User Experience Vs. Usability
Finding a balance between flashy designs and intuitive interfaces can be difficult - here’s some things to consider when making your next web project.
Web design schools and courses give you a huge array of skills to use when you leave, but as with anything, moderation is a key component. Many people with web design online degrees find themselves stranded on a familiar gradient - that between usability, and user experience.
Usability is the practice of making your website as user-centric and usable as possible, while User Experience focuses more on the attachment users form with the site, through design elements and form. Often these two elements stand at opposing sides, pulling your projects in different directions - adding more graphics and fancy JS may attract users visually, but if it clouds the true purpose of the site or makes it hard to use, you’re really doing yourself a disservice. As you begin your next project, take these three steps into consideration.
1. User Base
It’s important to consider the demographic that will be using your site. For instance, one of my first jobs was designing real estate websites. I was eager to explode the current design template with new graphics, flash, jQuery transitions - the whole shebang. The courses I'd taken in web design online were teeming with skills I couldn't wait to show off. That is until I got a call from one of our clients complaining that the site was not displaying properly in IE5 (this was only three years ago). As it turns out, most of the properties the site served were high end condos in Florida, with an average age range of 55 to 70. Needless to say, I was asked to take the whole thing down a notch.
Though I didn't get to use my full arsenal on that project, it did teach me a great deal of respect for the art of usability. Being able to lead someone through a website they’ve never seen before, especially someone with little web experience, is an essential benchmark for any piece of web design online. Always get the lowdown on who will be using your site first, and then err on the side of caution - the last thing you want is your client to lose business because you wanted to show off. Usability experts like Jacob Nielsen have careers built off of taking the fun and showmanship out of design, but they do teach a valid point – before you get fancy, you have to cover the basics.
2. Functionality
Even the most seasoned internet veteran can be stopped cold by new functionality. Take Google+ for instance - it does essentially what Facebook does, in a slightly different way, but it’s enough to warrant status posts of confusion. For you, using your site is always easy, because you built it. Try to put yourself in the mind of a new user - or better yet, find a new user - and take notes on what actions take longer to perform successfully. You might be surprised to find you made a more complex web site than you initially thought.
3. Desired Presence
Once you’ve laid the groundwork of the first two steps, it's time to glam it up. As important as usability is, personality matters too. Take, for example, the spike in the use of Bing over Google when they introduced customizable background images for their search page. It may seem meaningless, but people trust sites they can visually connect with. Take some time to really shine those core elements and add as much warmth as you can without getting in the user’s way, and you’re well on your way to a high quality web experience.