Why we bang on about responsive user experience design
As a creative agency, it is our objective to create aesthetically pleasing designs while maintaining seamless user experiences. The common misconception that design is an eye-catching, attention-drawing ploy to get punters to buy into your products or services is a fallacy.
Granted, there are people who use design in this distasteful manner, but if you study larger, more established brands, you’ll quickly learn how design is meant for great things.
Design is used to illustrate a message – making it clearer and stand out from the noise. This is very difficult to achieve if you cannot cater to the end user.
You may have created a stunning looking design for a website with the right shapes and all the right colours but if it is not responsive, you have probably wasted your efforts. In such a fast-paced world, most people use their tablets and smartphones to access websites – thus the website needs to respond to that.
Another problem we face is that some designers make the website responsive, so it resizes and moulds to the appropriate screen size but they have not planned out how the user will interact with it. It is all about how the user interacts with the website, after all.
Responsive user-inspired design
When thinking about the layout, structure and navigation, it is important to create a wireframe that balances how you would like users to interact and how they will actually interact.
Have you noticed that when you visit a website of a well-established brand, irrespective of the device you are using, it is a simple and easy to follow system. Everything is exactly where it is supposed to be – even though, as a user, you may not even know where is supposed to be. This not accidental, coincidental or magic! It is simply due to the brand investing in a savvy UX (user experience) designer.
The designer sat and thought about how you would interact with the website and then planned how it will look, feel and function. This insight really determines whether the end user will enjoy their experience or not.
UX experience designers are like architects who analyse all the different possibilities and potholes to ensure users flow through websites effortlessly. If users start to struggle to navigate or have to zoom in to read the text, they are more likely to click away from the site and go elsewhere.
They look at every angle!
This not only means you lose a potential customer but this increases your website bounce rate. (That’s not a good thing
Prototype
Experienced UX designers create blueprints and prototypes to vigorously test for suitability and robustness.
After getting in the minds of the user and thinking carefully about the design, they build a prototype to identify potential issues – this is a sure way to ensure flaws are ironed out.
Designers use advanced applications such as Adobe XD to create UI kits and page designs. This software aided with Adobe Illustrator and other graphic design applications is used to create a page design and layout.
This can them simulated precisely to see exactly how the website or app will look, feel and function.
