Hello, everybody. My name’s Brian Lewis and we’re here to talk today about user experience (UX) design. Great designers really know how to leverage the use of powerful yet subtle design techniques to really make the difference between a design that just looks pretty and one that really resonates with visitors, one that really looks right – one that communicates effectively with its visitors – connects with its visitors, engages them and that helps the visitors convert to become leads and customers.
User Experience (UX) Design Principles
1. Design Consistency
There’s a lot of these different types of user experience (UX) design tactics. We’re just going to cover a few of them in this video. First one is the importance of consistency in design and there’s a lot of elements that good designers are consistent within their design. One of those elements would be your interaction elements in terms of buttons and links. The reason why that’s so important is that visitors, when they arrive on your site, start to look for certain patterns and they will accept those patterns as they go through the rest of your site.
So when they see a particular button they’re going to expect that the visual treatment of those buttons are going to be similar on other pages and they don’t have to then think, “Is a button a button or not?” The same thing with links and we see this quite often on websites where link text may have different font treatments or different colors. That’s really forcing your visitors to have to try to figure out whether that’s a link or not. It’s creating extra work for them.
2. Relevant Imagery
Another thing that great web designers do is they make sure that the images that are used on the site are really relevant to the content and furthering the communication of the content and the brand. In fact, there’s a very interesting study that shows that when a visitor sees an image on your site, if it isn’t immediately relevant to that content, they will dismiss that image but even worse than that is they’ll then think that most of the other images they’re going to see in your site are not going to be relevant. So if you do have relevant images after that, they may not even pay attention to those.
3. Font Treatment
I also want to talk a little bit about font treatment. So we can do quite a few videos on font treatments, but you’ve probably been to sites before where you’ve seen all sorts of different types of fonts. It really can create a lot of visual clutter. Sometimes we’ve seen as much as 25-30 font treatments on one page as they’re all trying to gather people’s attention. The issue with that is that our eyes have difficulty assimilating to all those different font treatments. The best designers know how to use just the very few amount of font treatments to really guide the visitor through the visit experience and they use what’s known as a good font hierarchy. In other words, headlines are largest, subheadings would be the next largest, and then the copy would be the smallest font to help communicate to visitors as they scan through the pages.
4. Enhance Branding
Also want to talk about fads. The UX designers understand that really the latest fad that’s out there is something that may look cool now, but in 3 or 4 years from now, it may not. It may look really dated and then you may have to be redesigning your site.
Great designers understand that the design of a site is there to enhance the brand and guide the visitor through the visit experience, not necessarily just to create something that looks splashy or that looks different.
5. Color and Contrast
And finally, the last one I want to talk about is colors and contrast. Again, skilled web designers understand that our eyes are attracted to areas of bright colors and contrast. And we can use that strategically to help guide the visitor and make sure that we’re not creating a situation where, for instance, if you’ve been driving down Las Vegas Boulevard in an evening or nighttime with all the lights flashing.
A lot of websites are creating that same effect. You don’t know where to look. It creates a lot of visual load, a lot of visual interaction costs for your visitors, and they’re going to want to tend to leave your site because they’re not going to work that hard.
