Something yoUX Should Know: Improve Your UX Design

If users understand our web, then it’s a good web. That would be the goal when designing our sites, and that’s why UX design is so important. Our sites should be clean, simple, and easy to use. If we achieve this, it’s more probable that users will navigate through them easily, this will help the overall metrics of our websites.

You’ve probably heard this before, especially if you work in the world of design. In this article, we’ll share some tools and tips to help you achieve it. Some you may know already, some you may not, there’s always something new to find out.

Tips To Improve Your UX Design

There are hacks for everything. So here we’ll tell you a couple of hours so you can upgrade your sites.

Just Like Your Room, Keep Your Sites Clean!

At least one time in our lives, we’ve been sent to clean our rooms, and even though we’ve hated it, in the world of UX design, it’s a great piece of advice. Our site’s layout is the first thing that our users see, that’s why each page should be clean and in order.

What do we mean by this?

• Don’t overload your site with decorative elements or banners.
• Organize the information you want to show. Is it clear? Will people understand it? There’s a well-known term in UX design and UX in general called “Visual Hierarchy”. It is the principle of arranging elements to show their order of importance.
• Put on the user’s shoes and take another look at your design.
• Respect the spaces between objects, give them air, let them breathe.

Keeping Your Smartphone in Mind is Smart

Optimizing your web for mobile devices is crucial.

Why? Look around you, on the streets, subways, trains. Everywhere you look, most people (if not all of them) use their smartphones, spending hours and hours in front of them (you can check some numbers on this reality here). Pay attention to how the site changes while being watched on a smartphone, taking care that none of the information is lost, and also making sure your web doesn’t crash while adapting to different displays. Make sure your website is mobile-optimized and can be viewed easily on the smallest of screens.

Help Them Find What They’re Looking For

If it helps Sherlock Holmes, it can help your users.
We are talking about the magnifying glass icon which indicates there’s a search function on our site. Adding this tool is a great way to make the user’s journey easier.

Click Here

Not here, but on your site. Making clear to your users where they can click is a really good practice. There are many ways to do this. For example, you can add buttons, highlight the objects user can click, add some text that appears while hovering some places with the mouse.

Use “Read More” Instead of Making Them Read More

What do we mean by this? If you need to put in a lot of text, use the “read more” option to reduce it. This way, the user who wants to read more will do it; the one who doesn’t won’t be overwhelmed with too many text boxes.

Modulate

When creating sites, it’s common to have to update them with new information. That’s why good practice is to work with modules because they will let you do modifications without editing the rest of the site. Modules are independent sections inside your website. At the moment of coding, you can work in each module separately without modifying the rest of your site.

Light Is Not Only Healthier

We don’t know if nutritionists are also designers or not, but this advice they always give is an excellent tip for designing your site. The heavier your site is, the longer it will take to load. This can be a problem because it can make your users leave without even finishing loading it.

Measure, Analyze, Repeat

What could be a great quote for a t-shirt is a great motto for UX in general. Although it may not be the UX designer’s job, this should be something to be considered. The idea is to periodically measure the user’s experience, dwell time, and analyze their behavior. All of this, so you can optimize your site with each learning.

Well, that’s it for our tips, so let’s talk about some tools that can help you.

Tools To Help Your UX Design

There are different kinds of tools for planning your site’s UX design. Some of them are free, some cost a bit. That’s why it’s so vital for you to investigate them and define which one suits your needs better. Of course, there are many tools, and in this list, we’ve included only a few, the ones we think stand out and can help you achieve great results.

Figma

If you are new in the world of UX design, this will be your new Holy Grail. It’s an interface design application that runs in browsers that’s really great for team-based collaborative projects. It allows different collaborators to work together at the same time, in the same project. Also, because it has an auto-save feature, neither participant is at risk of missing out on anything of the work. What can you create in Figma? From wireframes to banners and landing pages. Pretty much anything you want.

Sketch

This app’s logo is a diamond, and I think that sums it up. This tool is really awesome although one of its biggest disadvantages is that it only works on Mac.

On the other hand, one of the things that really stands out is that this app is DOWN TO BUSINESS. Because it’s focused on UX designers, every feature the app offers is meant to save their time. For example, you can pretty much work entirely with your keyboard thanks to great shortcuts. Also, practically all plugins and add-ons are free.
Besides all of this, the app has some great templates to work which, again, saves lots of time.

Adobe XD

This platform is part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud. It has pretty much everything you need, because it not only allows you to design your site from scratch, but it also lets you test it, and have a team of designers comment on it and make recommendations.

Besides that, you will be able to check how it works on different devices and operating systems.

UsabilityHub

It helps you test all your sites and measure how users react and behave. Another positive thing it offers is the possibility to do it for free (with your users) or acquire an audience for a reasonable price.

ClickHeat

Check this free site that allows you to measure what are the spots that users click the most, generating a heat map of your sites.

Even though this article is pretty extensive, in the world of UX design there’s a lot more to talk about. For example, we haven’t discussed usability tests.

This is so important that we’ll return to this on another occasion.

We’ve got a couple of extra tools that will help you improve any project. Freepik and Flaticon. Find the best visual and graphic resources to create whatever you need!