Being business savvy as a UX designer will help you land advertised job opportunities easily. Below you will find a curated list of business strategies UX designers should know that will help them navigate the competitive market.

Leverage Artificial Intelligence

The world of artificial intelligence cuts across multiple industries. One of the best ways to leverage the power of AI is by using it to increase sales, improve productivity, and gain a competitive edge. You can attend coding bootcamp like General Assembly or Thinkful to master artificial intelligence. You can also decide to hire experts in AI to help you achieve your goals.

Conduct Competitive Analysis

It’s paramount to conduct in-depth research regarding your competitors before entering the market. This will help establish your niche, as you will easily identify the gap in the industry. Through research, you may also be able to identify ways to improve on your competitors’ services or products. You can also evaluate their success and failures and come up with new ways to operate.

The world of design is ever-changing. There is always a need to improve user experience in the market. To be a successful UX designer, you must invest ample time in finding out about competitors before delving into the market.

Curate Templates

The best way to get ahead in the market is by making your work effective and efficient. To ensure you produce quality content fast, you should rely on custom templates. Instead of starting from scratch when a new client approaches, you can rely on these set structures. Building your personalized templates or design systems will help you control time, labor, and quality.

Pricing Strategy

As a professional, you may keep your prices relatively low to attract customers, or price them beyond standards and cut off the ordinary customer. It’s a bit challenging to put a price on creativity, but you can draw a lot of information from other businesses or competitors.

Some businesses and experts in UX design started by under-quoting their services and slowly worked up to their level of success. This does not have to be your strategy. Ensure you have a proper business plan in place to ensure you can meet your long-term goals.

Review Your Performance

You have to have a structure in place to ensure you are improving on your craft. It’s important to ensure your design ideations positively impact a company’s profit. You can obtain data on the company’s website customer experience. It’s easy to establish by checking the number of customers visiting and the amount of time they spend on the site.

Increase Services

In addition to offering UX design services, you can go further and include web development or SEO services to your portfolio. Most companies prefer having one umbrella company delivering all their website solutions. Therefore, adding other services to your portfolio will help you stand out in the market.

Improve Customer Service

It’s always essential to review your client’s level of satisfaction. This will help you in improving the types of services you deliver. There are multiple professionals and businesses who have built their reputations based on customer service. If you are an established company, outsourcing a customer service team might be the best option.

Build Customer Loyalty

One of the cornerstones of success is retaining existing clients. It is much easier to maintain a relationship with an existing client than to work on acquiring a new one. Ensure the loyalty of your clients by rewarding them. You can create a customer loyalty program, improve customer service, or prioritize feedback. Most companies offer their clients discounts on certain services or during specific months.

Conclusion

Keeping your skills up-to-date as a UX designer cannot be overlooked. The world of design is always booming with new technology, methods, and approaches to improve user experience. Failure to develop a proper business strategy that keeps you informed can easily result in losses.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the field of web design and development has a job growth rate of 13 percent, which shows promising growth. Fostering the best practices to succeed can help you thrive, whether you are working as a freelancer, in a startup, or an established company.

About the author: Daisy Waithereo Wambua is a seasoned writer with a decade of experience in writing, proofreading, and editing. She has spoken at Maseno University to help young women explore new careers and learn more about technology. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Communications and Public Relations, a Certificate in Web Development, and a Master’s Degree in International Studies.

Posted by: Situated Research

The post Business Strategies UX Designers Should Know appeared first on Situated Research.

Online businesses in 2020 are forced to compete with large online and big box retailers, including Amazon, Wayfair, and brick-and-mortar stores like Walmart and Best Buy. In order to compete, e-commerce websites need to have a great user-experience (UX) and a streamlined buying process. Complicated checkout systems, over-cluttered product pages, and a lack of mobile optimization can severely inhibit a retailer from competing with large companies that have large, dedicated user-experience teams.

For the business owner, a well-designed e-commerce platform allows them to run their business easily, and can help streamline daily operations and customer service calls. Following are some tips and best practices to follow to help grow both organic traffic and sales conversions moving into 2020.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and UX

User Experience and SEO are critical components of any e-commerce site, especially as industry verticals are becoming more competitive. Digital advertising prices continue to rise and generating organic traffic is essential. In addition, cross-functional expertise is required to build a website that has good UX and SEO, as these fields continue to overlap. Google algorithms are becoming better at reading page content, placing priority on well-designed content that is not artificial. Prior black-hat tactics to raise search rank, like loading page footers with keyword-dense text, are now causing page ranks in search engines (like Google or Bing) to drop. Driving organic traffic can feel daunting and will take time, but will pay-off in the end with good SEO practices.

