Designing a website is easy and simple. Yet, only a few people can make high-performing designs. Why is that? Because composing web content needs “design thinking”. It is a human-centric approach to innovate and build a design that is original as well as based on the customer’s necessities. The accelerated prototyping in design thinking helps you make choices based on the popular demand of the customer instead of any historical data. Today, website designs are growing more intuitive and responsive than ever before!
“Looking forward to improving your web design? Design thinking is for you!”
The three major components of the design thinking are: –
1. Viability:
Which indicates what is likely to become part of a business model that is more sustainable?
2. Feasibility:
It is another way to speak or to predict what is technically possible within the given frame of the future?
3. Desirability:
Which determines what kind of design makes sense to people?
Design Thinking is maturing because we work in an ecosystem that could be very dynamic. Moreover, the difficulties can be multi-layers which means that one challenge can be overlapping to another causing an interlocking system. Furthermore, more or less all these challenges are inherent because of humans.
The linear levels of design thinking help web designers to take an iterative approach. Yet, when it comes to work – the process can be more customized and blended with different approaches to suit a specific requirement of the client or to overcome a critical challenge.
Design Thinking steps cover: –
Framing a Question
To find a solution it is important to first have a fair understanding of the customer terms. You can inspire your team to dig more about what customers need.
Gathering Inspiration
Look for designs that inspire you. Follow the “Google Pillar” and seek inspiration by going out into the world. It will help you to identify exactly what your customer demands and needs are!
Generating Ideas
You can leverage another “Google Pillar” and fuel the ideas with your imagination. It will help you to stay ahead of your competition as well as clean your designing blocks.
Make it Tangible
A good design is also backed by a marvelous prototype. Use pen and paper if you have to find what’s working!
Testing and Learning
It is necessary to test your design and to gather feedback. Remember a good design can become exceptional after passing a challenging test.
Unpack Your Design
With the ‘just right’ plan in your hand, all you would need next is an amazing story to introduce your design to your customer and clients.
Web Design trends change alike other trends on the market. It is vital to keep up because clients would always ask for something fresh and modern. Your designs should be intelligent, creative, and focused.
So, how to make your design more aligned with your customer requirements?
To make your designs lean toward meeting customer needs, you can follow these 12 tips. Now, following all the 12 tips can be a bit overwhelming for anyone, so you can pick up those that suit your design style. Let’s begin to cover each one of the tips: –
Plan! Plan! Plan!
The key principle of good web designs is to have a great idea by your side. So, you can start by simply making a journey for your clients where they first visit the website and start navigating their way. To make it more interactive for customers you have to chart out the web pages and content to educate them. All the customers have a particular interest or needs or problems for which they are finding clarifications. The easier it is for them to find a solution, the happier they get and hence you will get a good rating.
Reduce Noise
Customers looking for particular solutions can get easily distracted by information and other details. It’s a responsibility of web designer to keep them on the track, in other words, you should deal with the noise of the design. To do so, find a balance of font style, colour, background, element, imagery etc. Without a balance, your customers may feel out of the scenarios and maybe they might jump to another website where they can get what they need without losing any more of their time.
Social Proofing
In 2022, security is becoming a crucial factor for business and brands. Since most people like to only buy things from trusted brands like Amazon, if you want to grab the attention of the customer, then you need to come up with something unique. To gain customer trust and creditworthiness you must position yourself as subject matter expert of the area. That’s one of the ways. Another way is to add reviews as well as testimonials from your previous consumers. When you add reviews on your website it sends a social signal to customers that your website is safe to use.
Strong CTA’s
Once you have gained the trust of customers it is now time to give the very best services. An improved web design is one that contains a clear and strong CTA (call-to-action) so that your customer knows what they need to do next. Does that mean you need to add a lot of CTA’s on the webpage? That’s unnecessary and can repeatedly distract your customers. Even if there is one CTA that is smartly placed in the content, it can convert potential customers into paying customers.
Invest in HQ Visual
The visual component on a web page adds to the overall appeal of the website. It’s recommended to use only high-quality images on your website. For example, you can add original HQ images as well as videos. Nowadays, you can get stock pictures from various online platforms. Using images will help you to showcase your products and services. Moreover, using imagery also makes it easier for customers to connect with your brand.
Easy Navigation
No matter how good or fruitful your idea is in your head! If the website and the design are hard to navigate chances are you’ll lose a lot of customers. Users like to dive deep into the particular areas surrounding their requirement for example service page, product page and blogs etc. That is why you must place every element carefully without overstuffing or leaving too much negative space. Give a purpose to your customer to stay on your website.
Catchy Homepage
By simply spending a little more time on composing your homepage, you’d be able to make the first-important-impression on your customers. Of course, the homepage would not be having any service or products but it can deliver your brand message. Use your homepage strategically to instill your value in the consumers. So, then once they move past the homepage, they feel more connected and ready to discover the services/product offered by your business or brand.
White Spaces
One of the common challenges for web artists is white space or negative space. You don’t need to be afraid of the white space. It’s not where your design is lacking visual items, instead use white space as a fundamental component. Negative space plays a key role in improving the readability of the content. It provides a consistent look and feel to the web design.
Mobile-First
In recent months the number of mobile users has substantially increased. Because of the lockdown, people are forced to switch to the online world. For web designers therefore it is very important to keep in mind that their web design could be first viewed on smaller screens. That said, it’s necessary to make web design responsive to the variation of screens. That’s what the mobile-first approach is all about – to make design navigation easy for mobile users.
Price Placement
Like any other content on your website, pricing also plays an important role. That’s how your client will come to know about how much they would be paying for a service. Keep a separate tab for pricing but avoid making it too complicated for customers to choose! By helping customers to make pricing decisions you can gain their confidence and offer more clarity on how you deliver your services.
Make it Interactive
Give something to customers to interact with so that the whole website experience becomes less overwhelming. For example: nowadays you can use a self-selection tool, which is essentially a series of questions that helps customers to arrive at a specific result. In this way, you can help your customer to narrow down their needs to definite requirements. The quick interaction of customers with your website increases the chance of a conversion.
Testing and Iterating
Web designing is continuously improving skill. Only through practicing you can achieve results that 100% satisfy your customer needs. Also, testing and iterating your web design is a way to guarantee that you stay on the right track. In some cases, companies perform A/B testing that shows how much impact your web design would have on the conversions.
Key Takeaways
- Take time to plan your design
- Improve your design with testing
- Learn more about design thinking
Conclusion
Web designing is a creative and intelligent skill. A good design can double the influence on the conversion and help customers to easily navigate their way to find specific solutions. Also, web designing is the way to pull new clients and to make them feel confident about their selection.
Extraordinary blog!