“User Experience (UX) Explained for Best Practice Website Creation”
To explain why user experience, or UX, design is so important, we first need to understand what UX design is. Dee Scarano, a UX/ UI designer with over 12 years’ experience in the industry, defines it as “creating how something looks and works to make the experience of using it easy and enjoyable”.
This is important because any interaction a person, or user, has with a website, or any product in general, has been designed by a UX designer to make that interaction as easy and pleasant as possible so that the person becomes a customer. Bad UX design will often turn potential customers away before they can even get to the checkout of a website.
Example of bad UX design via Route66.ie
In the video I watched from Dee, she lists these key factors that good UX design will often have that help it succeed in a content management website as well as a regular public site:
1. Meet the user’s needs
This means that whatever a user came to your site to do, they should be able to do it as easy as possible. Meeting the user’s needs seems obvious but a lot of websites get this wrong, for example, if a person wants to buy a hoodie on your store, they should be able to do this without any issues.
2. Easy to use and easy to learn
Your site should be easy for a first time customer to be able to navigate through and shop in, regardless if they’ve never been to your site before, they shouldn’t have to go navigating through huge drop downs or searching in the footer if they want to buy a product, they should be able to click 3 or 4 buttons from the home page and have the product they want in their basket.
3. Must give the user control and freedom
The user should have full control and freedom while they are on your site, for example they should be able to cancel a payment or change their mind at the last minute.
4. Surprise and delight
If the company greets you with a custom welcome message when you enter the site, or offer first time customers a discount, that would be a nice surprise, it doesn’t have to be done but it shows a little extra care went into the UX design of the site and makes you want to use the site again.
UX Design via pexels
I think these explanations are really good and easy to follow, especially the video format, and the editing does a good job to break each section up into different chapters almost. The rest of the video goes onto explain some good and bad examples of UX design, but both the examples that were given were examples of products and not web examples so they don’t apply to our content management systems, but still a good example to keep in mind was the bad example that was given, which was doors.
Some doors have handles on them even if they are push doors, but a handle tells the user that something is meant to be pulled, these are called “Norman Doors” after Don Norman who is a Cognitive Scientist & User Experience Architect.
A good UX designer would first see if the door should open in or out and apply either a handle or a panel to push on, this fails the first key factor of UX design, meeting the user’s needs.
The second source that I researched was an article by Ryan Grist, who is a managing director of “a leading UX and web design agency with over 15 years of experience”. The article delves more in depth about UX design in a full content management system (CMS).
Ryan starts off his article by making the distinction between UX design in a CMS vs UX in a regular public websites. Designers for normal websites must focus on key aspects to make sure they maximise clicks and transactions, whereas for a CMS, a designer must shift that focus to helping its users complete tasks that they have already set out to do.
This may differ from how a designer would design UX for the public but I believe the key point from the video also apply here.
Ryan goes on to say a good rule of thumb for CMS design is to anticipate what the most used tool would be and to use market research to find out what that would be, this also lines up with our other key points, meeting the user’s needs.
Market research will be very important for designing for a CMS as a lot of user’s needs are based on making things easy in the back end development, such as not hiding menus inside drop downs, or having things in places you would expect them to be. Ryan makes a big point of this for his second main point and goes onto list “Automating Common Tasks”, and “Explain Everything” as his next two headers, which again, highlight how important it is for a designer to make everything easier for their CMS users.
Career Foundry YouTube video with Dee Scarano: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziQEqGZB8GE
UX Considerations for Building an Amazing CMS by Ryan Grist:
https://www.uxbooth.com/articles/ux-considerations-for-building-an-amazing-cms/
Image of route66 website:
Image from pexels:
https://www.pexels.com/search/ux%20design/
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