Usability In The User Experience
If you’re a business owner looking to build a website, you’ve probably come across the term “user experience (UX) design” thrown around by the professionals quite a bit. But what is UX design, really, and why should you care? As a web design Singapore company, we’re here to field those questions in this post.
A broad definition of user experience encompasses all aspects of an end-user’s interaction with a company, its products, and services. Good UX design provides for an exemplary user experience by meeting the needs of the user without fuss or bother. Its simplicity and elegance make the user experience a delightful one.
Relating more specifically to the digital domain, a pertinent component of user experience is usability, which is a key factor in determining if users stay on your page. When a page fails to clearly communicate what it’s offering, users leave. If the information is hard to locate or users get lost on a site, they leave. In this way, poor usability has a very real cost on your site’s performance. On the other hand, the statistics show that spending a mere 10% of a design project’s budget on usability yields, on average, an improvement of more than double a website’s desired quality metrics.
How You Can Improve Usability
1. Consistency
Consistency allows users to ‘learn’ how to navigate a site. For example, having all buttons on your site in red and in a rectangle shape allows users to discern that if an element is red and rectangle, it is likely a button and clickable. For example, in the illustration above from the SingPass website, the ‘Login’ button
is in red and of rectangle shape which lets you know that it is a button. However, the ‘Log Out’ button is grey in color which is confusing as grey buttons are commonly used to denote disabled buttons and may confuse users.
2. Intuitive
Is it possible for users to easily navigate a site unassisted to achieve what they want? Are elements on a website self-explanatory and follow logically from each other? An intuitive design anticipates the needs of users and sets out to meet them before users are even consciously aware of it. The result is a user experience that is in equal parts seamless as it is effortless.
3. Informative
Where certain desired applications are not pervasive and cannot rely on common user conventions to guide navigation, good design is informative and unambiguous. Consider the above example from the CapitaStar mobile app, which confirms the successful purchase of a voucher and informs the user where to proceed to redeem it, even allowing the user to get to the wallet via a simple click on the notification.
Now You Know
User experience is not simply a fancy term to glorify the design thinking process. It is the fundamental task of understanding what it is the end user requires and from there designing the user interface to meet the needs of the user.