UX - Small Details Does Matter - Part 1
This article is about the smallest details and understand how they can affect your overall website experience. The small interactions can make an imperceptible but enormous difference to the overall sentiment towards a website. Users won’t remember anything, they’ll just remember if your product was useful, fun, and beautiful. Below are some of the small details which can make great difference and how it can make our design useful , fun to user.
For example - On BestBuy.com, the small change of allowing people to skip sign-up during checkout resulted in $300 million extra revenue per year.
Icons
Icons are a simple, effective way to draw users into the content of your website. They serve the same psychological purpose as paragraph breaks. If we were to divide icons, there are two type of icons, first one is normal icons which every body uses and other are smart icons which change the entire perceptive of user.
With the help of small change in icon, it’s solving a big problem for user. Its not about thinking differently its about thinking smartly.
White Space
White space refers to the empty space between and around elements in a design or page layout which is often overlooked and neglected. Although many consider it a waste of valuable screen estate, but white space is an essential element in web design. White spaces plays a important role in any designing work, especially in web designing, because it visually give a resting place for the visitors. These resting places are often found in margins and padding.
- Allows for easier readability and scannability.
- Guide users on a page by creating a mental map.
- Can create the feeling of sophistication and elegance (e.g Medium.com).
- It helps in balancing and maintaining harmony in layout
UX writing
Writing for users is a deeply intuitive and technical trade. As with web design digital writing needs to resolve the user’s existing knowledge and instincts in an interactive way.
Both bill are same, with same amount, only difference is in the bottom copy of the bills. By changing the copy, problem is solved in very elegant and effective manner.
UX writing should meld with your product, and go unnoticed. Like UX design, it’s focused on ratifying a user’s needs with a technical product.
Stay Consistent
Your design should be consistent. Some standards and conventions should be established and applied throughout your website. For example - logo on top left and search on top right.
These websites have nothing in conman, but look at there header and notice the position of logo and search bar. It’s good to have experiments with your website but there are some standards and rules which have to be followed. User who encounters “Search” at the top right on one page will face problem if it’s arbitrarily moved to different location on other page and sames goes for logo.
Users will tend to apply rules they’ve learned elsewhere, even if those rules don’t actually apply to the current site. They will come to your website with their own expectations.
People have a strong memory for location, and your designs can leverage this characteristic by reserving particular locations for screen elements and applying them consistently.
Consistency can help minimize your development and maintenance costs, free you from having to be concerned about relatively trivial design issues and provide an enhanced user experience for your customers.
- Consistency creates accountability.
- Consistency establishes your reputation.
- Consistency makes you relevant.
- Consistency maintains your message.
Conclusion
UX design is not about solving user problems but it’s about how you will solve it. Above I have listed few from many small details which can help you solving problem in much easier and elegant way. These small things will not disturb your already existing design, in fact it will help to make it more user friendly. As in the end all that matters is User experience.