Website Sitemap

Part of good UX and SEO involves a well-designed sitemap. A sitemap reflects the website page and navigation structure, and hierarchically organizes website content. Adding a sitemap to Google Search Console is important for any e-commerce site, so that search engines crawl and understand product information. Google will be notified to any changes that you make to your site, which should happen on a frequent basis so content does not become stale. A sitemap not only makes the new content you post discovered quickly by search engines, but is reflected in the website navigation to users (helping tell them about the content on your website).

Simplify Page Content (and Clutter)

Clear, simple to understand content can raise engagement with your audience. In many instances, “less is more” – as said by Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, a German-American architect that pioneered the minimalist movement. Your website visitors appreciate you communicating your message in a simple, yet efficient manner.

Similar to a cluttered advertisement, websites with distracting content, too much text, or an unclear message will lose their effectiveness. Over time, more and more things fight for our attention, and the average user has a shorter attention span. Users are willing to spend less time figuring out what you’re trying to get across, so get the job done with simple, clear messaging on your website. Design each page using proper keyword research and ensure landing pages have a clear engagement goal in mind so that your content has a purpose.

Optimizing Website Structure and User Journey

Supporting the intentions of website visitors is critical to raising conversion rates. Whether the goal is to sell a product or communicate an important piece of information, users should be able to fulfill their needs as efficiently as possible when using your website. If a product is difficult to find or a message becomes muddled, conversion rates will fall.

Part of optimizing the user experience (UX) of a website is to ensure that different types of users (personas) are able to achieve their goals efficiently: whether it be completing an action or finding information. A well-designed navigation structure will help the user journey, so that users can find what they want in the least amount of clicks (and with less confusion along the way).

Make Sure Your Site is Responsive

More people are becoming accustomed to purchasing groceries, clothing, home décor, and vehicles in the comfort of their homes. According to Forbes, Cyber Week had 62% of traffic coming from mobile in 2018, and fifteen percent of orders of were placed on mobile phones over the Thanksgiving holiday. Other sources place over 60% of website visitors (and climbing) using a mobile device like a phone or tablet. With this in mind, websites need to use a responsive design to be sure that content is optimized for mobile devices. The lack of an intuitive UX can result in user frustration, causing visitors to leave before completing a purchase on a website.

Website speed

Website performance contributes heavily to page rank and SEO, as well as usability. Research by Google describes how sites appearing on page one of Google display content in 1.19 seconds on average, while those on page two display primary content in 1.29 seconds. Some tools that can help you gauge and improve your website speed are Website Grader by HubSpot, Google PageSpeed Insights, and Pingdom Website Speed Test.

SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate

An SSL certificate authenticates your website to encrypt data that is being transferred from a website to users. SSL certificates ensure that a website is secure when visitors make purchases, which is important is the growing age of e-commerce. An SSL certificate encrypts sensitive user data, such as personal bank information, phone numbers and addresses.

Google Chrome, the most-used browser, has begun notifying users when a website is not fully secured with an SSL certificate. Fully encrypting data using SSL will provide users the best, most secure experience: ensuring that sensitive data is transmitted securely between the browser and web server. In a world where data breaches and security are becoming commonplace, users will trust and show loyalty to brands that value their privacy and sensitive information: highlighting the need for SSL certificates on websites.

Conclusion

Optimizing your website has a powerful effect on your marketing effectiveness, as well as your bottom line. Increasing conversions on your website, whether serving a goal of purchasing products or communicating information about your business (in a clear, efficient manner) will attract new customers and build loyalty. By optimizing the user journey for your website, different types of users can be served in a more effective manner.

The skill sets involved in designing a website continue to broaden and overlap. Experts in development, graphic design, SEO, UX, marketing and content writing need to know how their design decisions impact other areas of design. For example, designing a page around a keyword (SEO) impacts the website structure (UX), written content, and image content on the page (which can also impact website speed). A working knowledge of these fields is required to balance design decision trade-offs to make websites more effective, and this expertise can yield powerful improvements. In many instances, a simple analysis of a website by an expert can present some low-hanging fruit, which can have a huge impact on results.

