January 2, 2013
With a brand new year stretching ahead of us now is the time to take all those bad digital habits of 2012 out in a big black sack along with the wilted tinsel and scrunched wrapping paper.
And User Experience or UX is the perfect place to start.
In 2012 brands built a clearer picture of the consumer journey and realised that consumers just don’t treat channels as silos. They hop from one to the other and they expect the same consistent experience from start to finish.
Having an excellent in-store service paired with a clumsy, archaic website simply doesn’t cut the mustard anymore.
So without further ado, let’s take a look at some of those bad User Experience habits to bin; and some good ones to bag for 2013.
1) Ditch the Lorem Ipsum. When developing or redesigning a web page the design should mould to the content and not vice versa. It’s the content, not the design that the user has ultimately come to your site for.
2) Don’t put all your eggs in the homepage basket. Statistics indicate that the percentage of pageviews attributed to the homepage is falling year-on-year, with lower-level articles proving far more popular – indicating greater value spent optimising these templates instead.
3) Don’t stock up on photography. Usability tests have found stock photos that bear little relevance and add no real value to a site can actually frustrate rather than entice users. Better to minimise to only functional and navigational rather than decorative graphics.
4) Forget the fold. Users are now so familiar with scrolling that there’s really no need to squeeze every last bit of content into the upper fold of a web page.
5) Focus on the navigation not the click-throughs. Despite popular belief, the number of clicks a user has to take to reach the required information on a website won’t put them off; it’s more important to ensure the site is easy to navigate with clear signposts along the way.
For more useful UX tips visit UXMyths.com