Giving visitors of your site a good user experience is key to keeping them on your site while providing them with what they are looking for to bring in qualified leads.
There are several rules to excellent User Experience (UX) design to provide a meaningful and relevant experience to the visitors of your website. The process involves integrating your products/services, brand, and CTA into a website that is easy to navigate and works as expected, blending form and function together to tell your business' story.
Source: Laws of UX by Jon Yablonski, O'Reilly Books
The Rules of UX Design
Jacob's Law
Users spend most of their time on other sites, and they prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.
- When a visitor is on your site, they expect to find the main menu at or near the top of the page.
- Visitors expect some indication that an action performed has been completed, for example when a form is filled out a thank you message or page should load.
Fitt's Law
The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.
- On a mobile device, a button should be large enough to tap as well as far enough away from other buttons to prevent accidentally clicking the wrong one.
Hick's Law
The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices available.
- When you have a large number of pages, it helps to categorize them in the menu to break the selection down.
Miller's Law
The average person can keep only 7 (± 2) items in their working memory.
- Putting content into a visual hierarchy or 'chunks' on the page helps visitors find the information they need. By creating informative headers and sub-headers, visitors can scan the page for the information they are looking for while comprehending additional content on the page.
- Using images and block quotes also breaks up the text into digestible chunks.
Postel's Law
Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.
- When building forms, be flexible and tolerant of the input your visitor might provide to reduce frustration and increase use.
Peak-End Rule
People judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak and at its end, rather than on the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.
- An awesome thank you landing page after a form is submitted can have a positive impact on someone's experience on your site!
Aesthetic-Usability Effect
Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that's more usable.
- Oddly enough, a well-designed and visually pleasing website won't ruin a visitor's experience if a button doesn't work or a page loads slower than normal.
von Restorff Effect
When multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered.
- A Call-to-Action button that is a different color than the other buttons on the page will catch the eye of a visitor.
- Just remember, if everything stands out, nothing stands out!
Tesler's Law
Also known as the Law of Conservation and Complexity, states that for any system there is a certain amount of complexity that cannot be reduced.
- Forms that utilize autofill removes some of the complexity required to communicate with your company.
- Making sure a checkout page has the option to select your billing address as your shipping address removes complexity to the form that can't be removed.
Doherty Threshold
Productivity soars when a computer and its users interact at a pace (<400ms) that ensures that neither has to wait on the other.
- Making sure a website loads fast is key to keeping visitors on your site. Slow websites result in visitors going to a competing site that loads faster.
- However, you can retain visitors if you give them a progress bar, no matter how accurate it is. An animation works too!
- And yet, a purposeful delay can increase the perceived value and instill trust, regardless of the actual process time.
If you want any of your pages reviewed for UX, contact your Strategy Coach for a quote!
