Deep Dive Into: Influence of UX on design
Picture it, Monday morning and you’re running late to catch your bus to work. There are only a few minutes left until your bus arrives…Luckily, you have the e-ticket, bought well in advance meaning no precious time is lost hunting for that final 20p! You load up the app and…where is the ticket? Was it in ‘Tickets’ or ‘Last Purchased’? Where even is the menu on this thing? In the time it takes trying to figure the app out your bus is driving off and you are late.
If that sounds all too familiar then did you know you have fallen victim of poor user experience? In the 21st century, you would assume that all technology is designed in a user-friendly way. But as you might know from countless real life inconveniences, it is not always true.
UX, or the ‘user experience’, was first tested in the 1950s at Bell Labs. It was used to improve a touchtone keypad design based on customer reviews. Since then UX is used pretty much everywhere in everyday life, like managing you finance or booking theatre tickets. It can be summed up as ‘usability’ and means every interaction your business might have with visitors. The base line of UX is to focus on ‘users’ and how they experience your business.
Let’s look at the numbers
52% of online shoppers claim that quick page loading influences their loyalty to a site.
Intentional and strategic user experience has the potential to raise conversion rates by as much as 400%.
74% of people are likely to return to a website if it is optimised for mobile.
Still, only 55% of companies are currently conducting any user experience testing.
How do you know when something is ‘usable’?
The simple answer is by testing and reviewing your designs. The details include: prototyping and then launching the design to see how your audience respond. A process of reviewing information acquired from audience comments and data. This will give you the opportunity to adjust your website to the desired audience and therefore achieve better results in your business. One of the easiest ways to keep track of collected data is Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that helps you analyse your website traffic, the amount of data sent and received by your visitors. Stored information includes their web preferences, most view pages etc. You can read our top tips to setting up a Google Analytics dashboard here. Storing and analysing this data helps to create a more human-friendly web design. Design based on information given by people, helps create better and more intuitive solutions to guide you audience through the website.
Examples of UX design made by Interactive Schools.
Very simple but very useful to have the menu allocated in the upper part of the page on the left. But, why is it so common and so easy to navigate?
This design is based on reading patterns that are common for English speaking countries. Left to Right & Up to Down. The minimalist design used here makes the navigation even easier, when your eyes find the main menu button, it links with single ‘contact’ menu on the other side. If we were to use, Google Analytics on this example, collected data would reveal that a huge percentage of the audience comes from English speaking countries, which justifies the position of the menu.
Every business has a purpose for their website, from selling goods to events booking. One of the main reasons for a school to have a well-crafted website is to encourage new pupils to apply and drive admissions. This example shows how to make the visitor’s journey easier by adding two extra option of next possible choices. Next to button ‘apply’, there are ‘enquire’ and ‘visit’, the other two reasons why people visit school websites, based on data.
How to improve your website?
Collected data is a powerful tool that helps shape your website. But how will you know if the website works correctly in response to that data? Useberry.com allows you to upload your website prototype and test it. In a few minutes your website will be viewed by testers, who can answer your questions. They will also review strong and weak sides of the design and help to improve, or confirm, your design choices. Hotjar.com is another site that helps keep the track of the data and user experience from your site. Graphs and data visualisations help you to recognise the biggest and the smallest activity on the website. You can switch between click, scroll and move heatmaps while you analyse for user activity. Heatmaps form Hotjar can show you that to biggest interest in website can be find in upper corners and near images.
Inspired by data
Design that is inspired by data ‘speaks directly’ to the audience, addressing their expectations. Thanks to great research and amazing tools that are now available, it becomes easier to understand the needs of the audience and to guide them through the website, improving their experience. Making your website one of their favourites.
That’s all for this week! We hope that this guide has aided you in your understanding of the influence of UX on design.
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