Sounds simple enough, until you start to think about ‘user experience’ as an actual, quantifiable idea. How do you measure user experience? Creating the best and most accessible site in the world – one that is a real joy to navigate and use, beginning to end – isn’t like winning a race. There’s no definitive 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place, because you can’t just hold a ruler up to a website and measure its UX.
As a subject, UX is tricky, but it’s also an exciting concept for web designers – one that is always changing, always updating itself, and always giving rise to the question, ‘What do web users want?’
It has divided across multiple platforms
Back at the beginning of web design, we only needed to think about one view – the one that appeared on our computer screens when we typed the URL into the bar, or clicked through from Google.
Then the age of the smartphone happened, and suddenly sites had to be capable of adapting to more than one type of visitor. As the years past, we grew more discerning of bad adaptive design, and more demanding of good design. Things needed to be easy to navigate, fast, streamlined, and sites also needed to have that unspecified something that made them stand out from the competition.
Then, of course, it became all about mobile-first, not second.
At the same time, the drive toward simplified and intuitive tech honed users’ tastes. Steve Jobs’ aversion to buttons is largely considered a catalyst for this shift toward a more pared-back approach to design, and UX design had to embrace a philosophy for the sleek and the honed…
The interface has grown cleaner and more intentional
The internet quickly went from a novel, exciting place to be to a vital, practical resource for us to use throughout our professional and personal lives. These days, we’re not logging in from the family PC – tucked away somewhere in a spare room – just to see what the internet can do. We’re almost always connected, either actively or passively, and relying on it to do all manner of things for us.
What does that mean for UX design? It means sites need to be practical and useable; they need to represent a reliable, valuable resource (particularly when it comes to SEO and impressing Google), and they need to be easy to navigate, without trying too hard to be flashy, fun, impressive or quirky.
That’s not to say there’s no room for beautiful website design. At XIST2, we know better than anyone that there’s still a wide scope for that. But, at the same time, the best websites are simple and elegant, easy to use, intuitive and responsive.
An emphasis on emotion
Where, once upon a time, websites could afford to be relatively ‘face value’, we have grown to a more sophisticated point of user understanding. Just as bricks-and-mortar shops are very intentionally designed to cater to shoppers’ behaviours, websites can be designed in a way that caters to our emotions.
Why? Because emotions drive behaviours, and they’re also essential to building long-term loyalty.
Social media, of course, is a key component of developing this emotion too. A carefully managed social media strategy that appears natural, off-the-cuff, and in no way overly constructed – though, of course it is – should develop that loyalty, which will lead your existing and budding audience to your website. This journey – from social media to your website – has to be a seamless transition from one expression of your brand to another. The emotion you’ve generated via your social media strategy must be followed up by your website.
Part of this emotional connection finds itself in locality. The natural, off-the-cuff, and pseudo-impulsive feel to social media strategy connects with a real sense of place, of being part of a grounded, physical community – which helps foster an online one. This is why we are firm believers in local partnerships. Companies looking for web design services in Oxford will expect that we know the area as well as they do, so we can deliver their messages’ tone and content without a hiccup. It’s not a disadvantage to emphasise locality when you’re on the global web – it helps create authenticity.
Emotional design necessitates a strong understanding of your customers, your site’s context of use, and how to put the two together to create positive, memorable experiences. It’s a fascinating area of web design, and one that will underpin its evolution into the future.
