User experience (UX), or how enjoyable it is to interact with your website, should also be considered when designing a website.
It’s easy to become obsessed with aesthetics when designing or redesigning a website. What color looks best? Where should the logo appear? How about an animated GIF in the middle of the page?
It is important to remember that your website is not simply a pretty face in a world with more than 1.8 billion sites that people can potentially land on.
Basics of User Experience
User experience (UX) is about understanding users, their needs, what they value, their capabilities, as well as their limitations. Moreover, the project is managed according to the business goals and objectives of the group responsible for it. The best UX practices improve your product and any related services from the user’s perspective.
( Also Read: Tips to Improve Chatbot UX )
7 Key Practices Web Teams Use to Win
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Create great experiences
Many web teams try to answer how they deliver great experiences as their first challenge. In other words, how they deliver any changes that they make, or how they go live. When performing their role, many team members press a button like “publish” in WordPress’ editor to deliver their work or press “deploy” to push code changes through Pantheon’s Dev -> Test -> Live pipeline.
With a deployment pipeline like Pantheon’s, a team can do double-checks before going live for sometimes fraught changes, such as significant code updates. The update can be checked to make sure nothing is broken and enhance the site as expected.
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Keep performance high
How does a team know whether content and code changes will break next week or next month? Or how do you determine if it is still performing as it should? The code change must be able to maintain performance, regardless of whether the intent was to speed up loading times or increase click-throughs. That sounds easier than it is.
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Know your users
If you want to conduct UX research, you’ll have to figure out exactly who the participants should be. Can you research internally, externally, or a combination of both? What types of users do you have? How many? Who are your clients?
Build out your user personas early. They can help your organization better understand your users and their language. Use any previous research or personas work that has been done by other teams, then conduct your user interviews to better understand your customers. How would you describe their values, behaviors, attitudes, needs, limitations, and pain points? How do they spend their day? Which products or features do they use? Present and share these personas widely within your organization once you create them. Let users guide your teams’ decisions and priorities and encourage them to keep your different users in mind.
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Work collaboratively across teams
Almost always, members of a team will realize they can deliver and maintain their work more effectively if they collaborate. When content editors work closely with designers, they can create better landing pages for their high-level goals. If they collaborate better as people, front-end and back-end developers can keep their code connected.
Collaboration in itself isn’t the goal. You can accomplish a task more effectively with two people rather than five. Teams that collaborate effectively can respond to market changes and threats more quickly.
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Automate your routine tasks
The collaboration will often highlight error-prone or time-consuming steps that detract from the team’s focus on the goal. When a team collaborates effectively, routine tasks will be automated.
Draw out every step it might take for a full web team to transfer a small change from a designer’s laptop to a live site. It might take you days to figure out how to navigate a dozen boxes and arrows. To save time and eliminate errors, you can then prioritize which arrows to automate.
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Analysis of the results
When a web team has an efficient, partially automated workflow in place, it often finds that it has the time and space to ask, “Why are we doing the same things again?” At that point, teams are reminded how important it is to measure results.
Pantheon strongly recommends you start with this question first if you are starting a new web team or job. The fact is however that many web teams only pay attention to this question after the train has gone so far off the tracks that an existential crisis has occurred.
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Maintain consistency
In addition to keeping your navigation consistent, you should ensure that the look and feel of your site are the same across all of its pages. Consistent backgrounds, color schemes, typefaces, and even your tone of voice impact usability and user experience.
This is not to say that every page should be designed the same way. Consider creating different layouts for different types of pages (e.g., landing pages, informational pages, etc.). By doing so, you’ll make it easier for visitors to understand what kind of information is likely to be provided on a given page.
Analyze the Why, What, and How of Product Use
You should consider what, why, and how users use products as a UX designer. The Why refers to the reasons why users adopt a product, whether they relate to a task they wish to accomplish or to values and views that they associate with its ownership and use.
The What refers to the functions that a product offers. As a final component, the How refers to the design of functionality in an accessible and aesthetically pleasing manner.
To create products for which users can form meaningful experiences, UX designers start with the Why, followed by the What, and finally, the How. You must ensure that the product’s “substance” is conveyed through an existing device and that the user experience is seamless and fluid.
Final Thought
You need to invest time and energy upfront to understand your industry, company, and products to build a successful UX research practice. Build relationships – both internally and externally – and educate others about the wide-ranging benefits of UX research.
Make clear your goals, projects, and initiatives moving forward, and share concrete examples of your past impact. Motivate others to get involved. You will be more effective in your role if you build your network and your rapport with other disciplines.
Ultimately, gaining research buy-in and achieving shared ownership of product outcomes will require collaboration with other teams.