To gauge how your website currently measures up, and identify some low-hanging fruit that can improve your website, request a free website marketing analysis from CueCamp. This report is in video form, generated by CueCamp’s team of experts to show the user-friendliness and marketing effectiveness of your website. Start out 2020 on the right foot, and reach out today.

Authors: Shannon Olear and Matt Sharritt, Ph.D. (Situated Research)

The post Boost 2020 Profit: E-commerce Experience Optimization appeared first on Situated Research.

User-centered design isn’t just about creating a great experience for customers—it’s also a smart business move. 

In our previous article “The True ROI of UX: Convincing the Executive Suite,” we talked about how to persuade company executives on the ROI of UX, and how to illustrate the value of UX in increasing business KPIs. In this second piece, we discuss how, in order to really drive the message home, it is essential that UX teams present successful case studies of similar B2B UX redesigns.

The trouble is, finding data from real-world B2B UX redesigns is extremely challenging. Through dogged perseverance, our UX team found some useful data, but the proven difficulty of defining the ROI of UX (ie. how to exactly measure it) complicated matters further, and it became evident that the ROI of UX needed to be categorized into “soft” and “hard” dollars.

On the “soft side,” results are categorized into increased customer loyalty and net promoter scores (NPS), increased word-of-mouth referrals, productivity gains, and increased efficiency. On the “hard dollars” side, increased earnings and cost savings are gained from fewer support calls, less spent on development, fewer development “redo” cases, less user-testing, increased sales, and so on.

Here are the internal and external ROI measures:

Internal ROI

• Increased user productivity
• Decreased user errors
• Decreased training costs
• Savings gained from making changes earlier in design life cycle
• Decreased user support

External ROI

• Increased user productivity
• Increased sales
• Decreased customer support costs
• Savings gained from making changes earlier in the design life cycle
• Reduced cost of providing training

The B2B UX redesign case studies below represent the results of our research into the top 15 global design agencies/consultancies who performed B2B UX design/redesign projects. These case studies come from prominent design/consulting firms such as Accenture Interactive, Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey, Forrester, IDEO, Frog Design, Fjord, Adaptive Path, and others.

ROI of UX: B2B Redesign Case Studies

Bank of America

The giant bank identified and funded a UX redesign project to improve its online enrollment application for online banking. In developing the business case, the design team identified yield (or the percentage of customers completing the process) as the primary metric.

Prototyping and testing various design solutions with yield as the primary success metric proved a successful design strategy. The week the new registration form went live, the yield metric nearly doubled, and exceeded the desired ROI benchmark. This was a win for the design team, as well as the business unit that sponsored the project.

General Electric Software UX Unification

Known for its industrial expertise, by 2010 General Electric Co. had quietly become the world’s 14th largest software developer by revenue. These capabilities had grown opportunistically, primarily in response to requests from specific clients. As a result, little software consistency existed across the company and significant development efforts were invested in problems already solved in other divisions.

Overall, users of GE software reported that the quality didn’t reflect the excellence of GE’s hardware engineering. GE leadership decided to make an investment in creating a common software platform for the company. The Software Center of Excellence developed a UX Center of Excellence that would guide GE management, and drive the culture change to ensure that their software user experience matched their well-earned reputation for stellar hardware engineering.

Leaders, engineers, and designers collaborated to build processes and tools to support culture change together with a core foundation of design tools and success metrics that would support its UX practice. In the first year after its launch, the IIDS generated a 100% productivity gain in development teams and saved an estimated $30 million for the company. These digital transformation initiatives provided the foundation for GE Digital—and GE’s leadership in the industrial internet.

Courtesy frog design

Cathay Pacific

Cathay Pacific Airways is known for its leadership in the adoption of new technologies. The airline was the first in the world to announce plans to install in-flight email, the first to link its Airbus aircraft to its maintenance centers electronically, and the first in the world to auction air tickets online.

For company employees, a staff of eight to ten people work full-time to answer questions and book travel. Working with a design consultancy, Cathay Pacific created a new online portal called TravelDesk, a one-stop shop for staff travel.

