Why User Experience (UX) Design Matters | Plus Best Practices

Why do you think User Experience (UX) in a mobile-based website design matters? Or rather, what makes a text easy to read? How do people read online text? Of course, we all want to write that text that site visitors will gladly read from beginning to end. Unfortunately, that’s often not the case. Most of the time, people scan through contextual texts.

And then, they read subheadings and the first sentences of the paragraphs they deem relevant. They look for transition words in particular. More so, in order to quickly abstract what the main conclusion of an article will be. All the things people do while reading your text are things Google will do.

That means that the structure of your text, and the way you write your paragraphs, become increasingly important. Core sentences – the first sentence of every paragraph – will need to contain the most important message of that paragraph. And having a clear and logical structure in your text will be invaluable.

What Is User Experience (UX) Design?

People depend on mobile devices every day for communications, eCommerce, content consumption, work, banking, directions, and increasingly as their sole computing device. What’s more, they are using a variety of devices such as mobile phones, smartwatches, tablets, phablets, wearables, and hybrid laptops.

Technically, a User Experience (UX) Design encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with a web business company, its services, and its products. It’s important to distinguish the total User Experience from the User Interface (UI), even though the UI is obviously an extremely important part of the design.

Bearing in mind, the User Interface (UI) Design is the point of human-computer interaction and communication in a device. This can include display screens, keyboards, a mouse, and the appearance of a desktop. It’s also the way through which a user interacts with an application or a website.

Websites such as Airbnb, Dropbox, and Virgin America display strong user interface designs. Ultimately, these sites have created pleasant, easily operable, User-Centered Designs (UCD) that focus on the user and their needs. User-Centered Design (UCD) is an iterative design process in which designers focus on the users and their needs in each design phase.

Types of user interfaces include:

• Graphical User Interface (GUI)
• Command-Line Interface (CLI)
• menu-driven user interface
• touch user interface
• Voice User Interface (VUI)
• form-based user interface
• natural language user interface

User interface examples:

• computer mouse
• remote control
• virtual reality
• ATMs
• speedometer
• the old iPod click wheel

Uniquely, the growing dependence of many businesses on web applications and mobile applications has led many companies to place increased priority on User Experience (UX) Designs.

More so, in an effort to improve the user’s overall experience. As an example, consider a website with movie reviews. Even if the UI for finding a film is perfect, the UX will be poor for a user who wants information about a small independent release if the underlying database only contains movies from major studios.

Where User Experience (UX) And User Interface (UI) Meets

Clearly, we should distinguish UX and usability. According to the definition of usability, it is a quality attribute of the UI, covering whether the system is easy to learn, efficient to use, pleasant, and so forth. Again, this is very important.

Oftentimes, the User Interface (UI) is often talked about in conjunction with User Experience (UX). After all, it may include the aesthetic appearance of the device, response time, and the content that is presented to the user within the context of the user interface. Overall, both terms fall under the concept of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in this case.

Not forgetting, HCI is the field of study focusing on the creation of computer technology and the interaction between humans and all forms of IT design. Specifically, it studies areas such as UCD design, UI design, UX design, etc. Notably, an increasing focus on creating an optimized user experience has led some to carve out careers for UI and UX experts.

In addition, certain languages, such as HTML and CSS, have been geared toward making it easier to create a strong user interface and experience. So, in totality, User Experience (UX) design is an even broader concept.

The Key Tips To Keep Your Text Readability Score High

Google’s Gary Illyes once tweeted that you should read your text out loud. If it doesn’t read nicely or sounds strange, it probably won’t rank either. Let’s be clear: your rankings won’t immediately soar when you improve the readability of your texts. But, writing a readable blog post is an essential part of User Experience (UX) in every SEO strategy.

In simpler terms, at jmexclusives, we’re convinced that writing in plain and understandable language can and will get you more visitors. We’ve even incorporated a tool that helps people write readable text in our case. Realistically, even most search engines love easy-to-understand web content copy — we’ll give you more tips on how to create it.

If you want your readers to read your entire blog post or page, your copy should be easy to read. Posts that are readable will definitely result in more returning visitors and a higher conversion rate. So in the long run: readability ranks. And now, let’s talk about how we can create easy reads. Before you start writing your text, think about the structure.

Ask yourself some questions like:

1. Does readability help in the ranking?
2. Is there a logical order of weblog topics?
3. Will it lead to higher rankings and more traffic?
4. Will your audience be able to follow your arguments?
5. What do you want to tell your audience and in what order?
6. Is it worth your while to make your text easy to read?
7. Will your readers follow your examples and your main message?
8. Maybe you should try writing content with the inverted pyramid style, etc.

