Is My Website User-Friendly?
User experience can be a tricky thing to figure out sometimes mostly due to how many things that it encompasses. Below I have listed 4 things that will help when starting down the road to designing a good user experience.
1. What problem are you solving?
User Experience is focused heavily on trying to understand the context, activities, and people in order to solve their problems. In short UX is solving your user's problems. So in that case you need to know what problem you are trying to solve for your user. If you don't know the problem how in the world are you going to fix it.
2. Know who you are dealing with
If you know and understand the people who are using your product/service, you will be able to design a better product/service for them. You need to know who your users are and how they are going to be using the site. Take a few minutes and really ask yourself, "What are the things that my user's are trying to accomplish on my site ?". Then ask yourself, "What am I doing to help them accomplish these goals?".
User Experience really boils down to who your end user is going to be. You wouldn't build the same exact site for every single demographic, and the same goes for user experience. People use the internet in a lot of different ways and people take in information in different ways. (just go ask your grandparents).
I can't over-emphasize this. Create your site for the people that are going to use it not for yourself. Your user's could care less about how much you like your own site.
3. Make sure that visitors always know where they are and where they need to go
If you construct your website in a manner that’s too complicated to navigate, produce content too difficult for your users to comprehend, your website will not meet its objectives, and you will lose business. A user should ideally only be 3 clicks or less from any post or page on your site any more than that and frustration can set in.
If you make it easy for your users to navigate your content the more likely it is that they will end up staying on your site. If you make it hard for them they will end up leaving your site, and that is a lost conversion, lost money, lost notoriety, or whatever else you are trying to achieve.
4. USE CONTENT THAT IS SIMPLE, CLEAR, CONCISE, AND SPEAK THEIR LANGUAGE.
Do not make the mistake of believing that your users think exactly like you. The truth is, that is rarely ever the case.
People will show up on your site and you will need to find a way to work with their notions about what things should be called. If you want a more in depth look at speaking your user's language you can take a look at this informative slideshare I recently went through. http://www.slideshare.net/scarequotes/speak-your-users-language-62328826
