The 9 Best Techniques for Designing Ridiculously Compelling Websites
In a world where everyone can design, it’s increasingly important to have your designs stand out from the crowd. A perfectly designed website will make you want to come back again and again. And the best way to do that is with some killer UX. Whether you’re designing for digital or print, there are universal principles you need to follow if you want your designs to look great, feel natural, and be easy for users to understand. This article covers everything from tips and techniques on how to design ridiculously compelling websites, through creating value propositions and personas that will help you create a strong user base for your site before ending with an action plan on how to design better websites.
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Create a strong value proposition and user persona
In your search for inspiration, it’s worth taking some time to think about what your site is for. What does your business offer? Why should your visitors care about that? Think about your core customers and the pain points they face. If you can solve those, you’ve got a leg up on your competition. Think about who your ideal customer is. What problems do they have and how can your content help solve those? With these two questions in mind, you can start to outline a value proposition and user persona for your site. This will help you to define your business and create a strong thesis for your site.
Provide content insights
This is the time to start digging into your data. What insights can you gather? What questions can you ask your audience? What data can you collect? If you have the option, it would be beneficial to you and your business to go through some of your site’s traffic with a pen and paper and just write down your thoughts and observations. This can help you to really unpick why people are engaging with your site and create a much deeper understanding of your audience. In addition to this, there are a number of tools that can help you to get a deeper insight into how your site’s visitors are behaving.
Incorporate usability testing
With your focus on the user in mind, you’ll want to run usability tests on a regular basis. This is a great way to get an understanding of how users are interacting with your site. You can run quick A/B tests, where you present two slightly different variations of your content to different subsets of your audience. This is a great way to gather some insights into what your users are doing and what they’re thinking. You can also dig a little deeper, by creating custom scenarios that test out different functions of your site to see how your audience are interacting with them. One thing to be careful of is not to use usability testing as a means to provide solutions to what you find. If you’re testing out a scenario where users have issues with your functionality, do not start spamming your customers with follow-ups or providing solutions to their problems.
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Be careful with colors and contrast
Colors are powerful, but you don’t want to use them carelessly. There are a number of important considerations you need to keep in mind when using color. First, remember that you want your users to be able to understand the information on your page. If there are too many colors on a page, it can be difficult for a user to understand the information. Second, subtle colors can influence people in a different way to bolder ones. If you want to be mindful, you can use a shade of grey or beige as a neutral. This will help to make your site more inclusive. Finally, you don’t want to overdo it when it comes to contrast. Keep in mind that the human eye will be looking at your design while it’s moving. This means that it needs to be easy to read and understand.
Employ animation sparingly, if at all
Animation is a powerful tool for bringing your designs to life, but it’s worth being careful with how you use it. If you want to create a sense of motion and energy in your design, you can use transitions in your animations. However, you don’t want to overdo it, as too much animation can be distracting. You can start to notice that your design is starting to become less and less readable when you start to overuse animation.
Use color sparingly
The same goes for colour as it does with adding too much of it to your designs. If you find yourself adding a lot of colour to your designs, it’s worth taking a step back and re-centring on making them as readable and as simple as possible. It can often be the case that you have a lot of information in your designs, but that the key features for your site are being covered. This can often be in the form of the content or navigation buttons. If this is the case, it can be beneficial to take some time and really work on making your key features as clear and as simple to understand as possible.
Make your content matter
All of the hard work that you’ve done designing your site will be for nothing if your content isn’t good enough. This is something that you’re going to have to really work hard on, but you can do it. If you want to create a strong user base, your content needs to be engaging and useful. This can be achieved in a number of ways.
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Don’t be afraid to ask for feedback from users
At the end of the day, your best source of feedback is going to be your users. If you take the time to ask them what they like and what they don’t like about your design and your content, you’re going to be in a much stronger position. Take advantage of all of the methods that you can use to collect user feedback. These can include surveys and feedback forms, social media posts, and in-person conversations. It can be a little overwhelming to try to collect too much feedback from your users, so it’s worth keeping it all in one place. You can use tools such as Trello or Google Sheets to help you to manage your feedback.
Plan for success: Include user feedback in your workflow
When it comes to creating a better website, one of the most important things that you can do is to plan for success. You need to take all of the steps that you can to ensure that your users are happy with your product. Be sure to include user feedback in your workflow, so that you can start to take action on what you’re learning. Make it a point to start logging your observations and writing down your thoughts as you go, so that you can keep things all in one place.
Bottom line
The bottom line is that a great website can make all the difference in the world. Unfortunately, many people struggle with creating good websites. In this essay, we discussed the best techniques for designing websites. Now, you have a better understanding of how to design websites and what you need to do to design an extraordinary website.