Intuitive web design takes into consideration the needs of prospective users. It’s all about the user or customer.
As a web designer, building a website should meet your user’s expectations or past experiences. A user’s past experiences define what’s intuitive or unintuitive to them.
By factoring their previous experiences and likely their expectations, you can place every information where it needs to be for ease of use. For them, they will quickly know where to find what they need exactly when they need it.
For instance, if a user wants to contact support, they’ll most likely navigate to the bottom of the website in the footer section or from the last item in the top menu.
This knowledge comes from their past experiences with similar websites. For web designers, meeting these user expectations should be of utmost importance. And in case you have a better way of doing something, you can also introduce it smartly without hurting the user experience.
Intuitive website design in London is hard to come by, so in this article we’ll be diving into all aspect of what intuitive design entails, and how you can use it to enhance your business.
What Is Intuitive Web Design?
In essence, intuitive design takes cues from two main things, User Interface and User Experience design. We bet you’ve bumped into the populous UI and UX acronyms before.
These are the main pillars of intuitive website design.
UI
User Interface or UI is the visual presentation of a website, that is, the layout, location of buttons, images, videos, and everything in between.
How a website is visually presented is defined by its UI.
UX
UX or User Experience is directly associated with UI design, but its main focus is on experiences.
UX defines the flow of content to give the end-user an easier time finding what they need on a website without interrupting their experience.
Combining the two:
When you combine great UI and UX, your website will have what is called intuitive design.
Intuitive web design is a perfect blend of functionality, usability, navigation, and design.
Intuitive website design finds the sweet spot between your target users’ current knowledge from their previous experiences navigating other websites and the target knowledge, which is what the user should know about navigating your site.
The sweet spot, which fills the so-called knowledge gap between the two is intuitive design.
Characteristics of Intuitive Web Design
What exactly defines intuitive website design? Here are some characteristics of an intuitive website design.
- Responsive
- Consistent
- Usable
- Attractive
- Built with user’s intent in mind
The last characteristic emphasizes the importance of considering the end-user while building your website. A survey carried out by HubSpot found that 76% of users consider the ease of finding what they want an essential factor in a website’s design.
Importance of Intuitive Web Design
But why is everyone so fixated on intuitive web design, anyway? And why should you join the intuitive web design bandwagon, yet such sites are not easier to create? Here are some main reasons why intuitive website design is essential.
1. To Attract More users
Many websites on the internet are dedicated to one particular thing, impressing the target audience. Intuitive web design helps your website stand out among the crowd.
When your website is as attractive as possible, it pulls potential users around. This is the first step to growing your user base. Without intuitive design, it’ll be hard for new visitors to come around, let alone stay around.
The current internet information overload age doesn’t allow users to tolerate bad or unintuitive web design. They’ll quickly move on to a competitor’s site if yours doesn’t impress; this typically happens in seconds.
If you think design doesn’t count, you’ll not be impressed when you hear that first impressions are 94% design related.
In other words, intuitive web design is critical to get more eyeballs on your website, which in turn has many more advantages that are discussed below.
2. Increase Visitor Retention
Website performance metrics are judged by bounce rate and retention, among other things.
An excellent User Interface will attract users, but then you’ll have only passed the first test. The second test users use to judge whether they should stay around longer or not is the flow of how they interact with various elements of the website.
A slow website will turn the majority of users away. Unintuitive design cuts across the interface and the experience, altogether.
Websites that are hard to navigate and load slowly are not responsive and have a terrible user interface, including the wrong positioning of buttons and using bad fonts, colors, and gradients that will hurt the whole experience, leading to high-bounce rates.
According to this study, a whopping 88% of consumers are less likely to return to a website due to an awful user experience.
Intuitive web design ensures that you tick all the boxes from UI to UX; not only attracting new users but retaining most of them on your site to grow your customer base.
3. Higher Conversion Rates
The whole purpose of websites, in most cases, is to try and sell something to users whether it’s a product or service; it doesn’t matter.
Without an intuitive website design, your sales won’t amount to much, which will heavily hurt your business. Web design can hurt or grow your online business. Dozens of case studies have proved this point.
This study found that there’s indeed a correlation between web design and purchase intention in e-commerce; primarily because design affects how users perceive your brand.
A great design with excellent usability will increase their trust in your brand, making visitors convert to customers. ESPN.com is a perfect example of why intuitive design is critical.
The sports company’s profit rose by 35% after considering its customer base suggestions and incorporated its homepage’s design changes.
4. To Compete Effectively
Most websites on the internet do not have what most people would consider an intuitive design.
But building your website in such a way will enable you to compete effectively with other market players. Once you’ve implemented intuitive web design aspects, you will be able to gain a competitive advantage if your competitors are not doing it already or level the playing field with them if they’ve already implemented the same.
How can you implement intuitive design?
How can you build websites that consider this an essential factor as a web designer or developer?
You can start by conducting thorough market research to know your potential user.
Know what your potential users already know or are familiar with; this is their current knowledge as mentioned previously.
Once you figure out their current knowledge, you’ll have already solved most of the equation.
From there, you can now try to match their current experience in your website design or redesign.
Alternatively, you can also train them unconsciously to use your new approach to a particular thing than what they already know, which is better. But don’t try to reinvent the wheel at once; take it slow.
Conclusion
Building an intuitive website is about finding the perfect balance between the end user’s current knowledge and target knowledge.
User Interface and User Experience design are at the core of intuitive web design. Although intuitive web design can be hard to create, or else everyone would be doing it, it has the potential of growing your online business in different ways.
Intuitive web design can benefit you in different ways as a business, such as attracting more users, improving retention rate or reducing the bounce rate, building trust, and increasing sales. Furthermore, it will help you compete well in the market.