Top 6 Easy Tips to Balance Usability and website Design in Your site
Website design is just a perception! An average website for one might be an appealing one for the other. On average, users do not find most of the usability and website design today good enough in design. As per the rules of website developers, usability should always be a priority. But they cannot afford to compromise the website design anymore in the process.
It is therefore necessary to combine usability and design for the betterment of a website. In fact, having both design and usability in balance will play a true role in developing a high-end user experience. Website designers make a grave mistake when they focus solely on usability. Instead, design and usability should go together, just like layout & content, header & footer, and CSS & PHP. Proceeding with this interesting discussion, let us find out the right ways of balancing the design and usability of a website.
Determining Usability of a Website without Compromising on the Design
The usability of a website is all about a user-centric design. Around 53% of all mobile users prefer to leave the websites in just 3 seconds. Why? The vital reason is either they do not find the website usable or do not find the way it offers its products or services (the design) engaging enough. In either scenario, the brand loses a potential lead.
Website Usability is the ease of use that visitors get when they land on your website. Moreover, responsive design is the key to attaining high-end usability. The design should be specific to run seamlessly across all the devices such as tablets, laptops, desktops, and mobile phones. Today, website managers need to drive immense effort in order to attain the balance between usability and design of a website to avoid losing customers for its sake.
Some of the principles that you can adopt in order to help attain this balance include as below:
1. Visual Hierarchy
Add the visual hierarchies to allow the visitors to identify the most crucial elements on the web page without the need for reading any other content. For instance, if you have multiple CTAs on one page, you should ensure that one of them is actionable! It means that one of those CTAs should be bolder in color and must have a large button.
2. Adapt Ideal Page Scanning Pattern
The designers should know that people prefer to scan the page when they decide to dig deeper into the content. For all kinds of traditional text-rich pages, they will possibly scan the page for interesting keywords or topics. To get the user’s attention, you must add up the most important part of the content on the top left corner of that page.
It is important because the users mostly use the F-pattern scan, according to which, the readers frequently focus on scanning the left side of the web page. Therefore, this principle can help the developers design a website that gets more user attention.
If the text over a website is less, users scan the page with the Z-Pattern. To enjoy the benefits of this behavior, you can place the most crucial information of your website at the corners and then add the rest along the bottom and top of the web page. The developers can use a visual element to connect the diagonal between the top & bottom content.
3. Consider the Size of the Elements
Most users prefer reading the bigger web page elements first! Therefore, if you want to attain usability and design balance, it would be good to emphasize important content by increasing its size and making it big over the site.
If there is a possibility for the color contrast or the graphic treatment to be strong, you can make some changes to override users’ reading habits. In this way, you will be able to draw the attention of your website visitors to the largest of all elements on the page.
4. Clean Design and White Space
A good design should always cater to the usability aspects of a website. It should always help the users look for what they want without facing any hassle. For instance, the use of a clean design and white space will help the developers eliminate all kinds of clutter from the website. This also helps the visitors to grasp the content with ease and quickly relocate the information that they are looking for. With this, they will also understand the action they wish to take over your platform.
5. Work on Enhancing Accessibility
When you seek to design a website, you need to make sure that all of the visitors will be able to access the information on your platform in its entirety. Evidently, you need to have intuitive navigation or page layout structure. Give your visitors the ideal freedom to take all the necessary actions with ease. Do not make them switch from one link to another within your website in order to find what they need. This will only decrease their interest in your website and quite likely, they will not hesitate in browsing through other websites that have a more intuitive and interactive designs.
6. Page Loading Speed
Decrease the page loading time and increase the speed! An inappropriate design triggers the site to drop down in terms of responsiveness. Compress the images, clear the cache, do not add much of plug-ins, minify the JavaScript, and use reputed hosting services. All these practices can eventually simplify the design and improve usability altogether.
Takeaway
You can abide by all these important principles in order to enhance your balance between website aesthetics and usability. For the best results, the developers need to follow all of the ideal rules and regulations of proper website design and development. The same holds for web designers as well. In fact, both need to work in tandem and create a perfect balance between usability and design.
As a result, you can get more visitors to your website and eventually have better business than your competitors.If you found this interesting, have any questions, or would like to learn more, our Branding Agency in Dubai can help, please drop us a line at puneet.ae
