Instead of its visual design, a website’s usability and utility define whether it is successful or unsuccessful. Because the website visitor is the only one who clicks the mouse and thus decides everything, user-centric design has become a standard method for successful and profit-oriented online design. After all, if people are unable to use a feature, it may as well not exist.
Guidelines for Effective Web Design and Good Website Design Principles.
To correctly use the concepts, we must first understand how people interact with websites, how they think, and what the core patterns of user behaviour are.
1. Do Not Force Users to Think
The first law of usability states that the web page should be obvious and self-explanatory. When designing a website, your task is to eliminate the question marks — the decisions that users must make consciously, taking into account benefits, disadvantages, and alternatives.
If the navigation and site layout are not simple, the number of question marks increases, making it more difficult for visitors to understand how the system works and how to navigate from point A to point B. A clear structure, reasonable visual cues, and easily identifiable links can assist users in finding their way to their goal.
2. Don’t Waste Users’ Patience
When offering a service or product to your visitors in any project, aim to reduce your user needs to a minimum. The less activity necessary from users to test a service, the more probable a random visitor is to try it out. First-time visitors want to experiment with the service rather than fill out lengthy web forms for an account they may never use again. Allow users to browse the site and discover your offerings without requiring them to share personal information. Forcing users to enter an email address in order to try the functionality is unreasonable.
3. Manage User Attention
Manage User Attention Obviously, visuals are more appealing than text, just as bolded statements are more appealing than plain text.
The human eye is a highly nonlinear apparatus, and web users can rapidly perceive edges, patterns, and motions. This is why video advertising are highly unpleasant and distracting, but they perform an excellent job of attracting people’ attention from a marketing standpoint.
4. Attempt to Increase Feature Exposure
Modern online designs are frequently chastised for their strategy of guiding visitors through visually appealing 1–2–3-done-steps, huge buttons with visual effects, and so on. However, from a design standpoint, these characteristics are not a negative thing. Such instructions, on the other hand, are incredibly helpful because they guide visitors through the site material in a very easy and user-friendly manner.
5. Employ Effective Writing
Because the Web varies from print, the writing style must be customized to the interests and surfing patterns of consumers. Promotional writing will be ignored. Long blocks of text without any graphics or keywords in bold or italics will be disregarded. Extraneous language will not be tolerated..
Discuss business. Avoid names that are funny or creative, names that are influenced by marketing, company-specific names, and unfamiliar technical terms. For instance, if you describe a service and want users to register an account, “sign up” is better than “start now!” which is again better than “explore our services”.
6. Attempt Simplicity
The “keep it simple” (KIS) approach should be the fundamental goal of web design. Users are rarely visiting a site to enjoy the design; in most situations, they are looking for information regardless of the style. Strive for simplicity rather than complexity.
From the perspective of visitors, the optimum site design is pure text, with no adverts or other content blocks that fit exactly the query visitors used or the content they were looking for. This is one of the reasons why a print-friendly version of a website is vital for a positive user experience.
7. Do Not Be Afraid Of White Space
The importance of white space cannot be overstated. It not only helps to lessen cognitive strain for visitors, but it also allows them to perceive the information on the screen. When a new visitor comes across a design layout, the first thing he or she does is scan the page and divide the content area into consumable chunks of information.
Complex structures are more difficult to read, scan, analyse, and manipulate. When choosing between separating two design elements with a visible line and some whitespace, the whitespace approach is usually preferable. Hierarchical architectures minimise complexity (Simon’s Law): the better you can present viewers with a feeling of visual hierarchy, the easier it will be for them to grasp your material.
8. Effective communication, organisation, and economics
Give the user a clear and consistent conceptual structure. Organizational concepts like as consistency, screen layout, relationships, and navigability are critical. All elements should follow the same norms and rules.
Save money by getting the most done with the fewest cues and visual components possible. There are four main things to take into account: focus, distinctiveness, clarity, and simplicity.
Customize the presentation to the user’s ability. In order to effectively communicate, the user interface must maintain a balance between legibility, readability, typography, symbolism, various viewpoints, and colour or texture.
9. Our Friends Are the Rules
A conventionally designed website is not always uninteresting. Conventions are actually quite helpful because they lessen the learning curve and the requirement to understand how things work. For instance, if all websites presented RSS feeds differently visually, it would be a usability nightmare. That’s not that different from our daily lives, where we tend to become accustomed to fundamental rules for how to arrange data (folders) or conduct our daily activities (placement of products).
Conventions help you establish credibility and win over users’ confidence, trust, and dependability. Consider the expectations of your audience when developing your site’s navigation, text layout, search placement, etc.
10. Test Frequently and Early
Every online design project should follow the so-called TETO-principle, as usability tests frequently provide important information about serious flaws and problems associated to a particular layout.
Don’t test too early, too late, or for the wrong reasons. Understanding that most design decisions are local is important in the latter situation since it prevents you from answering the question of which layout is superior on a general level without first analysing it from a very specific perspective (considering requirements, stakeholders, budget etc.).
Learn more about the web design services that SG Web Designer offers by visiting our website. Additionally, you can call us at +65 63620123.