Are design variables prioritizing user experience on websites?
Our commitment to sustainability and paperless promotion, led me to start working with service providers on website design. Over two decades now and at least five iterations later, our web avatars have not only changed vividly but are undergoing transformation. The challenge is to remain relevant and contemporary for our engaged users. And it is always a tightrope walk between design, functionality and user experience. Cost constraints demand that we compromise one variable for another and renewed perspectives keep evolving.
Experiences from ongoing website design projects have changed our outlook towards moderating factors. Design variables have fluctuated between being static and dynamic as design language changes. On the other hand, implementation constantly dictates how user-experience transforms from functional to interactive. The net result is a set of positions, trade-offs and immense learning towards structured design interpretation. User-specific goals and constraints guide us on the rest of our web-design journey.
Current Redundancies: Largely an outcome of focusing on ticking the compliance box to meet statutory requirements. Information is presented in tables, charts and bar graphs in a static manner. User experiences are restricted to providing critical information for further action. Forms require downloading, physically completion and plugging back into the system. The net result is re-work, multiple activity loops and increased team effort to keep pace with data. Users view this web-link like a post box; seeking information, updating details required and acting offline and repeatedly posting data back for further engagement.
Incremental Changes: User communities online demand information and engagement differently. This requires re-thinking on how information is re-ordered. It remains static but involves increasing menu options to allow for functional access. Stakeholder profiling has started to reveal multiple segments, requiring varying levels of interactivity. The fragmented expectations of multiple audiences are different, the easiest response is to go modular. Simply speaking this information exists as modules, user accessibility is customized and made responsive to audience needs.
Formulated Changes: Technological change, information complexity and multiple user platforms alter expectations. External data abundance demands easy access, so design language has to facilitate. Structural changes involve increased interaction like call back options, on-line chats and even multilingual bots. Website access is no longer limited to a desktop, design specifications have to dynamically re-orient to mobile phones, tablets and changing screen configurations. Data piles have to be relegated to the back end, while interactivity brings information to the fore-front.
Engaged Changes: Active, veiled, intuitive features facilitating demand-based interaction are decluttering web-design solutions. Information formats demand symbiotic exchanges between multiple-user defined platforms. Digital domain and social media symbiosis on web-platforms requires vigorous design upgrades. Complexity moves to the back-end, user experience simplicity to the fore-front, while being clutter free and interactive retains its premium. Interchangeable data sourcing, multiple window access and spontaneous pinning of information, requires constant change to be factored in.
Design language simplifies elegantly to accommodate user experience expectations. Visual exchanges are re-arranged through multiple platforms. Users inter-navigate from social handles, digital domains and virtual platforms. Inter-connectivity between pointing links and call to action buttons intensifies. Websites are no longer repositories of information, but organically growing organizational interfaces achieving virtual representation. Websites today serve business, customer and operations variables together. While design changes must meet ongoing decluttering, user expectations will remain tacit and highly multilayered.
Web experiences will gain greater prominence and returns justify initial as well as ongoing up-gradation costs incurred. Design tight-rope walks only anticipate even higher user aspirations!