Tips for clean, user-friendly web page design
Web design is all about the user. What do they want to find, how do they want to find it and how long are they prepared to browse a website before they lose interest and their attention span dictates they move on elsewhere? If you can’t understand and account for the user’s expectations for their browsing experience – and create a web page design that responds accordingly – you’ll struggle to increase traffic and conversions and keep bounce rates as low as possible.
Like any industry, web design is subject to trends in style and approach. The favoured flavour this year is stripped back, simple, clean design. Minimalism puts content in focus and does away with unnecessary, superfluous elements. This style of web page design lends itself to a streamlined, highly logical user experience. In other words, a website visitor will see only what they need to in order to find what they’re looking for or take a particular action.
Going minimal with your website demands that you be ruthless - but also generous. During the planning stage, scrutinise every inch of every page and ask yourself whether that text, or image, or link – whatever it might be – really needs to be there. Does it serve a particular purpose? Does it add to the overall objective of the site? Does it deliver a specific benefit to the user given their objectives and expectations? Be ruthless about doing away with content or design elements that don’t contribute something to the user’s experience of your site.
Be generous in the amount of space between textual and graphic elements on each page. Don’t be afraid of leaving room between headings and body copy and don’t feel you have to fill your site with additional images, banners and ads just to make it appear complete. Clutter is clutter. If you’re content, links and images are interesting and compelling you’ll find white space actually accentuates them rather than makes your page appear sparse.
A minimalist website design might look empty to someone who’s used to looking at busy sites crowded with content and crammed with animated banner ads. But in reality it takes a lot of work to pare back your design to a point where absolutely everything the user sees absolutely has to be there. It makes browsing – and by extension buying – a simpler, more streamlined process. Don’t be afraid to strip your site all the way back to basics
