The Importance of User Experience (UX) in Website Design

User experience (UX) is a term used to describe a user’s overall experience when interacting with a website. This includes the website’s navigation, content, layout, and other elements. 

UX is essential in website design as it determines how effectively users interact with your website and how likely they are to return and take action.

In this article, we list website elements you need to optimize for UX and explain why it’s necessary. So let’s dive in!

User Interface (UI)

UI is an important part of website design and is perhaps the most visible element of user experience. UI is the way in which a user interacts with a website and includes features like menus, buttons, and navigation. 

Here is statistical data from various studies that support the importance of UI in web design:

• A good user interface can increase conversion rates by up to 200%. 
• 70% of online businesses fail because of poor website usability.
• 88% of online customers say they don’t intend to visit websites that are not user-friendly.
• As much as 60% of users don’t find what they are looking for on a website.

A good UI is an intuitive UI. If a user is confused or frustrated by the way they need to interact with a website, they will likely leave without taking any action.

The three main features of intuitive UI include:

1. Simplicity—Keep your UI clutter-free. Too many elements can distract and deter your users from completing the desired action. 
2. Consistency—Make sure all UI elements look and behave the same way. Consistency in UI design ensures your visitors don’t have to guess what a certain button or some other element on your website does  
3. Hierarchy—Ensure that the most important elements on your website are optimized for visibility and scanability. Use larger font sizes or bright colors to emphasize important details (CTAs, search bar, product menu, etc.)

Visual Design

94% of the website’s first impressions are design-related. Moreover, people will base 75% of their opinions about a website’s credibility solely on its aesthetics.  

Following are the five important tips for optimizing your web design for UX:

1. Use web-friendly fonts—Fonts like Arial, Helvetica, and Times New Roman maintain their readability across all screen sizes. 
2. Use the web design pattern that best works for you—The two most common web design patterns are F and Z patterns. Both are based on typical human behavior (more specifically, our eye movement) when browsing a web page. 
3. Use negative space—Negative space is the clear area between the visual elements on your website. Web designers use this space to emphasize the importance of certain page elements and break up textual content for better readability.
4. Use a color palette that best conveys your message—It is a known fact that we, as humans, associate different colors with different emotions. So we have warm colors, like orange, yellow, and red, which evoke feelings of love, passion, and energy. Cool colors, such as blue and green, evoke feelings of relaxation and calm. Neutral colors, such as white and gray, evoke feelings of clarity and neutrality.

94% of negative user feedback is design-oriented, which makes your website’s aesthetic a very important UX factor. 

Mobile-Friendliness

With 92.1% of online users who access the internet using a mobile phone, optimizing your website for mobile-friendliness is one of the most important aspects of UX design. 

Here are four other statistics that support the importance of mobile-friendliness in UX web design:

• 55.4% of internet users will use their mobile devices when shopping online.
• 73.1% of web designers state that a top reason why visitors bounce off the website is non-responsive design.
• 59% of online buyers think that being able to shop on their mobile devices is important when deciding where to buy.
• 58% of mobile users prefer companies whose mobile websites remember their previous interactions.

Following are the three tips for optimizing your website for mobile-friendliness and boosting UX:

1. Test your website with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool—This tool will detect any segments of your website that are not optimized for mobile use.
2. Choose responsive themes—This shouldn’t be too difficult, as the most popular themes are optimized for mobile devices. Nevertheless, you should check a theme before installing it by watching a demo that shows how the theme looks across multiple screen sizes.
3. Test the core web vitals—Examine your Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) vitals.

If you don’t have enough experience or lack an in-house team that can optimize your website for mobile devices, you can always find a digital marketing agency on reputable online marketplaces like DesignRush and choose from the best UX design agencies in the UK.   

Loading Speed

Your website needs to load in three seconds or less, and here is why:

• Around 70% of consumers say that page loading time impacts their willingness to buy from an online business.
• The highest eCommerce conversion rates occur on pages that load in 0 to 2 seconds.
• A website conversion rate will drop by an average of 2.11% with each additional second of loading time.
• A website that loads in 10 seconds on a mobile phone will have a 123% higher bounce rate compared to a website that loads in one second. 

Here is what you can do to reduce your website’s loading time:

• Compress your images—Large image files take a long time to load, so you should try to reduce their weight with one of the image optimization plugins available online, such as WP Smush.
• Reduce your redirects—The more redirects your website has, the more it will take to load. Use redirects only when it’s necessary.
• Cache your web pages—Caching is one of the most efficient ways to reduce a website’s speed. It stores copies of your website’s files, thus minimizing the effort a server needs to generate and serve your web page to a user’s browser. 
• Enable browser caching—This way, you’ll be able to store certain pieces of data in a web browser so that it can be reused each time the user visits your website. This helps reduce load times, as the browser won’t have to fetch all the data each time the page is loaded.

Conclusion

A website optimized for UX is not only good for your visitors but also for your SEO ranking. A website that has been optimized for UX will have a higher conversion rate and user engagement, which sends signals to search engines that your website is valuable and trustworthy. Each dollar you invest in UX will bring you a lot more money back through well-designed website.

We hope this article helped you understand the importance of user experience in web design and provided you with some useful tips on how to make your website user-oriented and enjoyable to use.