User experience is something that has really become crucial as website visitor behavior patterns have become more refined in the last few years. Although the concept of user experience is always evolving, there are still certain fundamentals that website designers can follow to cope with the dynamic nature of their audiences. Here are six of the most important user experience guidelines that can help you ensure that your website does not lag behind.
Top 6 User Experience Guidelines for Websites
Guideline #1
The majority of user experience guidelines compendiums would focus heavily on pop ups and unsolicited windows and graphics. The reason for this is that it is very tempting for a website owner or designer to forget audiences’ convenience in lieu of higher revenue generation.However, various researches and studies have shown that most website visitors find such windows and graphics popping up extremely annoying because it hinders their original activity. This is why it is important for website owners and designer to resist the temptation of going for short term profits and aim for long term goals instead.
Guideline #2
Website credibility is also something that will be high on most compendiums and guides focusing on user experience guidelines. A website owner or designer can increase the credibility of his website in a wide variety of ways. Here are some tried and trusted ones.
A FAQ page
Logical navigation
References and citations in content
Visibility of author credentials
A professional design
Accessibility to previous content
Regular updation
Outbound links to authority content
Incoming links from authority websites
Guideline #3
Every website provides actions and activities to users that will fall in the same category. Most user experience consultants would counsel for these actions and activities to be standardized in every way possible to make the website more conducive to the audience. Whether it is the layout of the website i.e. location of information panels or the checking out process, consistency is one of the most important user experience guidelines.
Guideline #4
Simplicity is a pillar of most user experience guidelines because the whole idea is to make the website more users centric. This, basically, means that the workload on the user with regard to core website actions is kept minimal. A good example of this would be for a website to provide insurance premium, tax deduction and body mass index calculators for calculations as opposed to forcing the users to do it.
Guideline #5
There are certain website activities that require the user to wait or involve time outs. It is imperative that the user is kept informed of such things as clearly as possible. This means specifying the time out durations in a prominent part of the page and providing countdown timers when the users are required to wait for something.
Guideline #6
When it comes to user experience guidelines, the relevance and significance of providing information in the right format to the website visitor cannot be ignored. This can be viewed in a wide variety of ways including providing multiple measurement units and even focusing on whether the content is likely to be printed or read online.
User experience is something that has really become crucial as website visitor behavior patterns have become more refined in the last few years.
Although the concept of user experience is always evolving, there are still certain fundamentals that website designers can follow to cope with the dynamic nature of their audiences. Here are six of the most important user experience guidelines that can help you ensure that your website does not lag behind.