The Most Practical Tips for UI and UX Design

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Admit it -- sleek website design captures attention and interest. It can help build the right kind of impression you want from your website visitors. Plus, letting them marvel at the aesthetics of your website makes it easier for you to draw them in further to explore everything the site offers.

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Whether it’s your own website or one that you’re designing for a client, always consider the need you have to fulfill for the users. This is where user interface and user experience come into play. All your efforts in creating meaningful UI and UX should be centered around helping your users solve a problem or get what they want from your website.

With that, we’re giving you the most practical tips you can apply when working on UI and UX design.

On User Interface

Can your visitors immediately locate what they’re looking for? Knowing who your users are and what they need from your website is the prerequisite of all your interface design decisions.

A perfect UI design lets website users accomplish their goals easily. It should lead them to where they want to be at. Start with a menu that clearly shows your users the right path to take.

Avoid giving them surprise interactions. Let them focus on what they want to do. If reading content is what they’re after, let them finish before showing a pop up of an ad or newsletter subscription.

After every action done, show them what to do next. Label the buttons accordingly and be clear about what’s going to happen once the button is clicked. The same goes for links. Your CTAs should be in the right place, at the time you think they want to take another action. Make them accessible or you’ll fail to introduce another interaction.

On User Experience

Dr. Donald Norman, a cognitive science researcher, coined the term user experience. Simply called UX, it is how someone feels when using a system, a website or a mobile app, for example. He was also the first to describe how important it is to base design decisions on the user’s needs.

How do you want people to feel when browsing your website? A super polished website design would mean nothing if it falls short in providing a compelling user experience.

When people go to your website, they should immediately spot what they’re looking for or they’d feel lost and disconnected. They should also be able to move around the site without second-guessing what the sections and buttons are for.

Color plays a major part in your design process. In picking colors, you should be the master of contrast. Don’t turn the users off by putting together colors that are too striking they can cause eye strain.

Give your visitors smooth navigation across your site. Keep dropdown menus two levels deep and they should always be scrolled vertically.

Is your site mobile-responsive? If not, you’ve got work to do. Also, it would be ideal to put your CTA buttons within thumb’s reach for easier access on mobile devices.

To scroll or not to scroll? Endless scrolling could be overwhelming to some people but may be good for your bounce rate. The longer they scroll down, the more content they will most likely click, which also means they’ll stay for a longer time on the site.

How fast does your site load? Take note that there are some who get impatient when a site takes more than three seconds to load.

Make your links look like links. They should be underlined and displayed in a different color (often blue) from the rest of the text.

Don’t underestimate the value of a search box. For those on the brink of getting lost on your website, the search box will save them.

All these guidelines will bring you to only one conclusion: your UI and UX design should always be about the users, not you.

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Freelancer is holding a contest for redesigning the Freelancer Newsfeed. The Newsfeed is where you get updates about your work or projects, and guides you to the most important things on the Freelancer website. We thought it was time to redesign it to make it look and function better.

Take note of the tips you read from this post and apply them to come up with a new Freelancer Newsfeed design. The contest will be up for two more weeks, so seize the chance to win the huge prize that’s up for grabs! To join, simply click on the link below.

Contest link: Redesign the Freelancer Newsfeed and Win $10,000!

 

Posted 7 April, 2016

flDyan
flDyan Staff

Junior Product Marketing Manager at Freelancer. Outside of work, I'm into wedding coordination, entrepreneurship, beach trips, badminton, reading novels, and binge-watching TV series on Netflix.

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