Guidelines and Best Practices for Great Web Design and Usability

When creating the design or redesign of a web page, it’s easy to let lost in the world of internal aesthetics possibilities. Adding visual effects like images, colors, and logos is important, but that’s not all to reach the ultimate user experience. To make navigating through your page enjoyable, you need to focus on usability. But what exactly does it mean? Usability is a measure of how well a specific user in a specific context uses a design or product to achieve a pre-set goal effectively. To reach maximum satisfaction, web designers consider this crucial factor from the start of the project until the final result. Web design and usability are all about us, people. We tend to get lazy sometimes, and we want things to be explicit. To help you, we summed up the best practices that will guide you on the way to creating the perfect customer-oriented website.

Smart ideas for creating great web design and usability

There is more than one way to perfect the web design and usability of your page. The first one is to create a simple layout that will be eye-pleasing and effective. When working on it, remember that most people don’t come to admire the design – they enter your website to get information on a topic, product, or service. Eventually, customers will purchase, but only if they don’t get lost in the clutter. To maximize the functionality, limit yourself to a color scheme of approximately five colors. Carefully select the typefaces – make them legible and try to create a contrast with the background. Don’t choose something too minimalistic or artsy. Work with the idea to please more people, and choose something that suits your brand.

Secondly, strive to create a visual hierarchy – organize and arrange the website’s elements so that the users can reach the most useful sections by intuition. To do so, use images to invite them to complete an action, but do it naturally. Adjust the structure, position, size, and colors. You want to draw the visitor’s attention to the fundamental. After you have done that, it’s time to make it even easier for the user. Take care of the navigation. It has to be intuitive, which is not so easy to achieve. Try to meet the expectations of the audience by creating a clean structure. Place the navigation bar close to the top; you can even include it in the footer. Then, add some breadcrumbs (secondary navigation bar) that will appear as horizontal text links. Separate them by an angle bracket. Another excellent idea is to include a search bar and make a wireframe map.

Focus on the functionalities of the website

Another consideration to have in mind – keep it consistent. This refers to navigation, colors, backgrounds, pages, typefaces, and even the tone of your writing. If you meet this requirement, you will be able to make a positive impact on the user experience and usability. You can still use different layouts for specific types of pages (landing pages, informative pages, and others) but make it easier for the visitors to get an idea of what content to expect. Make sure the website is responsive as well. What does this mean? It means that your page must be compatible with mobile devices to provide maximum flexibility. Since almost half of the traffic is created thanks to hand-held devices, you should choose friendly HTML templates that provide browser compatibility.

Make the website to be accessible, conventional, credible, and customer-oriented. Finding the balance between being original but also meeting the expectations of the public can be challenging. However, it’s decisive to create accessibility for different types of visitors, including people with disabilities. Place the navigation at the top or on the left side of the page. The same goes with the logo, but here’s one tip from us – make it clickable. Let it redirect the people to your homepage. Add a shopping cart icon that shows the number of items inside if you own an e-commerce business. Do your best to deliver clear conditions about the products or services you offer. Think about a page with a price list and also an “About Us” page. Finally, think from the point of view of the customer. After all, you are doing it for them, not for yourself. Ask someone else to test the website, someone who visits it for the first time. You will be amazed by the discoveries that another user can make for you!