User Experience (UX) Explained for Best Practice Website Creation

 

The first talk I watched about Universal Design was given by Rebecca Ferguson who is a professional designer.

 The talk is about how designing an already existing website that you might think is horrible is better than starting over. In the talk she goes over about first meeting the client to try and pin point what the problems are and what the client is trying to get out of the website they are trying to create, is it about boosting sales and pretty much what the goals and aspirations of the client are.

Something that really stuck with me after watching this talk is how Rebecca mentioned how she tries to be adaptable with her clients. She mentioned that during her process of designing a website for a client she likes to constantly get feedback from said client in order to better gauge their goals and aspirations. She goes into more detail how her process and what she tries to do with her client is take them on a journey where the client can learn more about UX/UI Design and not just go straight into using complicated terminology that the client is going to be confused about. Doing this can help the client get a better understanding about what they want to achieve going forward in terms of growth, sales and brand awareness.

Something else that I really liked from this talk is the process she goes through to try and break the ice with a potential customer. Rebecca mentions that she starts off this process by researching the company of her potential client and finding out what gaps or problems the company might be facing even before an official meeting.

Another ice breaker she mentions at a meeting with a client is, potential ways for an already established business/company to make more revenue by adding in little incentives to buy more before checking out, for example before buying something a small pop up could come up recommending the customer to buy something else that would fit with the product they are already buying.

Another thing that stuck with me from watching this talk is when she was asked to provide possible sources of accessibility tools she mentioned looking at government websites.

Finally from this talk, Rebecca went on to talk about when the right time is to scratch something and start fresh. first off you have to pin point exactly what is not working in the hierarchy of your website, it could be the flow of information, visually something is off or that the user journey just seems off. She advises not starting completely from scratch but rather doing things differently such as saving your current project as a draft and trying to go a different route with the design and see where that leads to.

The main goal is to make sure something is functional, useable and accessible.

Government websites have to be accessible for everyone, so in terms of UX/UI, that is the best possible place to start off looking for such tools. This to me is incredible advice because in order to have your website be accessible to everyone, you must first look at what other people are doing correctly in order to have theirs easily accessible by anyone that ends up on their website.

To end this off, I read an article written by Sheryl Burgstahler who has a Ph.D in Universal Design and its applications.

The article talks about UD in more general terms, going into its definition, scope of applications and the different principles of Universal Design.

What I really enjoyed about this articles was reading about the different principles of Universal Design. Principles such as how the design must be equitable, as in useful and marketable to people with diverse abilities such as a website who is accessible towards blind people. Another principle is tolerance of error, which minimises the potential consequences of clicking on the wrong thing which can be very difficult for someone with disabilities to find their way back to the home page or the page they were just on. Creating a simple yet effective website which accounts for human error and is not too difficult to navigate to or back to a certain starting point showcases effective use of such principle.

Something else that I enjoyed reading about from this article is how Universal Design is not only applicable to just websites but to learning as well.

In learning, Universal Design can be used to motivate people to learn more, broadening the scope of what one person would like the learn about or also helping learners better express themselves.

After researching the talk/article, I came out with a better understanding of what UX/U is and how to achieve it when creating a website.

Certain check boxes have to be hit in order to have a successful website, such as accessibility, good flow of information, less consequences for human error and the right tools at your disposal in order to provide all of these things to a customer.