Utilize some of these readability solutions:

• Try to avoid starting sentences with the same word.
• Avoid or limit the number of difficult words in a text.
• Try not to use complicated sentences and try to avoid the use of passive voice.
• Also, make sure to write in an appealing style that can’t be really hard to read.
• Try to use short sentences where you can, as lengthy sentences are much harder to process.
• Always remember, that not everyone has a talent for creative writing. It helps to mix it up a bit!
• Try to alternate long sentences with shorter ones and often use synonyms.
• Also, check out the 5 tips to write a readable blog post in detail.

We know writing readable copy is hard. Writing an unreadable text is a mistake that we see pretty often. That’s why Yoast developed a readability analysis in its SEO Plugin for webmasters. It checks, for instance, if your sentences aren’t too long. Or if you don’t use passive voice too often and if the length of your paragraphs is okay.

The analysis gives you tips about what you can improve on and you can even see which sentences need a second look. They’re continuously tweaking it, adding new checks, and translating it into as many different languages as possible. There are up to 18 languages right now! The analysis is available in Yoast SEO Plugin for both free and premium versions.

The Best Ways To Improve Mobile User Experience (UX) In Design

For UX designers the ever-changing mobile device trends represent both challenges and opportunities. On the one hand, we have to account for the variety of devices and ways in which they are used. On the other, this opens up an entirely new set of focus areas in UX design. Whilst, creating positive experiences for an entirely new generation of users.

In early computers, there was very little user interface except for a few buttons at an operator’s console. Many of these early computers used punched cards, prepared using keypunch machines, as the primary method of input for computer programs and data. Essentially, punched cards have been obsolete in computing since 2012.

However, some voting machines still use a punched card system. The user interface evolved with the introduction of the command-line interface, which first appeared as a nearly blank display screen with a line for user input. Users relied on a keyboard and a set of commands to navigate exchanges of information with the computer.

This command-line interface led to one in which menus (lists of choices written in text) predominated. Last but not least, the GUI arrived, originating mainly in Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), adopted and enhanced by Apple, and effectively standardized by Microsoft in its Windows operating systems.

Graphical UIs And Mobile UIs

Elements of a GUI include such things as windows, pull-down menus, buttons, scroll bars, and icons. With the increasing use of multimedia as part of the GUI, sound, voice, motion video and virtual reality are increasingly becoming the GUI for many applications. Mobile UX design is quite tricky — there are just so many things we have to consider.

Including the growing list of mobile devices, the ways people interact with them, and the fact that people want consistent and pleasurable experiences across all device types. The emerging popularity of mobile applications has also affected UI, leading to something called mobile UI. In 2015, Google published 25 mobile UX design best practices.

More so, based on internal research. These tips were recently updated to bring them more up-to-date. The author also includes a downloadable PDF of all 25 tips that are nice to keep handy for any mobile UX project. Another great resource to keep handy is Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines for mobile design. They are easy to read with a beautiful layout.

Not to mention, they’re also peppered with best practices, tips, and Apple’s own take on design principles. For mobile UX designers, these guidelines are a great resource for delivering high-quality user experiences. Specifically, Mobile UI is concerned with creating usable, interactive interfaces on the smaller screens of smartphones and tablets.

So now, the question is:

• you have a mobile website, right?
• is it responsive or did you use a plugin to make it look good?
• does it really convert as it eventually should?

Well, as mobile internet usage has exploded over the years, your mobile website’s user experience (or Mobile UX) should get as much attention as the user experience of your desktop website. Even more so, Google will increasingly judge your site based on your mobile version. That said, it’s time to know how we can stay ahead in UX designs.

Therefore, in the next section, I’d like to share a few things you can do to enhance the User Experience (UX) of your mobile website. Let me make a differentiation to start with. Although all things mentioned in this post also apply to tablets, and desktops, we mostly had smartphones in mind. More so, when writing this post.

Keep in mind, that in 2022 moving forward, you’ll have to keep smartphones in your inner circles just like many other devices can consume your content. More so, if you are looking forward to a way of improving special features, like touch controls. Reading this post on your smartwatch? Sure, why not.

1. Use a task-based mobile layout design

According to Yoast SEO Blog, you should design your mobile website and its structure with the user in mind — while not forgetting about mobile SEO. Your user uses a mobile phone. They might be on their way to whatever and needs to check something on your website. What could that be? Think a moment about the things visitors do on your website.

Perse, check your Google Analytics, and use common sense about your business or conduct proper testing. Thereafter, decide on the top tasks for your mobile website. Furthermore, according to top task expert Gerry McGovern, top tasks are the small set of tasks (usually less than ten, often less than five) that matter most to your customers.

These are the key tasks that users expect to do quickly on your site. Optimize your mobile site in such a way that these tasks are accessible with the most ease possible. David Allen already told you. You need to get things done. If someone finds your website and starts browsing it, make sure they can easily find and complete what they wanted to do.

