The human mind is quite fickle. If we examine our daily lives, we are usually drawn to everything around us based on its appearance. This psychological factor has been part of our lives for centuries. Yes, for humans, everything that shines do seem gold.
Yet another place this comes into play is the Internet. Two major factors that can draw a user to a site are the design and the user experience. Today, we are going to talk about web design and the skin of a website.
Design plays a significant role in a site's credibility, with around 75% of website visitors making their judgment based on it. We live in a digital era, where approximately 252,000 websites are created daily and over 200 million are active, the web design industry has become fiercely competitive. Now, I said, “People always visit a site that can grab their attention.” Here are several key details you must consider while building a website. You have to apply numerous considerations while playing the design game, from the appearance to giving the best user experience.
Before we start on the standard design mistakes, the first barrier to overcome is understanding design. The process is all about conceptualizing, strategising, and delivering the correct information regarding the business. While it plays into the business aesthetic side, regardless, we also need to focus on functionality.
When we focus on the visual components, like content, text, imaging, videos, colors, fonts, and elements like forms, buttons, iconography, and layout, we should not forget about Design Functionality. Aspects like speed navigation, user experience responsiveness, cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device design consistency, user interaction, and SEO are the backbone of any site.
Now that we have covered web design, let's jump into what is important.
One of the most common mistakes I have encountered on websites is needing a properly laid out configuration menu or navigation layout. A poorly set navigation is a straight pathway to make your consumer run for the next best option they can find. Having an intuitive design plan is important. Truth be told, no one wants to painstakingly go through scrolling and scrolling. If you have a website with large sets of pages, now the best way to declutter them is to categorize them and arrange them based on hierarchy.
The next big thing we need to understand is that navigation is different for different devices. You can use the hamburger menu strategy on mobiles or smaller screens, but this may work differently on desktops.
Your search can resolve this issue if your navigation does not always exceed your customer's expectations. Searches must handle typos, plurals, new terms, hyphens, and many more versions of the same terminology. If they can’t work that out, you need to make some significant changes, or else this can be a curse in the long run.
Bad searches can affect consumers, give them the bitter taste of the worst user experience, cause poor engagement, and cause your SEO ranking to fall exponentially by the time you figure out the root cause, which, in the end, results in bad conversions. So resolve this by improving the search algorithm, having a continuous functionality test run from time to time and do your research to find better options for the search bar, so that you can give your consumers the best.
Now, accessibility is not just about how you can access the site from anywhere in the world; it is more about who is accessing it. We live in an age when the internet has become a part of everyone's daily life, including every single individual, especially people with disabilities. Most designers sometimes focus on everything, but they may overlook a certain aspect of a website called the customer journey. This is just like how they normally don’t consider the design thinking approach, which is not the right way to go about web design. A way to resolve this is through a design thinking approach. While planning and building a website, you can consider various intuitive components like text sizes, color contrasts, page title size, image alternate texts, keyboard accessibility, and content such as carousels, ads, and auto-playing videos. Another set of content to consider is scrollable news feeds and tickers.
A person with visual impairment would seek out text-to-speech solutions to consume content, and the mute and deaf would consider audio-to-text solutions. People with bad vision or hypermetropia would love a zoom option on their websites. A good website has all the elements of the consumer's needs and more. It works out each consumer's pain points and reaches out to them before a ticket is raised.
A design should give consumers the omnichannel experience they sought out for. It should be responsive and consistent across every browser and device. This can yet be a plunder that can be added to design mistakes. While designing a website, it is important to remember that a user might use different platforms, browsers, and devices. Our priority is to design based on different user journeys and roadmaps consistent across all channels.
When it comes to the content side of web design, a designer must avoid several mistakes. These can range from not strategizing visual hierarchy to overusing content and CTAs. Less user interaction can aggressively affect your business profits.
Let's start with the overuse of information. You drop tons of information on your small eCommerce website, confusing your users. They can neither understand it nor access the information that they need. That can leave them bewildered about what to make of all this information. Where do I start, or where do I end it? This can be avoided by organizing your content, dividing your website into web pages, and working with components, modules, and reusable blocks to deliver based on their functionality.
Next is setting visual hierarchies to enable a well-planned consumer journey. To do this, introduce colors, enticing words, imagery, and small animation. Now, another significant impact on user engagement is the spacing, position, and size of each element involved with this. Well, if you cut corners here, I say you are on a terrible road down the path of failure.
Finally, CTAs: Implementing CTAs is about the right balance and at the right places. If you provide an effective CTA that hits the spot, you can reap the conversion rates you can’t imagine, but if you don’t, this can hinder them as well.
When it comes to web design, there is more to discuss than the above. Creating one website can be either confusing or overwhelming, which can lead to many mistakes. I say one of the important aspects of all of it is to work on it through user research and numerous tests and trials. Now, be mindful of these mistakes and dabble in the best practices so that you can create a beautiful consumer experience for your customers.
