Understand your users and their behaviours
Before you begin any work on your website, one step is essential. This is the period of user analysis and research. To better respond, it’s necessary to understand a user’s expectations—whether a professional or an ordinary user—of a website. In addition to carrying out studies and surveys to understand your users’ feelings and expectations to improve intuitiveness, it’s also worth analyzing the profile and behaviour of users once they’re online on your site.
User experience is not vague or based solely on the intuition of the UX expert; it can be measured and observed. Above all, user experience is about understanding and optimizing the cycle between the 3 essential stages desired by the user who :
- formulates a need (whether informational, functional or other);
- interacts with an interface to meet that need;
- understands the information received from the system, and then validates it according to whether the need has been met (I’ve found what I’m looking for), modified (the information I’ve received has changed my need) or abandoned (I won’t find what I’m looking for).
This information makes it easier for your teams to target your audience and its expectations. The analysis stage will enable you to establish useful functional requirements for the future, such as a decision evaluation grid to ensure consistency over time (heuristic evaluation), a lexicon or personas. The creation of personas can help improve this understanding of your audience and its habits by representing a segment of your target audience and creating a projection of it so as not to forget its needs, which are often different from yours. This information can be a great help in making UX decisions.
The importance of UX design for the user experience
Once this analysis stage has been completed, it’s time for your team or an agency like Nmédia, specializing in UX Design, to get to work. You can do many things to achieve fluid, intuitive navigation throughout your website.
A clear site is, first and foremost, a structured site. You want information to be shared with real coherence. Working on information architecture to better structure the content of your website is a great help in making the different pages easier to read and more accessible for users to find their way around. By capturing the user through its initial query, whether precise, vague or imperfect, you need to take care of its journey and lead them through the different contents of your website to convince them of your proposal to answer his query. When a user has come to your website looking for specific information, it’s essential that they can find it intuitively. Clear, hierarchical menus with appropriate terminology will make navigating between your different pages easier.
A search bar can facilitate user navigation in the same context. However, ensure that the results proposed by this intelligent search tool are relevant.
Did you know a user will have a first impression of your brand and your website’s content in less than 50 milliseconds? Will this opinion be based primarily on the visual elements of your site? User tests and research have shown that it’s best to focus on a few aesthetic choices when designing your website. For example, it’s essential to opt for minimalist, uncluttered designs rather than those that are too busy and bombastic. For clarity, it’s necessary to avoid information overload that could detract from the user experience.
The same applies to the choice of typography for your website’s texts. While a bit of whimsy may be welcome, choosing a legible font for comfortable reading is essential. Texts should also be spaced and sized to not interfere with navigation and understanding of your pages.
Don’t hesitate to play with text colours and the contrast between your different blocks to attract your users’ attention. Certain layout effects, such as bold or bulleted lists, can also guide the reader’s attention while improving accessibility.
A website accessible to the most significant number of users
To make the Web more accessible and inclusive, we recommend compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These standards set out criteria encompassing all types of disability and can enable as many people as possible to visit your site in an accessible and enjoyable way. This includes, for example, keyboard navigation, screen readers for the visually impaired, and detailed descriptions in the alternative text of images.
It is essential to use a responsive or adaptive design to offer a site that is accessible to all types of devices. Many users today only use their tablet or mobile device to browse the Web. You ensure they spend more time on your platform by offering an adapted user experience through responsive design and optimized loading speed.
Understand that the best feedback you can get on your website comes from your users. Don’t hesitate to conduct tests with them or submit satisfaction forms to ensure the site is always adapted and meets their needs. While it’s possible to have a site that’s adapted and intuitive at a given moment, it’s also necessary to maintain it over time. Therefore, continuous improvement is essential, whether to capture new trends in user experience or to continue improving points highlighted by your users’ feedback.