User Experience
User Experience – Key to Complete Customer Satisfaction - 14/11/2014
It’s all too easy to focus on the visual elements of a website, but user experience design (UXD) is required if you’re looking to encourage visitors to do more of things you want them to, whilst increasing their enjoyment. UXD is not possible without a strong understanding on your target audience, and our work involves thorough planning, research and testing (on a range of devices).
Successful Interactions
Every website visitor is unique and they will form their own journey, but you have to allow them to do so, and Freetimers can find the balance between the aims of the business and the requirements of the end-user. Navigation and information architecture is a really important aspect in UXD, and it’s well known that if a visitor can’t find a product then he or she will not buy it. No matter how complex a website is, important information should be easy to find, especially products and services, and today that has to be across all devices. Most visitors know exactly what they’re looking for when they visit a site, and this is why you have to understand their unique needs.
Ongoing research can bring insights into how customers behave, and that data can then be used to improve user experience. Having designed a diverse range of responsive and mobile websites, our designers have an expert understanding on how consumers behave online, and the UX aspect of design is never neglected.
Personas can be really useful in terms of understanding who will be using a particular website, and Freetimers can create realistic user journeys in the design process. Our team can work out the goals, motivations and irritations of a potential customer, designing an interactive interface that matches a range of technical abilities. By seeing the website from the perspective of a real user, we can identify any potential areas of improvement, while we thoroughly test our sites to ensure visitors can interact with the website the way the business wants them to.
Responsive - UX on all devices
The responsive web design approach is one many businesses take when they’re looking to improve conversions and reduce bounce rates (single page website visits), and that’s because it can give any visitor a user-friendly experience, no matter what device they’re using. Whether an individual is using their smartphone, their desktop computer or their tablet, content will be adjusted to match the device’s screen size, meaning the most important pages can be clearly displayed without cut-off or stretched images. Mobiles and tablets are often switched from portrait orientation to landscape and vice-versa, and a responsive design can ensure content is perfectly adjusted to accommodate the end-users’s requirements. A mobile website can be another ideal option, especially when you do not want to make significant changes to a complex ecommerce website. This approach provides mobile users with a customised experience, meaning they do not have to pinch the screen to find relevant information on a discouraging desktop website.
An effective website today is not just designed to look attractive and entice the viewer; it’s created to perform for the business or the entrepreneur, and function flawlessly for the end user.