Optimizing UX: Web Design Best Practices

Written by Daisie Team

Published on 18 July 2023 7 min read

Designing for the web requires a perfect blend of creativity and technical know-how. The sweet spot is found when you can optimize user experiences through graphic design. This challenge can be met head-on by understanding your users, making your website accessible, enhancing navigation, speeding up your website, and applying responsive design techniques. So, let's jump right into it.

Analyze User Behavior

The first step in designing for the web and optimizing user experiences involves getting to know your users. You wouldn't build a house without knowing who's going to live in it, right? The same principle applies here. By analyzing user behavior, you can tailor your graphic design efforts to meet the specific needs and preferences of your audience.

Identify Target Audience

Think of your target audience as the blueprint of your design project—these are the people who will interact with your creation. When identifying your target audience, consider demographics, psychographics, and behavior. Understanding these factors can help you create a user experience that is tailored to their needs. For instance, if you're designing a website for a tech company in Silicon Valley, you'll likely use a different design approach than you would for a bakery in a small town.

Study User Interactions

Once you've identified your target audience, it's time to study how they interact with your website. This can be achieved by using tools like Google Analytics, which provide valuable insights into user behavior. For example, you can track which pages visitors frequent the most, how long they stay on your website, and what actions they take. Understanding these interactions can help guide your design choices and create a more engaging user experience.

Evaluate Website Traffic

Website traffic is like the pulse of your website—its health can be gauged by the number of visitors it attracts. Evaluating your website traffic can provide you with insights about your audience's behavior, preferences, and needs. You can find out which devices they are using, where they are coming from, and even what time of day they visit. This data can help you make informed decisions about how to optimize your graphic design to enhance the user experience.

Improve Website Accessibility

Imagine going to a party where everyone's speaking a language you don't understand—frustrating, right? That's how users with disabilities feel when a website isn't accessible. Improving website accessibility is a key aspect of designing for the web and optimizing user experiences. Let's explore some ways to do this.

Implement ARIA

ARIA stands for Accessible Rich Internet Applications. It's a set of attributes that you can add to HTML elements to make your website more accessible. Using ARIA, you can provide additional information about elements, roles, states, and properties to assistive technologies like screen readers. So, if you're designing a website for an audiobook company, you can use ARIA to make sure all the users, including those with visual impairments, can navigate the website and enjoy the audiobooks.

Ensure Color Contrast

Colors are the spices of web design—they add flavor. But, just like spices, they need to be used judiciously. Ensuring proper color contrast is essential for readability, especially for users with color blindness. For instance, using light grey text on a white background might create a stylish, minimalistic design, but it can be hard to read for many users. So, if you're designing a website for a law firm in New York, a strong contrast between text and background colors can ensure that all the users can read the legal content clearly.

Optimize for Screen Readers

Screen readers are like tour guides for visually impaired users—they narrate the content of your website. Optimizing your website for screen readers involves using clear, descriptive language, proper HTML tags, and a logical content structure. For example, if you're designing a website for a museum in Paris, you would want to ensure that every piece of artwork has a detailed description that a screen reader can interpret, allowing a visually impaired user to enjoy the art collection just like any other visitor.

It's easy to get lost in a new city without a map. The same goes for a website. A well-designed navigation system is like a GPS for your website—it guides users to their destination. Let's look at how we can enhance the navigation design when designing for the web and optimizing user experiences.

When it comes to navigation design, simplicity is king. Users should be able to find what they're looking for in just a few clicks. Imagine designing a website for a large university in California. The website could have hundreds of pages, from course information to faculty bios. A simple, intuitive navigation structure—perhaps with drop-down menus for each department—can help students and faculty quickly find the information they need.

Incorporate Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are not just for Hansel and Gretel—they're also for your users. Breadcrumbs are a secondary navigation system that reveals the user's location in a website's hierarchy. If you're designing a website for an online store, breadcrumbs can help shoppers navigate from a product page back to a category page with ease. It's like leaving a trail of digital breadcrumbs that your users can follow.

Utilize Responsive Design

These days, people browse the web on all sorts of devices—from desktop computers to smartphones. Responsive design ensures that your website looks and functions well on any device. For example, if you're designing a news website, a responsive design will ensure that readers can easily navigate through different news sections, whether they're catching up on world news on their laptop at home or reading local news on their phone during their morning commute.

Boost Website Speed

Remember the days of dial-up internet when loading a single web page felt like waiting for a snail to cross the road? Thankfully, those days are behind us. However, website speed remains a critical factor in designing for the web: optimizing user experiences requires fast, efficient websites. Let's explore how to turbocharge your website's speed.

Optimize Images

Images add visual interest to a website, but they can also slow it down if not properly optimized. Let's say you're designing a website for a New York-based photographer. The site will be image-heavy, but large, high-res photos can make a website as slow as molasses in January. Optimizing these images—by resizing them, compressing them, or using the right file format—can help the site load faster, keeping the photographer's audience engaged.

Minify CSS & JavaScript

Minifying CSS and JavaScript is a bit like cleaning out your garage—it's all about getting rid of the clutter. When you minify CSS and JavaScript files, you're removing unnecessary characters (like spaces and comments) that take up space and slow down your site. Imagine you're designing a website for a tech startup in Austin, Texas. Minifying the site's CSS and JavaScript files can help the site load quicker, ensuring a smoother user experience for potential investors and customers alike.

Implement Lazy Loading

Lazy loading is a clever technique where you delay loading certain parts of a web page until they're needed. For instance, if you're designing a blog for a famous chef, you might have lots of tasty images and recipes. With lazy loading, the images won't load until the user scrolls down to them. It's like serving a meal course by course, rather than all at once. This helps to speed up the initial load time of the website, making sure that visitors stick around for dessert.

Apply Responsive Design

Have you ever tried to navigate a desktop-designed website on your phone? It's about as enjoyable as stepping on a Lego barefoot. That's why designing for the web: optimizing user experiences through graphic design means creating a site that looks and works great on all devices, from desktops to smartphones. So how can we achieve this? Let's dive in.

Adopt Mobile First Approach

Think about the last time you used your phone for browsing. It's pretty handy, right? With a mobile-first approach, you start by designing for the smallest screen and work your way up. Imagine you're designing a site for a renowned coffee shop in Seattle. You'd want the site to work flawlessly on mobile devices—after all, people might want to check the menu while on the go. This approach ensures that your site provides an optimized user experience, no matter the device.

Use Fluid Grid Layouts

Using fluid grid layouts is like arranging furniture in a room. Depending on the room's size, you'd place the furniture differently, right? The same goes for web design. With fluid grid layouts, website elements resize and rearrange based on the screen size. Let's pretend you're designing a site for a trendy fashion brand in Los Angeles. A fluid grid layout will ensure that whether someone is browsing on a laptop in a Hollywood cafe or on a phone during a Malibu beach day, the site looks great and is easy to navigate.

Integrate Flexible Images

Just like text and layout, images also need to be flexible. Think of flexible images like a stretchy rubber band—they expand and shrink depending on the space they're given. If you're designing a website for a travel agency in Miami, you'd want the breathtaking beach images to look just as stunning on a small smartphone screen as they do on a big desktop display. With flexible images, you can ensure your website looks visually appealing on all screen sizes, making your web design truly responsive.

If you're eager to learn more about optimizing user experience in web design, we highly recommend checking out the workshop 'Do's and Don'ts of UX Portfolio' by Tetiana Gulei. This workshop offers valuable insights on the most effective do's and don'ts in UX design, ensuring that your portfolio stands out and leaves a lasting impression on your audience.