With the sheer number of brands, products, and services competing for consumer attention online nowadays, marketers and entrepreneurs can’t afford to undervalue the importance of good user interface design for their corporate websites. When the use of your website generally provides a negative user experience for your readers, it could impact your site’s reputation and popularity, thus also affecting its search engine performance.
Remember that at present, search engines like Google use a variety of techniques in order to intuitively determine if a site is providing quality user experience to its readers. If very few people are linking to your website or if they are not engaging well with it, for instance, Google can conclude that you have a shoddily made website that does not deserve a good spot in search engine results pages.
So, what are the characteristics of good user interface in website design? Read this short guide, and ask yourself whether or not you were already able to address the possible issues mentioned here.
Easy navigation, clarity, and consisteny
Don’t expect your readers to possess the tenacity to tolerate a poorly designed website. If they can’t find what they are looking for, they are most likely to leave in an instant. Make the navigation of your site easy for the users by clearly labeling menu items, offering visual cues to help visitors determine which section they are visiting, and keeping the design, typeface, and color consistent throughout the website.
Fast and responsive
Another thing that can really eat away at the patience of web users is the slowness of websites. If visitors feel that your website lags with every action they try to perform on it, or if your web pages keep too long to load, it will likely result in frustration on the part of the visiting person. The consequence is either they leave your site immediately or they get discouraged to visit your inner pages.
Concise content
When it comes to creating content for your website, it is best to keep it concise and easily understandable. Studies have shown that most web users do not read web content thoroughly when they are still in the stage of looking for the right products or services to purchase. As such, make sure to lay out the most important information you want to include in the title and the first paragraphs of your content. Also use subtitles and bullet points. These will not only make your content easier to read for your visitors, they will also allow your content to be more optimized for online searches.
Mobile-friendly
In this age of smartphones and tablets, you can’t disregard the importance of optimizing your website for handheld devices. If not, your readers could encounter a lot of problems when they try to visit your site. The navigation menus might not be visible, the images might not fit properly, or there could be a significant number of scrolling, zooming, and pinching required just to be able to access the content.
Good aesthetics
Aside from making sure that your website runs like clockwork and possesses user-friendly qualities, you should also do your readers a favor by creating a site that is aesthetically pleasing. And what better way to communicate your brand identity than by creating a site that takes full advantage of the benefits a great visual appeal? If you have a crummy-looking website, then you could be sending the wrong message to people visiting your site, i.e., that you have an inferior brand and that you couldn’t care less about what your visitors think about you. Make a good first impression by having a nice-looking website, but make sure that the positive user experience is maintained in all other aspects of the user interface design.