On their mobile phone, there are probably loads of apps that they are used to using. Being on a mobile device might make it harder for the user to focus. Distractions are everywhere, not just on the phone. Design your mobile UX to make sure they get things done, before switching to other apps instead.

2. Add a clear menu and a search option

One of the main elements of mobile UX is search. You have to be able to search at a moment’s notice. A search option should always be available when reading a page or even when clicking on another. The thing is that we always strive to present the easiest website possible as mentioned in the above section.

Unfortunately, there will always be elements that just don’t fit in that easily. For all that content, it would be good to use a mobile search option. If you are a real estate broker or sell clothes online, that search option might as well be the most important element on your mobile homepage. Please show that search option in the content area in that case.

Make it available via the menu bar on other pages. One more thing about mobile UX related to the search, make sure your internal search result pages look awesome as well. The results should be ordered on relevancy, for instance, on both desktop and mobile. Make sure individual results can be distinguished, so improve the separation of results.

3. No dividers are needed, instead, use short forms

About that lack of separation; that doesn’t mean you should use all kinds of dividers on your mobile website. Dividers take up space, and that might have a negative influence on mobile UX instead. Think of ways to style elements, so they all look like separate sections, without the need for a divider. Use borders, white space, and headings.

There are lots of things that can be done to improve that mobile UX without adding line elements that just take up space. Of course, it’s not prohibited to use them. Just make sure they fit in and don’t distract users from doing their tasks. As on your desktop website, your mobile site could or should aim for conversion.

Buying products, or getting a quote for your services. Subscribing to your newsletter or simply filling out a contact form are all actions that need user input. On a mobile phone, six-page forms ruin the mobile UX. Users might fill these out, but it is a mighty big might as it is a six-page form. For optimal mobile UX, you want to keep forms as short as possible.

Remove all the things you want to ask but don’t need. Newsletter? Just the e-mail address (with an <input type="email"> input field). Quote? Last name and e-mail address. Shop? Delivery address invoice address Address. Or at least an option to copy the delivery address to the invoice address. Do make sure you are following the GDPR guidelines, though!

4. Please try and tone it down a little bit

You might think your desktop site looks fantastic with all those colors and huge images, but on your mobile website, the effect will be perceived differently. There will be less focus. Your website doesn’t have to be black and white only, but a nice white background, black letters, and one or perhaps two supporting colors are enough for a better mobile UX.

Do make sure that your mobile site and the desktop site have mobile parity — they should offer the same experience on mobile as well as desktop. This not only goes for the content but should also go for the design. Plus, today, when you are evaluating your site you should always look at it from a mobile-first perspective.

So, should you ever start a redesign project for your site — do it mobile-first. Toning things down also goes for your wild animations and such. Every non-essential bit of JavaScript that you add to your site makes it harder to load and run. Plus, animation doesn’t always make sense on a mobile site. Keep your site lean and mean!

5. Utilize the general button hit areas

It’s so obvious, yet still a cause for concern. Mobile websites are mostly browsed by using fingers and thumbs and buttons don’t always provide enough space to hit them easily. In Google’s developer documentation, you can find this under Accessible Tap Targets. And we need to be able to click elements with that thumb as well.

In that Google article linked above, you can find numbers for that tap target. Note that a minimum recommended touch target size is around 48 device-independent pixels on a site with a properly set mobile viewport. For example, while an icon may only have a width and height of 24px, you can use additional padding to bring the tap target size up to 48px.

The 48×48 pixel area corresponds to around 9mm, which is about the size of a person’s finger pad area. In addition, the usability experts at Nielsen found that touch targets on mobile should have a rendered size of at least 1 cm x 1 cm to prevent errors and frustration. Closely related to button hit areas is the way touch elements are often too close together.

Something Nielsen also described in that research article. It’s annoying to click a link and end up somewhere else — just because the link next to it is too close to the link you wanted.

6. Measure and test your color contrast while designing

If you want to know why color contrast is so important in web design, you should look no further than how even big companies like Google utilizes them. Especially, while merchandising some of their topmost web platforms and applications. At its core, checking for good resultant color contrast in your graphics design is very important.

Moreover, when you create color palettes for your web design projects, chances are that you’re testing the color combinations for great contrast. If you’re not testing the color combinations of your designs, you might not be considering the eventual readability of the design. And thus, you’ll be losing the very potential audience you target.

Some web users — if not all — are quite sensitive when it comes to the choice of design colors. In web design, Color Contrast is the difference in light between the font (or anything in the foreground) and its background. So, in terms of web accessibility, how well one color stands out from another color determines quite a lot.

