What are the Steps to Good UX Design for a Website or App

A good user experience helps users achieve their goals as they have expected. To do that, you need to understand the objectives and point of view of your users and consider the different interactions they will have with your website, mobile app, physical store, etc. The number of situations to consider may sound daunting, but users can achieve a good user experience by following four fundamental steps when designing a UX.

The four steps are:

Understand the user

Step into the shoe of your users and think of the actions they would take on your website or app. Why would they use your service in the first place? Are they looking for information, researching products or services, or making a purchase? Identify the different actions your users would need to take to achieve their goals and list them down on separate sticky notes. Arrange the individual actions in a user flow that you think will help them achieve their goal in the best possible way. Along the way, you may find that you can group, combine or reduce specific actions to enhance the user experience.

Create the mood

Once you have created your user flow, map out the emotions you want the users to feel for each action. For example, when they enter your website, do you want them to feel excited, curious and welcomed? And when they complete a purchase, do you want them to feel satisfied and relaxed? Your UX can create the intended emotions through a combination of graphics, imagery, colours and messaging. It is also essential that the emotions conveyed are consistent with your brand identity, personality, and values to connect with your target users.

Visualise the vision

Now that you have a clear vision of the intended actions and mood, you can start to design how each of the pages of your website or app will look like. For example, the placement of the buttons and where would they lead to, the layout of your content, the colour scheme of the entire site, and so on. You can begin by sketching out your design on the user flow you have created to serve as an outline for your website or app. A user flow is helpful even if you are hiring a UX design agency Singapore to help you communicate your vision.

Test!

The best way of knowing whether you have created a good user experience is to test early with real users. You do not need to have a completed website or app before testing; there are plenty of tools out there that allows you to create visual mock-ups of your site quickly (and cheaply). If you do not have the resource or skill for that, you can even share the sketch of your user flow with friends or potential users to gather their feedback. When testing, ask the users open-ended questions so you can probe deeper into the experience or challenges that they may have with each action; you may even discover new ideas out of them.

Designing a good UX is challenging but achievable with the steps prescribed above. What you need is a good understanding of your users’ actions and moods, visualise how your website or app can look like, and be prepared to test it early and quickly. You can also hire Creativeans, a UX design agency Singapore to guide you through designing a good user experience.