“Hey, Can You UX-ify My Website?”
3 simple tips for anyone looking to evaluate and improve their website or application’s UX Design
Has anyone ever asked you that question or something similar? Maybe a request from a friend or a coworker, or in many cases, just someone who has heard you’re a UX designer. I have been a designer at a manufacturing company for about two years now and this has been a very common question that has been asked of me as well as many of my fellow designers.
I’ve found myself responding in a similar manner each time someone asks me this question, so I decided to share some of the advice I give to people looking for simple UX tips.
Tip 1: Take time to get to know your users and their tasks
“Alex, duh! This is so simple!” And I agree! It’s so simple that sometimes we don’t fully take the time to understand who our users really are. I have seen this happen for several reasons, but I’d like to highlight two recurring ones. 1) The team assumes they knows what’s best for users or 2) The team focuses on a task or process with little thought to who the user is.
With that said, assumptions aren’t inherently bad. Often times, they come from subject matter experts, or leaders responsible for the tasks to be done by the users of a website. But the key to having assumptions is to clearly identify them and then VALIDATE them. To get started, try documenting the following three assumptions: the demographics of a typical user, the problem experienced by that user and its impact to the overall task at hand, as well as the environment in which that problem is experienced. Knowing just these three things can largely impact how you design and deliver a solution.
Bonus! Tami Reiss wrote a great article with a few examples of common assumptions and gives simple experiments you can run to validate them, check it out!
Tip 2: Identify the top 3 tasks that users will accomplish on your app
As I mentioned, most of my experience comes from designing software for a manufacturing company, and with that often comes the need to accomplish many tasks by a persona or group of personas. Unfortunately, that means that many of those tasks, some related and some not, will get smushed into the same website or application. So a big thing that I recommend is to focus on the top 3 tasks that a user needs to accomplish, and make those extremely easy to accomplish.
Tip #1 will help you learn what those tasks are, and you can define them better using research methods/tools such as interviews, ethnographic studies(aka field studies) and web analytics tools such as Google Analytics or Matomo. These are just a few examples that will help you identify those top 3 tasks, and the last step is then to make them prominent and easily accessible on your application or website.
Tip 3: Often times, less is more
A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. — Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Being a self-taught designer, I have spent A LOT of time scouring the web for any and all content I could get my hands on to learn the tools and skills of the trade. The quote I shared above was one that I found while watching a great YouTube video (I’ll link it below, and yes, I’ve skipped to the relevant part 🙂) that really put things into perspective when it came to data and content on a website.
So many times I have heard stakeholders and users ask to see everything. Maybe it sounds like “I’d like to see a dashboard with information from 10 different sources.” Or something like “Let’s put links to all the places people might want to go to on our site.” I sometimes cringe when I hear statements like this, but then I am reminded of why I love my job: I get to be empathetic and dive deeper to understand the underlying needs and tasks to be accomplished. To me, this is just as much an art as the visual aspects of design are. So, I encourage you to find those underlying needs and present them in a clean and simple way.
Bonus Tip: Use the 10 Heuristics to evaluate your website
Whether you are just starting in the design world or you are a seasoned veteran, I think we can all agree that the 10 Usability Heuristics by Jakob Nielsen are great guidelines for performing usability evaluations of any software product. Finding these in the beginning of my self-taught journey really kickstarted my ability to understand some of the more complex concepts that lie within Human Computer Interaction without a lot of the scientific terms and jargon. Read about them at the link above or in the Medium article below by Vamsi Batchu that explains each heuristic and gives good examples of them!
Hope you enjoyed this article, and feel free to comment, like and share with others interested in design! Cheers.
