Mychal Williams
How Website Design Affects User Experience
Updated: Feb 25
A myriad of things can affect user experience, and a perfect web design is one of them. You will primarily hear about aesthetics if you ask people what they consider essential in web design. However, there's more to web design than what meets the eye. Professional web designers must consider multiple factors when creating a web page. I'll name a few:
Ensure to enhance the end user's experience and provide them with an appealing web page.
Design pages to keep visitors on a specific page through visual components, as well as the presentation of content.
Ensure the website has crisp responsiveness and functionality.
Although these are just three quick examples of what professional designers keep in mind, there are dozens of other things, but I'll name seven of the most important.
Lustrous Display
When someone lands on your website from a landing page, you want to amaze them. Humans are visual creatures, so it is critical to demonstrate your website as a legitimate company or service provider in a given industry. Moreover, fantastic web design helps your website to stand out among the rest. A perfect design provides a clean and professional look of a website to visitors, clients, and prospective buyers.
If a company has hired the services of a professional web designer, a visitor immediately notices it. This fact alone can develop a sense of trustworthiness as the users prove that your company is a well-established entity and they can get the best services from you.
Grabs the Attention of the Audience
Ever heard, "First impressions are everything?" that same adage applies to website design. The initial few seconds are of great importance. It is a time when the user decides to stay on the page or move on to another one. An exce
llent and eye-catching layout combined with powerful visuals can keep visitors glued to your website for a fair amount of time. After this, a visitor may be interested in your services or products.
Google has billions of websites by itself, meaning there are trillions of information available to us, but having too much information creates analysis paralysis, so when it comes to website design, you want your users to get relevant and authentic information easily and quickly. For this purpose, designers must limit the time visitors spend searching through a website and provide quick ways for visitors to digest what they are seeking. Hence, it is essential to capture your audience immediately with superb web design and attractive visuals. Here are the core ingredients to help retain visitors:
Build visual interest by introducing suitable typography.
The perfect blend of color and page layout is also necessary.
Bright and catchy banners can deliver your message in the desired manner.
Add such things which help to keep your audience engaged.
Engaging animation can help to draw the attention of a visitor.
To give your site a pleasant look, you can also use exciting design elements such as shapes, patterns, icons, textures, and colors.
Improve Site Functionality
An excellently designed website delivers the desired appearance and maintains the site structure on different screens. It enriches the user experience by offering a simple yet controlled layout. Seasoned designers ensure that websites appear similarly, accessed using a desktop or a smartphone.
Creates Trust & Emotional Connection
Uniform and unified design elements, which provide a clear visual presentation, can help gain a user's trust. A feeling of confidence builds up, and the audience considers you a trustworthy company.
Web design is truly unique because it allows you to create a powerful emotional connection between the user and your brand. In a society where a significant portion of our first contact with another person is digital, website design sets the stage to form robust foundations for relationships. Professional designers intentionally use vibrant colors, shapes, and branding materials (logos), which connect your brand with the website through emotional appeal and symbolic design.
Appropriate Use of Content
We mentioned earlier that giving your user all the information is not a good idea because it creates analysis paralysis and removes the sense of curiosity about your website. Moreover, it is challenging to digest readable content or information without any breaks. Therefore, your visitor decides to leave the site without bothering to open the next page of your website.
A well-designed website presents breaks within a large amount of content. In addition, the breaks help maintain a web page's visual strength. When building a website, consider giving information in an easy-to-digest way while highlighting necessary information.
Here are some critical components of proper design:
Select a good size and easy-to-read body text for your web page
Use illustrations and introduce necessary breakups within the content
Test using icons, influential quotes, or infographics
Seek visual hierarchy by specifying your headings to the required size, font, and color.
Utilization of sidebars to outline or highlight essential information
Use of white space in the right way
Personalization and Web Design
Did you know there's a significant amount of psychology at play when you put a human face on your website? The reason is that there's an emotional response attached, and it's a powerful way to create a connection in website design. When enhancing the user experience, adding human faces and photography suggests that you utilize the visitor's emotional aspect. Therefore, it is likely to gain lengthy engagement with the user.
In addition, humans prefer visuals, especially faces. By seeing a face on a web page, people immediately relate to such an image. So it is not difficult for a web designer to utilize this factor to influence the users' reactions and overall experience.
It doesn't matter what content is available on a web page. Visitors will instinctively gravitate to the visuals of human faces before they start reading the text. The 'Eye-tracking study proves this fact'.
The study shows that a face provides the first impression of a website to the users and influences the user experience until the end. Experienced web designers use human faces as a perfect tool to enhance the user experience. Why are human faces necessary for improving the user experience?
Faces Promote Trust and Connection
When we talk about winning the users' confidence, nothing can provide better results than human faces. Designers may establish trust by handling users with an emotional attachment.
Trust: The "About Us" page is available on almost every website. Similarly, most of these pages show images or pictures of the CEOs, the team members, and other people involved in the business. This strategy helps to build a trustworthy relationship with the user. Industries like medicine, education, and childcare need to gain such trust. It takes 50 milliseconds for a user to draw an opinion regarding a particular website. Therefore, a face can assist in winning the confidence of a user in this short time.
Connection: The foundation for an association between a website and the user depends on a solid relationship. Using human faces to make a positive connection is the most viable option.
We're a creative website design and digital marketing agency that has been helping small businesses reach their goals since 2020. Our team of experts can help you with your website design needs. Feel free to reach out to us if you have questions about your current website or if you're not sure where to start on your new idea.