The portal design project resulted in significant cost savings for the company:

1. The online portal reduced call-center volume (employee benefits center regarding policy questions, and service center regarding flight availability).
2. It increased productivity. Ground staff at the airport previously spent significant time managing the listing and check-in process for employees using their travel benefits. This project reduced the time required for these tasks.

Virgin America Website Redesign

Virgin America was on a mission to make flying fun again. In 2014, the airline decided to reinvent the digital travel experience, and in order to meet the needs of modern travelers, create the world’s first responsive airline website. The company decided to design and engineer a new digital platform that could respond to modern travel needs and behaviors.

After successfully A/B testing the new design against the old, Virgin America’s reinvented responsive site was released. They announced an IPO following two successful quarters running the new site that had exceeded performance goals in the following areas:

• 14% increase in conversion rate
• 20% fewer support calls
• Flyers booked nearly twice as fast, on any kind of device

Virgin America responsive website design.

HubSpot

In a recent major iteration of HubSpot, the company decided to re-think the user experience on its site, starting from the ground level with user feedback. They tested entirely new conversion methods, copy messaging, and even visual treatments. As part of the process, they pushed countless experiments live, and iterated with each piece of feedback, putting the user in control.

The result? The conversion rate doubled (tripled, even, in some areas). As HubSpot receives upwards of 10 million visitors per month, one can imagine the impact this had on revenue.

Continental Office B2B Website Redesign

With a brand refresh just a few months prior, Continental Office, a customized workplace solution provider, needed to update its 6-year-old website. The team wanted to ensure they were integrating buyer personas to provide an engaging user experience complete with relevant content marketing.

The old website was fine at the time but wasn’t built around telling the whole story while understanding the customer journey.

“In creating that great user experience, you have to stay relevant with what people are looking for and then build your website around that, which I believe is what we did and has allowed us to have these successful results.” – Rachel Iannarino, Vice President, Marketing.

The results of getting to know customers and building a website around that speak for themselves. Through the redesign strategy, traffic increased by 103% year-over-year and net-new contacts increased by 645%.

“Even though we had such great results last year, it’s already up — the number of new contacts is up over 80% from last year already. And I can’t lie; I keep waiting for these numbers to kind of plateau, but fortunately for us, the results just keep trending in a positive way” – Iannarino said.

Music & Arts

Music & Arts sells musical instruments and comprises 150+ retail stores, and 300+ affiliate locations. Their sizable eCommerce site had numerous usability problems that hindered online sales.

There is a detailed case study of this UX redesign project on the Toptal Design Blog: “eCommerce Redesigned: How Minor Changes Made Major UX Improvements.”

After a three month UX redesign project that significantly improved basic usability issues (consistency, simplicity, user flow, system feedback) their online sales increased around 30% year-over-year.

Pubmatic

This ad-tech platform’s UX redesign project took over a year. The B2B platform was about 7 years old and was made up of a hodge-podge of UIs, a variety of different-looking web-applications that were created at different times. As the company was maturing, it needed a unified UX design and a brand-consistent look-and-feel.

As a result of the UX redesign, NPS increased from 6 (detractors) to 9 (promoters) over 3 months immediately after launch when measured against the old platform’s satisfaction data.

Final Thoughts

A very interesting experiment related to the ROI of UX was conducted by the Geoff Teehan, Director of Product Design at Facebook in 2006. They called it the “UX Fund.” The $50,000 fund invested in companies that focus on delivering great user experiences. The hypothesis was that the ROI of UX should be reflected in their stock price over time.

Over a ten year period, from 2006 to 2016—including a major financial crisis in the middle of it—the “UX Fund” returned 450% vs the Nasdaq’s 93.2% return (that’s 45% annual return over ten years which beats any other asset class). You can read more about this experiment here.

Despite the evidence that UX design investments enhance customer experience and address business problems, executives still find it a challenge to define the financial benefits using traditional ROI measures. UX designers best serve businesses if they can not only create great “designs that work,” but are able to articulate and convincingly demonstrate tangible business results and KPIs to executives and stakeholders.

In order to be convincing and really get to the heart of what executives need to hear, UX designers need to think in similar terms to business leaders. Think: how can we best provide business value? If we do this, what will the return on our investment be? What metrics will demonstrate that we’ve made the right choices?

