How A Good User Experience Plays A Role In Web Design

Recently updated on February 27th, 2023

When it comes to the term web design, many people ­associate it with a website’s overall look and feel. The design may incorporate a sleek logo, an eye-catching color palette, and beautiful images. The design could even be responsive and look great on a wide range of devices like smartphones and tablets. Whatever the case, a good website must be good as long as it has strong attention to web design right?

Yes, however…

Modern web design incorporates more than just good looks. People generally visit websites to consume content. If the content isn’t there, people won’t bother spending time visiting or sharing the site, no matter how “good” the design may look. This is where a good user experience comes into play.

Getting Things Done

People these days are utilizing the web to get things done. We use the web to communicate online, shop online, find something entertaining online, and even take college courses… online.

How great does it feel when you find what you’re looking for faster, easier, and perhaps cheaper? Great right? How does it feel when you can’t find what you’re looking for? Not so great. When the user experience on a site isn’t up-to-par as expected, we tend to find something else to fulfill that immediate satisfaction.

Speed Bumps Of Web Design

Speed bumps of web design refer to the common obstacles and challenges that designers and developers may face when building and optimizing websites for speed and performance. Some of these speed bumps include:

• Large image and media files: High-resolution images and videos can slow down website loading times.
• Too many plugins and widgets: Installing too many plugins and widgets can increase website loading times and lead to compatibility issues.
• Poor website hosting: Choosing a cheap or unreliable web hosting service can negatively impact website speed and performance.
• Bloated code: Using inefficient or outdated code can slow down website loading times and make it harder to maintain and update the site.
• Lack of optimization: Failing to optimize website content and code for speed and performance can lead to slower loading times and poor user experience.

Designers and developers can overcome these speed bumps by following best practices for web design and development, such as optimizing images and media, choosing efficient and lightweight code frameworks, and regularly testing and optimizing website speed and performance.

When something gets in the way of that process, whether it’s a popup ad or a slow loading webpage, our experience with that site can immediately start to dwindle. It can be comparable to those speed bumps that tend to get in your way while you’re trying to leave a parking lot.

Now these “speed bumps” on the web can be minuscule like an ad, or much more immense like a poorly executed checkout system.

The Online Shopping Experience

Say you found that product you were looking for online at a reasonable price. Great, you got a good deal. That makes for a good user experience!

When you go to place your order, however, you are presented with a gauntlet of form fields. While this may not stop you from making your purchase today, the experience you had with this site may end up stopping you from even considering visiting the site again the next time you’re shopping around.

To address and eliminate that negative user experience from occurring, perhaps that site’s checkout process can incorporate a check box for confirming that your shipping address is the same as your billing address, removing the need to enter your address twice for many.

The important factor to consider is this: as a site owner, make sure you, or your professional web design firm, does whatever can be done to make the user happy while they’re visiting your site. When that is accomplished, perhaps they can then fully appreciate that sleek logo, or eye-catching color palette incorporated in your design that you were so proud to show off.