Include These Best Practices in Your UX Design

How often have you found a helpful website but decided to exit because of lousy page design?

User experience (UX) refers to how visitors interact or not with a website. A website with good UX promotes brands and improves engagement.

This guide features best practices highly recommended by top Chicago UX design agencies.  Here are the points we will cover:

• Creating an accessible website
• Keeping the site design consistent and simple
• Creating personas to improve UX design
• Adding a sitemap
• Monitoring and testing

Read on to find out more about these top website UX design strategies. Let’s go!

To learn how Digital Authority Partners can create a standout website for you, watch this video!

Creating an Accessible Website

Designing a website that people of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds can use is what we mean when we say “accessibility.” An accessible website considers people with temporary or permanent disabilities and those with slow internet speeds.

In website UX design, accessibility should be incorporated from the early stages of the process, not as an afterthought. Doing so improves the user experience for everyone and benefits website traffic, search engine optimization (SEO), and brand reputation.

An expert Chicago UX design agency considers the following key factors for excellence in accessible UX design:

• keyboard accessibility so that people with motor disabilities can access websites even without a mouse;
• alt text or descriptive text for images to help visually impaired users understand the content; 
• clear and concise language to help cognitively impaired users understand the information presented;
• color contrast to make text and background colors readable for low-vision visitors;
• audio and video captioning and transcripts for the hearing-impaired;
• easy-to-use or fill-out forms that assistive technologies can navigate.

Keeping Site Design Consistent and Simple

Being consistent and straightforward means using a uniform layout, typography, color scheme, and visual design across pages and avoiding unnecessary design elements. 

People can easily navigate and use a website with a consistent design. They can identify where they are on the site and what actions are available. This approach helps reduce cognitive load and frustration and makes your website more recognizable and memorable to users.

To create a consistent and straightforward website UX design:

• Develop a design system including guidelines, standards, and reusable components, for example, using the same header and footer on each page.
• Integrate consistent branding across the website with logos, color palettes, and visual elements.
• Apply a grid-based layout when positioning elements to maintain a clean and organized design.
• Maintain the same font family, size, and color throughout the website.
• Minimize animation and special effects to avoid overwhelming the user.
• Add white space to create visual breathing room and help separate content.

Creating User Personas To Improve UX Design

Creating user personas is essential in developing a good website UX because it helps designers understand their target audience. Personas are fictional characters that represent user types.  They allow designers to sympathize with their users and create experiences that cater to their needs.

Having user personas to refer to during the design process can help designers make more informed decisions. These help designers empathize with end users and create designs accordingly. 

Here are some steps to create user personas for website UX design:

• Find out what users need, how they behave, and what they are experiencing through testing and surveys.
• Identify common patterns and break user groups into segments based on similar characteristics.
• Develop persona profiles that include the persona's name, age, occupation, goals, motivations, behaviors, pain points, and other relevant information.
• Use personas in the design process, considering how each interacts with the website and designing the user experience accordingly.
• Keep personas up-to-date because user needs and behaviors change over time.

Adding a Sitemap

A sitemap represents the structure of a website by listing all its pages and sections and organizing them hierarchically. Adding a sitemap improves website UX design so users can navigate the website more efficiently.

Sitemaps also help search engine bots easily crawl and index the website, thus improving search engine ranking, visibility, and site traffic. When an experienced UX design agency in Chicago makes a sitemap for your website, they follow these steps:

• Identify the main sections of the website.
• Create a tree-like structure with the most important sections on top and the less important ones underneath.
• List all pages on the website, such as the homepage, about us, services, products, and other relevant pages.
• Include metadata for each page, such as the page title, URL, and meta description.
• Use a sitemap tool such as the XML Sitemap Generator or Slickplan.
• Publish the sitemap by uploading it to your website's root directory or submitting it to search engines through Google Search Console.

Monitoring and Testing

Perform regular monitoring and testing of your website to avoid the pitfalls of poor usability, such as sluggish page loads or broken links. 

Testing design modifications during an update can reveal which parts of the design are successful and which need improvement. Likewise, testing different designs allows marketers to identify which changes are most effective in enhancing the user experience.

Monitoring and testing provide valuable user feedback on your website's performance.  These tasks also help identify accessibility issues that may hinder users with disabilities. The following strategies make for effective monitoring and testing: 

• Identify goals such as increasing engagement or conversion rates to focus your monitoring and testing efforts.
• Check critical metrics such as page load times, bounce rates, or conversion rates.
• Use Google Analytics or Hotjar to track user behavior and identify website design and functionality issues.
• Conduct user testing through usability testing sessions, focus groups, or surveys.
• A/B test different website designs or content versions to see which performs better.
• Audit website performance to identify user experience issues, such as slow loading times or broken links.

Summing Up

Businesses must have a well-designed website that prioritizes UX design to engage customers and improve search engine ranking. A site with excellent UX design is accessible, consistent, and simple. Also, marketers must never overlook adding and updating a sitemap, site monitoring, and repeated testing of UX design to meet customers’ changing needs and preferences.

Do you want to find out how the best website UX design can help your business? Find out today! Call Digital Authority Partners.