find her on Twitter, Facebook and/or Google+.

2 Comments on “10 Easy Ways to Engaging User Experience

  1. I believe that the third option offers the freelancer the most value. Many thanks for making such an essential article available to me. This kind of essay is helpful for those of us just starting out.

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