Putting theory aside for a moment – how does good user experience design look in practice? Firstly, ask yourself what your company or offer is: do you already have a corporate identity or important design guidelines in a style guide? If so, use this as the basis for any further steps. You will most likely benefit from the work that has already been previously done. This will ensure a consistent and professional appearance across all your communication channels. This enables you to be recognized by your users and eliminates the risk of design faux pas later on.
For the next step, you should ask yourself - Who exactly it is that you intend to reach with your site or app? What are your target group’s wishes and demands? What do they expect from your offer? UX design is always tailored to a specific target group. This is the only way to provide the perfect experience for your visitors and users. For example, a gothic band’s website should be quite different from that of a porcelain factory. Accordingly, user experience design only works for certain target groups whose taste you should know in advance. This requires tests, surveys, and even large-scale target group studies so you can use the results to create personas.
Concentrate on the essentials: an overloaded design is not helpful and will end up being distracting and irritating. A good user experience design, on the other hand, is minimal, simple, and clear. When it comes to websites, it’s important to regularly include blank spaces to give the user time to process content. If the design is too intense, the user will quickly become overwhelmed. There should also be a sufficient gap between the text, image, and any navigational elements, but make sure you also aren’t simply wasting space.
Coordinate colors, fonts, and the layout of your content. Avoid stylistic inconsistency for your UX design. It can quickly overwhelm users if they are constantly confronted with new color schemes or fonts. In addition, lack of consistency in user experience design makes it look unclear. The taste of the target group is always important in this case.
Once all aesthetic aspects are classified, the focus is on optimizing accessibility and user friendliness: a good user experience design does not have long loading times and leads the user quickly to their goal without sending them on several detours. Complicated menus should, therefore, be avoided. You should instead design an intuitive and easy-to-follow path to help the user get familiar with your software or website.
Inexperienced users sometimes fail at basic intersections – despite all the optimization efforts to produce a chic UX design. Such users must be able to quickly find not only the most important functions but also be able to find support if necessary. For this purpose, you could provide a central help button. This could lead users, for example, through the application in a clear step-by-step fashion, or lead them directly to a searchable encyclopedia that explains all important terms and functions. To improve user experience even more, you could consider including a forum, contact form, or even a hotline for telephone inquiries.