If done well, design can help bring order and coherence to the disorder that is the current state of the B2B world and enterprise applications. A 2016 design study of 408 different companies found that the more a company focused on and invested in design, the more they saw sales increase and experienced higher customer retention rates—customer engagement soared, and they moved through product cycles faster. All this simply because they put UX design, and more importantly, the customer, at the very heart of their business.

Clearly, good user experience is good for business. Today it’s become part of a UX practitioner’s job to offer decision-makers a compelling demonstration of the true value of exceptional UX design, and that there is indeed an impressive ROI in UX.

Written by:  Miklos Philips, Toptal
Posted by: Situated Research

The post The True ROI of UX: B2B Redesign Case Studies appeared first on Situated Research.

Card sorting will help you to understand your users’ expectations and their mental image of your product’s use.

Card sorting allows you insight into your users’ thought processes allowing you to see why they organize content in certain ways. This is key for organizing your content and developing an intuitive structure for your product.

In-Depth Site Analysis

Card sorting exercises can help structure a website’s information, including site labels and navigation schemes. This boosts usability by making things easy to find.

Smart Design

By creating intuitive, mutually exclusive categories, your final product will be easier to use and more appealing to users with good labeling and navigation.

Work Through Discrepancies

Often, information can be organized in multiple ways. Card sorting will determine the best content structure with consensus on the most logical grouping of information.

We have helped clients early in their design process using card sorting sessions, where users are separately given cards with labels, then asked to organize them and assign category names.

Card sorting has many benefits: to learn more or get started, contact us today.

Written by: Michel Ann Sharritt, VP, Situated Research

The post What is Card Sorting? appeared first on Situated Research.

Although some studies have shown that individuals working alone can generate more and better ideas than when working as a group, the brainstorming activity enables everyone in the group to gain a better understanding of the problem space, and has the added benefit of creating a feeling of common ownership of results.

Good brainstorming focuses on the quantity and creativity of ideas: the quality of ideas is much less important than the sheer quantity. After ideas are generated, they are often grouped into categories and prioritized for subsequent research or application.

The outcomes of brainstorming are:

• A list of ideas or solutions related to a particular problem
• The ideas or solutions organized into groups
• Some form of prioritization based on attributes like cost and feasibility

Idea Mapping

Idea mapping is a visual thinking tool that helps structure information, helping you to better analyze, comprehend, synthesize, recall and generate new ideas. We can help you from the most nascent idea up through prototyping and user testing. You’ll get our expertise in usability and business development.

UI Sketches

Low-fidelity prototypes are a great place to begin, and our team can facilitate UI brainstorming sessions where sketches and basic functionality can give your new product a voice of its own.

Market Research

In addition to prototyping and UI design, we can conduct market research to see where your idea fits into the marketplace. Client confidentiality is paramount and we’ll gladly sign a non-disclosure agreement.

Helping clients in the beginning stages of a project to help get ideas flowing is our forte. Our team specializes in translating high-level objectives into exciting new products and services, down to the finest detail.

From market research to product development, we’ve got you covered. We can work with any budget, so reach out and let us know what you have been thinking about doing.

We thrive on helping businesses launch new products, and would love to facilitate a brainstorming session for your new product. Contact us today to get started.

Written / Posted by: Michel Ann Sharritt, VP, Situated Research

The post How User-Centered Design Can Turn Your Concepts into Kick-Ass Prototypes appeared first on Situated Research.

This helps you stay on the winning side by assessing your branding, usability, accessibility, information architecture, or any other element of your web content strategy.

By examining your competitors’ websites, you can gauge what you do best and what they do best: creating key objectives that you can improve upon.

Over 3,000 companies have had their website analyzed by Situated Research to see how they measure up against their competition.

Detailed Web Analysis

We’ll trace your business objectives through your website to see what services you offer and how effectively you communicate. We’ll look at your site’s navigation structure, color psychology, and social media initiatives.

Assess Competitors

Find out how effectively your industry competitors attract new customers, and how their website’s overall experience stacks up against yours. Typically two or three top competitors can reveal insights into how you can better target clients.

Key Findings Report

A summary will show specific areas that you lead your competitors, and where they lead you. Key findings will allow your design team to maximize the effectiveness of your website and attract more customers.

