Have you ever visited a website intending to make a purchase but quickly left because your experience was unpleasant?
Maybe the website was slow to respond, the navigation was confusing, or it simply didn’t appeal to you visually.
Ultimately, user experience is essential and brings us to the topic of this blog: UX design and its importance for your website.
What is UX Design?
UX design stands for “user experience,” and it is a crucial factor to consider when designing a website.
When a potential customer lands on your website, you want to ensure they can easily navigate it and make purchases effortlessly. While it’s easy to get caught up in beautifying your site, this is only one aspect to consider in UX design.
From the early stages of development, it’s imperative to take a user-centred approach. This involves a strong understanding of your users’ online needs, behaviours, and current website preferences.
Why Is UX Design Important?
In today’s ever advancing digital age, a website is not merely a tool used to convey information, but rather, a representation of your business as a whole.
When considering the significant role that our online presence plays, it is imperative to ensure that user experience is pleasant throughout the entire process.
If users can seamlessly navigate through your website and find whatever they are looking for with ease, not only will this ensure that sales are made, but you are ensuring that you have a returning customer who is likely to recommend your business to other people as well.
Popular UX Design Trends for 2024
Responsiveness
While this trend is not exactly new, it is essential in this digital driven world. In today’s day and age, the attention span of our audiences has drastically decreased, therefore, the minute a website is unresponsive or takes longer than usual to load, you’ve lost them.
It is far too easy to merely leave a website and click the next option that responds faster.
Mobile Friendly
More often than not, people are using mobile devices, ipads, or tablets to visit various websites, and if there is one aspect that can make or break a visitor’s experience, it’s the compatibility of your website across different platforms.
In this world, where audiences are constantly online, you need to ensure that your website looks good and functions well on any device.
Dark Mode
It was roughly around 2019 that Apple and Google introduced dark mode, and since then its popularity has grown.
People seem to enjoy the darker palette of apps, perhaps because it is less jarring on the eyes, or maybe it just seems more aesthetically pleasing – whatever the reason may be, this theme is here to stay.
Hyper Personalisation
Today, digital marketing is all about data and providing users with a personalised online experience.
We’ve seen this approach adopted by major brands, demonstrating its success. Examples include Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign, where consumers could find various names on the bottle labels, and Spotify’s Wrapped campaign, which provided users with personalised playlists summarising their listening history.
Both campaigns generated a buzz and excited people enough to share them across their social media platforms.
3D Design
With the advancement of AI and virtual reality, designers need to step up their game in creating visually appealing designs that capture people’s attention.
As a result, 2024 has seen a rise in the use of 3D design elements by brands, as they create a visually striking aspect on websites while effectively conveying specific messages to audiences.
Voice User Interfaces
Enhancing usability has been a crucial factor to consider for quite some time now. With the growing popularity of interfaces such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, voice user interfaces have become a feature appreciated by audiences.
In short, this feature allows for streamlined processes and improved user accessibility, particularly for audiences that rely on audio functionality. While this is not necessarily a feature to implement on your website, it is something to consider for apps.
To Sum It All Up
All things considered, by keeping user experience at the forefront of your website designs will not only enhance the experience of your current audience, but will also ensure that first time customers turn into loyal customers.