Understanding the parts of your website that require performance enhancement is an important aspect of UX optimization. For instance, load time is a crucial indicator of how well a mobile app performs; if displays take too long to load or don’t reply quickly enough occasionally, consumers may feel impatient and give up on your product. Finally, paying attention to design specifics is necessary for improving the user experience. Font size, color schemes, page layout, button placement, and other presentational components are examples of these factors that have an impact on how a user interacts with an app.
What is UX Optimization?
User experience optimization means understanding how users engage with your app and spotting opportunities to enhance the user experience. By improving the user experience, you can make sure that customers are more interested in, knowledgeable about, and loyal to your product. Understanding who your users are and what kind of device they use to access your app is the first step in user experience optimization. The next step is to gather and evaluate this data to determine which elements of the user journey require improvement.
How Do You Optimize a UX Design?
Depending on whatever issue your website may be facing, it’s typically not a one-time fix to optimize your UX design if you don’t know what you’re looking for. Here are some of the main issues to look out for when optimizing your UX design:
- Visual Hierarchy
- Alignment
- Spacing
Visual Hierarchy: The design principle that elements are strategically arranged to influence users’ perceptions and guide them to desired actions
When creating elements such as image cards, buttons, and menu icons, the designer must keep in mind the tedious details necessary to catch and draw the user’s attention.
For instance, images with CTAs or text on them should be larger than the text area to better catch the user’s attention. The title of the text should always be bolder and larger than the description. The goal of visual hierarchy is to lead users to take action by influencing their perception through the design of your site or product.
Alignment: Alignment can be a make-or-break issue for your website. Alignment simply means the lining up of text or graphics. It sounds simple, but if you don’t have proper alignment on your website, you will notice it.
Our rule of thumb is to left-align your text when using longer pieces of information and to central-align your text when using smaller pieces of information up to 2-3 sentences.
Spacing: Spacing is absolutely crucial in design. Spacing is the horizontal and vertical distances between elements on a page. Spacing is so vital because it causes sections on your website to look disconnected and unorganized.
When optimizing your UX design, horizontal and vertical spacing should be identical. When they aren’t identical, elements in the same section can look distant, which makes it hard for the user to actually take action. It is also good practice to incorporate the 8-point grid system into your UX design.
What is the Difference Between UX and UI?
UX refers to the user experience, while UI refers to the user interface. User experience focuses on the feel of the design and the experience the user will go through as they journey through your website. Are the colors too distracting? Are the buttons and CTAs capturing the attention of the user? Does the website look more professional or amateur? These are all questions and concerns for a UX designer because they all influence the experience and perception of the user.
The user interface focuses more on the structure and functionality of the design elements. The timing of a pop-up, too much brightness on an icon, or adjusting the typography of an article are all ways to optimize the UI of a website. UX and UI are both sides of the same coin, and they essentially make up the whole of web design. A lot of the actions in UX/UI design are interchangeable, so it’s understandable how grasping the concept can be a bit difficult at first. A good way to remember the correlation between the two is that UX is psychological and UI is functional.
What is the Benefit of UX Optimization?
User experience optimization is critical for a healthy website and thriving online presence. There are several factors that are affected by optimizing your user experience, so these same factors also benefit. In our opinion, the main benefits are improved aesthetics, increased conversions and sales, and improved user engagement.
Improving your website’s aesthetics will give you the most immediate return. Your website or page that you are optimizing will look and feel better, and you’ll be able to notice it. And if you notice it, so will your visitors. When your website helps the user’s experience transition easily to taking action, your bounce rate will get a boost. Bounce rate is a metric that measures how long, on average, a user is on your website or page before they leave, or “bounce” off.
Increasing your conversions and sales is likely going to put the biggest smile on your face of all the benefits. Of course, when a potential client or buyer visits your website and the design is optimized to look and feel better, they will feel more comfortable on your website, which increases the odds of them using your service or buying your product. You don’t want visitors to click off your site or page because it looks like a spam site.
Get ready for an improvement in your user engagement too. More visitors will lurk through your website’s pages as the design becomes more fluid and comfortable. For example, you may have an article that links to your service page on your website. If your article impresses a visitor with enough knowledge or expertise on a certain topic, they will likely convert into customers. And if they don’t convert into customers, they will likely still visit your website for information regarding that certain topic, which will help drive your website’s traffic.
Ask your web developer or UX designer to implement these tips next time they are optimizing your website. It will help increase your overall SEO and eliminate any eye sores on your website that have been bothering you as well. We are here to help, so if you don’t want to deal with the hassle, contact us, and we’ll optimize your web design for you!