Your website is an investment. Effective marketing will attract more clients, giving your business the boost it needs. Spy on your competition to grow your market share and maximize the ROI of your website.

To learn more about competitive website assessments and how you can get yours today, visit our website: https://www.situatedresearch.com/services/competitive-website-assessment/

Written by: Michel Ann Sharritt, VP Situated Research

The post Want An Easy Way to Spy on Your Competition? appeared first on Situated Research.

Eye tracking visualizations such as gaze plots, heat maps and gaze replays can easily be interpreted and presented in a convincing way. We have helped companies figure out where their users’ attention is drawn, and derive value by learning what marketing materials are most effective at presenting information.

Track Gaze

Eye tracking uses a non-invasive camera to watch users’ eyes as they ‘track’ information on a screen. We will help you determine where your users are looking, and why.

Heat Maps

Eye tracking sessions generate heat-map style overlays on your interface to show how long users look at a portion of the screen while completing tasks with your product.

Usability Findings

By tracking users’ gaze while they consume information,  you can determine what information is being overlooked, and what information users prefer.

The visual results of eye tracking studies and real-time data observations provide tremendous tools to get non-usability experts excited about and involved in usability testing.

To learn more about eye tracking to design effective interfaces visit our website at: https://www.situatedresearch.com/services/eye-tracking/

Written by: Michel Ann Sharritt, VP of Situated Research

The post Designing Interfaces That Are Effective appeared first on Situated Research.

This list is a starting point to providing the user experience that you want to give your customers online. Remember, if users come to your website and have trouble finding information or ordering a product, they will often leave your website and you will lose their business. 

Website Usability Tip #6: Recognition, Not Recall

Minimize the user’s memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the site to the other. Nor should the user have to remember or learn a new way to do something. (ex. Checkout Process)

• Use common icons that make sense to the user
• Do not over-complicate your interface
• Only use pop up instructions on buttons if you must

Website Usability Tip #7: Flexibility & Efficiency

Flexibility: allow multiple ways of accomplishing the same thing.

Users can find information through:

• A search box
• Using menu navigation
• Breadcrumbs
• Links in the footer

Efficiency: build in simple and efficient methods of doing common tasks, without making it difficult for someone new to the system.

Amazon’s checkout process and shopping cart system are an example, with users being able to set up a ‘one-click’ checkout system where a default credit card and address are stored to make checkout super speedy and easy.

Website Usability Tip #8: Aesthetic and Minimalist Design

Aesthetics is important when designing for the web. Knowing how to balance aesthetics with what users want can be a challenge.

Here are some key points to remember:

• Make sure colors play off of the colors of a well designed logo
• Do not overwhelm users with too much content
• Content should be relevant to the site
• Use clickable videos
• Never use avatars

A big mistake that web designers often make is adding more pages to a website to make it look more ‘legit’. Always remember that users on the Internet usually quickly skim over information, and avoid wordy text. Overwhelming them with redundant information will make them leave the website.

Website Usability Tip #9: Assist Users

Help users recognize and recover from errors.

• Error messages should be expressed in plain language
• If there is a process for ordering something (or otherwise), guide users through the process
• Never make users guess what to do next
• Constructively suggest a solution if a mistake is made

Website Usability Tip #10: Documentation

Even though it is better if a website can be used without any assistance, it may be necessary to provide documentation for complex tasks.

Any such information should be easy to search, and focused on the user’s task.

• List concrete steps to be carried out
• Make sure instructions are not too long
• Ideally, it should be contextual (placed where it is needed, so users don’t have to search for it)

Let us know if you have any questions on our website usability tips. If you would like a free expert analysis of your website’s usability and marketing, you can request a free website analysis video to get a professional free analysis of your website, emailed to you in the form of a short video.

We look forward to helping you create the ultimate user experience.

Written by: Michel Ann Sharritt
Posted by: Situated Research

The post Tips on Improving Your Website’s User Experience, Part 2 appeared first on Situated Research.

Our team has come up with ten usability guidelines for web developers and business owners to follow. This list is a starting point to providing the user experience that you want to give your customers online. Remember, if users come to your website and have trouble finding information or ordering a product, they will leave your website and in turn you will lose business.

Website Usability Tip #1: Visibility

Always show users where they are at on the website. 

