Jun 16, 2015

Website Design Practices for Easy User Navigation

I’ve long been known as a nitpicker when it comes to editing and design for emails and websites. My team members have known to expect a sizable amount of changes and suggestions, but I promise, they’re all in good spirit. And they really do have a purpose.

Beyond just making everything look good, practicing consistency in design for websites, as well as emails, is a crucial step for ensuring your target audience knows quickly what’s attention worthy and how to interact with your communications.

Website design trends come and go, but good usability never goes out of style.

A Few Email and Website Design Usability Items

The kinds of things I’m talking about are things like:

  • Using one color all the time to indicate clickable links or buttons so people know they’re clickable
  • Creating a typography system for size and color of fonts to indicate relative importance of the information (e.g. bigger or brighter color for the most important headlines, smaller or less vibrant color for less important headlines, italics for quotes, etc.)
  • Placing certain and repeatable types of content like related links on the same area of every page and using the grid system of your pages for similar content to be found in similar areas of your pages
  • Using the same order of field names on every form

These examples and others like them can help visitors to your sites and landing pages, and recipients of email, know what to do with the stuff you’ve presented them; and how they can understand what’s important and how to act by simply skimming.

The end goal of using consistent design cues is to improve the user experience … get them to the content they want faster, help them understand who you are, have them take action right away. And “teaching” them how to interact with your site via these visual cues does just that, making them better engaged and a happier camper when using your site.

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