10 Tips to Improve Your UX Design Practice

If you are a beginner you should understand that the UX design world is immense. The web is saturated with a lot of information and advice. The latest trends fly by on a regular basis, all of which are aimed at seperating the wheat from the chaff. And that can be somewhat challenging.

One of the quickest-growing practices in web design and development is an upsurge in empathising with the reader or the existing audience of a website or application.

Today, we want to help you with important tips that will ultimately make you a prolific UX designer and set up a framework for creating apps and designing websites for real audiences. Let’s find out how you can improve your UX Design practice.

Simplicity

Simplicity in a website design simply means getting rid of unnecessary components for a design. Note that a visitor coming to your site wants to accomplish a specific action. They will scan the information to get what they have come to look for. It’s important to understand that they won’t stick around if they have to enter into a maze to find what they want.

Simplicity entails having a clean layout, a two or three color scheme and plenty of white space, an average of two fonts and a third one for your logo. Your graphics must have a purpose; to be both clickable and informational.

“When it comes to the recommended tabs, a website should have just a few tabs that are satisfying, unless they have overlapping topics.”
— Gerald Gordon – Website designer at Essay Geeks.

White spaces sometimes called negative space is the background color of a design, does not necessarily need to be white. It needs to be the space between website elements. In a simple design, white space dominates the page.

Consistency

If a visitor is able to tell which are the main colors of the website after three clicks, it means you have maintained color consistency. Consistency is having a logic that binds the elements together and ensures a global unity. When you need to use colors, it’s good to have three of them. The font should be two or three. For instance, the best thing is to have one font color for your post titles and one for the content. Consistent font sizes are important as well.

In addition, the layout and background also form part of the consistency. The layout must be able to understand what information they will obtain from your site.

Acessibility

Accessibility is not part of SEO, it’s more than how people can find your website but more importantly after they know you, how can they reach you? In this case, you must consider some factors such as the URL name, on-site name and approachability / responsiveness.

If your URL is clear, a user will find what they want more easily. But if you have long URLs with some illogical string of numbers, a user could just walk away from your site. Additionally, you need to ensure your website is fully responsive on all possible devices. If a user can’t access your website while on the fly, then your site won’t get more visitors.

Utilize the right UX design tools

The online world is saturated with UX design tools which make it overwhelming when it comes to the selection of the right tools, especially for beginners. Here we advise a user to ensure they test, test and test the tools again. In any case, you are a user. If you are not satisfied with a particular tool, then test several of them until you get the right one for the job.

Review user guidance

For many people, user guidance is simply manuals and documentation can be beneficial when it comes to creating a great first user-experience. However, user guidance serves more purpose than a manual. Websites sometimes do not have a manual but may have user’s guidance which is designed in form of microcopy on forms like labels and hint text.

A good way to review user guidance is to read it to a user and see how they interpret it. In this way, you will have found a way to enhance your UX design.

Start an online survey

Sometimes as a UX designer, you might be feeling anti-social while at the same time you want to obtain some user feedback without having to interact with users. In this case, an online survey can work. Online surveys are quick to launch, inexpensive to execute and most of the time, surveys analyze themselves.

Keep the surveys as brief as possible and specific and users will provide plenty of suggestions on how you can enhance their experience. The only challenging part of online surveys is that you will get suggestions and feedback depending on the way you phrase your questions. Therefore, we advise users to create unbiased questions.

Design a paper model

If you are considering starting your next design practice, walk away from your laptop or PC. Instead, take a few sheets of paper and design an interactive paper model. This is the best way to make users participate in the initial stages of your design practices. You will also be able to know how they will use your system before you start coding.

Put on your users’ shoes

Many a time people suffer from a range of social biases which makes it impossible for users to see the world from another person’s perspective. So it’s good to put yourself in your user’s perspectives. Always try to empathise with your users as they interact with your website, system or application.

Credibility

If you are buying something from Amazon, you are always sure and confident because it’s an authoritative site. You are sure your money won’t disappear and you will receive what you are purchasing. You should not think that credibility is only left for e-commerce websites but it is also important for informational websites.

You must let a user be able to have a deeper knowledge of who you are and what you do. Ensure to put a testimonial section where customers can leave for testimonials and this will appeal the trust of your users

Refresh your arsenal

UX design like any other field experiences a slew of new tools that are introduced almost every week. You need to be on top of that. Most of the time UX designers depend on their favorite set of tools that they use and revise them occasionally- maybe only when one of the tools gets discontinued.

Note that any new tool released is in response to a genuine user complains and is aimed at solving user problems more effectively than the already existing tools. So try to use new tools.

Now go and improve your UX Design Practice

Design a website or application for different users can be challenging since you have your own perspectives, experiences and innovative knowledge of apps and websites. Once you make use of these tips, you will start seeing things from a fresh viewpoint and empathise more directly with your website/app users. Step by step, you will improve your UX Design practice.