• Use breadcrumbs
• Highlight where the user is at in the menu navigation
• Use sitemaps

Website Usability Tip #2: Communicate Clearly

The website should speak the user’s language. Nothing should be left up for interpretation. 

• Links and buttons should be concise and clear
• Labeling should make sense to the user
• Labeling should also be short and to the point
• ‘Error 404’ pages mean nothing to most users
• Buttons should be labeled in a way to bring a call to action (buy now)

Website Usability Tip #3: User Error

Users often click on items by mistake and need a clearly marked “emergency exit” to leave the unwanted area without having to go through an extended process. 

• Use clear breadcrumbs
• Use sitemaps
• Have a search button
• Make sure your logo is clickable to take the user back to the home page
• In some instances pop boxes may be useful warning your users of their error

Website Usability Tip #4: Consistency

Consistency is key to keep your users happy and coming back for more. Users should not have to reorient themselves each time they click on a page.

• Keep the same format for all pages of your website
• Placement of menu navigation should remain consistent from page to page
• Heading font sizes and placement should be consistent
• Labeling should not change
• Functionality of buttons, forms, etc. should not change

Website Usability Tip #5: Error Prevention

Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place.

• Eliminate error-prone conditions
• Check for errors
• Present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action
• Design a simple environment

Check back next week for the remaining 5 usability tips. In the meantime, if you would like our team to review your website you can request a free website analysis video to get a professional free analysis of your website, emailed to you in the form of a short video.

We look forward to helping you create the ultimate user experience.

Written by: Michel Ann Sharritt
Posted by: Situated Research

The post Tips on Improving Your Website’s User Experience, Part 1 appeared first on Situated Research.

In this post and the next, you will learn 10 tips for designing dashboards and application interfaces that are stylish and user-friendly while still presenting important data to your users in a format that they can understand. Whether you are just starting UI design or your product is almost finished, jump in and learn how to design the perfect dashboard.

#1: Ask Your Audience

What do your users care about? Developers frequently make mistakes in determining what their applications will be used for, in turn focusing on metrics that aren’t as important as they think they are.

Instead of guessing about what your users will find important, poll them to find out directly. Facebook used this strategy to understand the needs of its advertisers and released a UI update as a result. They understood that understanding their end user was important and that they should have conducted research before their initial launch.

#2: Design for Different Platforms

How will your users interact with your application? Will they view it on their iPad, on a full resolution PC, or on their smartphone? Knowing the platform which your users prefer is key to building a powerful and usable interface.

While every modern website should be responsive it is important to design your application with your most widely used platform in mind. Things like large buttons, for example, are crucial for tablet apps.

Use Google Analytics to see which devices are used to access your website, and then design for your most popular platform.

#3: Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

There are certain features of UI design that are common between websites. Almost every social network, for example, has a feed of recent updates. Almost every B2B application has a left-aligned navigation bar and a right-aligned content section.

Instead of designing your dashboard from the ground up, use features common to your type of application to speed up the design process. Dropdown notifications or top-right corner account menus are ubiquitous and well-known in UI design.

#4: Color Psychology is Important

Colors play a fundamental role in design, particularly in the design of great user interfaces. Use colors to alert and notify users to tasks, activities, features, and more in the form of button colors and alerts.

Generally, it’s best to use predictable and common colors within your design. Green is a great indicator that everything is okay, while orange and red can be used to indicate a small or serious problem.

#5: Keep the Design Simple

When in doubt, simplify. The best user interfaces are not massively complex – in fact, the best UIs are not complex at all. With the right approach to usability, you can put a huge amount of functionality behind a simple, user-friendly dashboard design.

Break your product’s functions down into core categories, then use these categories to determine your interface’s design.

If your product has hundreds of features, categorize them and create a tabbed or modular layout for users to select features from. Simplicity works, and it’s always best to select clean, simple design over something cluttered but powerful.

We hope that this post helped to give you a good start to creating an awesome dashboard. We will post the last five tips later on this week. In the mean time if you would like to learn more about our company or the services that we offer, visit our website at www.situatedresearch.com. We would love to help you out with your next big design.

Written by: Michel Ann Sharritt
Posted by: Situated Research

The post Tips on Creating an Awesome Dashboard User Experience appeared first on Situated Research.