Like whether or not most people will be able to read the information. On the other hand, the Color Contrast Ratio is the numerical value assigned to the difference in light between the foreground and the background. And in terms of web accessibility, the color contrast ratio is how contrast is actually measured.

7. Measure your overall Flesch reading ease score

Have you ever wondered how easy your website is to understand? Does your writing meet the readability expectations of your audience? In order to evaluate the effectiveness of your writing, there are tools to use. With these tools, you can easily check the readability of your overall website pages. As well as the Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease and grade level.

Particularly, in order to help you determine if your writing is reaching the right audience. If you use the readability analysis in the Yoast SEO plugin, you have probably come across this feature. The Flesch reading ease score tells you how easy to read your text is. Eventually, if your web text is too complicated and hard to understand, users will leave your page.

Of course, they’ll return to the search results to get more suitable sources. Remember, these could be some of your competitors — it’s not good to ignore them. On the other hand, if your test scores are a very low-grade level, users will likely assume that your content isn’t valuable. Ultimately, both of these things can prevent site visitor content interaction.

And even contribute to a high bounce rate. In order to maximize your readership, it’s important for the content on your website to be great. But, it should also reflect the readability expectations of your audience. For this reason, that’s where The Flesch Reading Ease Test comes in handy. It helps you to measure the readability of a text from start to finish.

8. Optimize for speed, but don’t use too many font sizes

On one side, another major factor for the right level of mobile UX is speed. There are multiple tools to check site speed. Most of the time, there are several things you can do to enhance performance. The first one always seems obvious: image optimization. You should at least reduce image size using tools such as Squoosh.

In addition to that, you should combine and minify the CSS and JavaScript files that are loaded. The fewer connections to the server that needs to be made, the faster your website will be and the better the mobile UX. Of course, you should also use great hosting as that often turns out to be a quick win for many sites.

On the other side, don’t use too many font sizes. Google’s mobile-friendly tests even check if your font sizes are in order. This mostly goes for the body font, but still, typography can make or break a mobile website. Not only is the type of font you pick important, but the sizes of those fonts are as well. Use all the desktop font sizes on your mobile site.

There are two reasons for that:

1. The mobile screen size. You don’t want the title to fill the screen. More so, if you want to make sure the article starts within the first view of the page. You also do not want the base font (like your paragraph font) to be too small to read without having to pinch and zoom.
2. You’ll create a mess when using more than three font sizes. The size differences will be much more visible. That’s why you should limit the number of font sizes to two, maybe three.

In nutshell, site speed is a very hot topic at Google right now. Not too long ago, they announced a new set of metrics called the Core Web Vitals for webmasters. These metrics give Google insights into a new ranking factor: Page Experience. In 2022 and beyond, mobile sites will also be judged on the experience they offer users.

That said, you can read up on the basic Core Web Vitals that you’ll need to adopt into your user experience (UX) design strategy. And then, make sure that you follow the five ways to enhance your page experience for your mobile website.

Final Thoughts:

As you can see, we can achieve a better User Experience (UX) with oriental mobile designs by following some of the best practices above. As well as understanding the actual user constraints, and facilitating a solid working relationship with developers. Of course, site speed is one of those factors. Basically, there’s more to content design than what’s known.

In layman’s language, Content Design is about more than writing words. It’s designing experiences with them. Words alone are meaningless without form and function. Words are part of the design — not just an afterthought. Because words are no good when form and function don’t consider them. Consider things like your website blog page design.

Realistically, a Website Blog Pages Design is the practice of optimizing a site blog’s layout outlook, its branding and appearance feel, its target user readability, and its overall performance functionality. Particularly, in order to maximize its unique visitation traffic, user readership, and increase its lead conversions.

See More Related Weblog Topics:

1. Content Copywriting | Technical Skills For Creative Writing
2. Fall Back Font In CSS | Steps To Reduce Font Loading Impact
3. Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS) | Steps To Relief Eye Strain
4. Domain Authority (DA) Score | Steps For Ranking Website High
5. Transition Words & Phrases | Their Web Copywriting Role

Simply put, a mobile user experience (UX) design refers to the creation of positive experiences during the use of mobile devices and wearables. As well as the general applications or services running on such devices. According to Interaction Design Foundation, “Mobile UX design focuses strongly on efficiency and discoverability.”

Mobile isn’t going away. In 2016, the number of users accessing the web on a mobile device surpassed desktop use for the first time. For UX designers, the increased adoption of mobile and the proliferation of various device types will make user experience design that much more challenging. For these reasons, we need to adhere to a set of best practices.

Additionally, we need a clear understanding of the constraints that mobile introduces. And then, in the long run, provide a smooth working relationship with developers. All these are some of the key factors in achieving designs that create positive human experiences. So, what’s your take on this? Let’s hear some of your experiences and thoughts below.