Keeping ahead with the best web design and UX tips, you can power up your web design game and provide a great experience that meets all your customer needs.

User-friendly websites go beyond an attractive design; they foster meaningful interactions and facilitate achieving business and individual goals.

Whether you are a startup or a well-established business, this article is for you to help you create a highly appealing website.

Now let’s reveal the secret to building a user-friendly website that captures and engages users immediately. Let’s go! Are you up for it? We’re ready to go!

Unlock the Power of Appealing Design with UX Design

UX Design revolves around developing a website that is easy for users to navigate. User experience design helps to make your website or application easy to use and does not confuse your users.

A UX designer focuses on how your consumers will use your product. As you sell a product or service, you also produce content to reach and connect with your customers before the products even reach their hands.

While building the website, it is great to consider the user perspective in mind as you want your audience to land on the right page that defines your business.

With an inexperienced web design team, you might not meet the users’ expectations. By choosing a UI/UX development company, you can deliver a great user experience.

Key UX Tips to Create Visually Appealing Websites

Rather than designing casually, designers must put time and effort into the best website by incorporating tips and tricks to make it look good, responsive, and user-friendly.

Seeking the right tips? Here, we have compiled the best tips and tricks to design a beautiful, user-friendly website.

Put the User at the Center of Your Website Design

There is more to website design than what works for you and your team. Rather, choose a style that centers around the needs of your users.

Moving from this to a user experience perspective, you can quickly spot areas where problems might arise.

Consider Using Responsive Design

The next best practices involved creating a highly appealing experience for the users to consider implementing a responsive design that is easily accessible from any device (desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile devices).

Nowadays, more and more people visit websites on their mobile devices, which makes responsive design essential. Depending on your device, your website might not display properly without it. As a result, your website’s bounce rate is high, and engagement is low, leading to a poor user experience.

Use Consistent and Clear Navigation

A website can’t function without clear navigation. Websites are like maps for users. With the crystal clear navigation process in place, you can provide the best user experience to the visitors visiting your website and easily satisfy what they are looking for. You should ensure that your navigation is visible and easily accessible. It is highly recommended to reduce the excessive use of drop-down menus. This may confuse the users, and they might leave the website immediately. Adding something that guides the user to navigate the website easily is great.

Contextualize Your Images

Pictures speak louder than words! When optimizing your website’s UX and visual aesthetic, ensure your images complement your fonts, text, and layout. Visuals and design are up to you, but ensuring images add value and context is important.

In addition to images and videos, GIFs can reinforce your brand and demonstrate how your products work. Video, animation, and motion graphics are also more eye-catching than static images, which can help your website stand out.

Make Effective Use of Whitespace

A website’s white space is the area between images, text, and other design elements. By utilizing whitespace effectively, a website can be made more readable and more user-friendly. This, in turn, will help you create a great visual appeal by placing the elements in the right way in the background.

It also facilitates the scanning of content more efficiently and provides a more sophisticated and elegant appearance to the website.

Maintain a Consistent Typography

An effective typographic design establishes a brand’s identity and conveys information on a website. A consistent typographic style throughout the website facilitates navigation and interaction.

Keep your fonts consistent, stick to one font, stay consistent with colors, and make sure your typography looks good on different devices and browsers.

Put a Call to Action That Is Appealing

CTAs encourage users to act. As a result, conversion rates increase while user navigation is improved. The CTAs on your website should be visible on every page and throughout the user experience. To make CTAs stand out from other buttons, appropriate colors and textures can make them pop. There is also a need to consider the placement of the CTA and the text that appears on the CTA. The user should be encouraged to take action by incorporating an action verb in the text.

Boost the Speed of Your Website

Users need to experience a fast-loading website. They may get frustrated with long loading times. Increase conversions and engagement by optimizing your website for speed.

If you have larger images on your website, start compressing them to enhance the speed and performance of your website.

Bring User Feedback into the Process

Always open to taking feedback from the user. Without incorporating the feedback, you cannot find how users interact with your website and where they face issues. Overall, feedback allows you to make more informed design decisions. A user-centered approach increases user satisfaction, boosts engagement, and increases profitability.

A website should incorporate user feedback, whether through surveys, user testing, or other means, to stay current and relevant, meet the needs of its users, and ultimately facilitate business growth.

Do Not Forget to Test Your Website

To ensure a functional, reliable, and easy-to-use website, thorough testing is essential. It is essential to thoroughly test your website before launching to ensure a positive user experience and avoid negative feedback.

A broken link also called a 404 error, is one of the most common problems that may arise. If you delete a website or change its URL, you must create a 301 redirect. Broken links will not result in a Google penalty but can negatively affect website visitors’ experience. To avoid issues like these, you must thoroughly test your website.

Conclusion

Developing a web page that is both visually pleasing and user-friendly involves more than just technical expertise. Visitors should also be able to enjoy and remember their experience on your website. Take time to explore the expectations of your target audience. Choosing a UI UX design services provider will benefit in multiple ways.

The post Creating Visually Appealing and User-friendly Websites: Web Design and UX Tips appeared first on SiteProNews.

Isn’t addressing your customer needs all about creating better products or experiences? But design thinking is not as simple as it sounds. Its implementation can be a tricky business.

Design Thinking

According to Interaction Design Foundation, “Design thinking is a non-linear, iterative process which seeks to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test.” 

Design thinking is not a recent phenomenon. It has been in existence for ages in design processes. Be it designing of monuments or automobiles, designers have intricately applied a human-centric creative process to build meaningful solutions.

Human-centric product designing is very often an afterthought in the business world, resulting in enterprises creating products which fail to meet customers’ real needs. However, human-centric design approach has proved to be a key differentiator as companies have reaped the benefits of creating products shaped by human needs. In order for this approach to be adopted across large organizations, it needed to be standardized.

How the Design Thinking Process Works 

Design-thinking comes in different phases such as empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, and implement.

Empathize: Research extensively to gain knowledge about users. It is important to know what users do, feel or think. It is all about getting into the user’s shoes. In this phase, it is about directly observing what users do, understanding their thought process, and asking ‘what encourages or discourages users?’

Define: Combine observation with research to determine your users’ problems. In identifying your users’ needs, you can showcase opportunities for innovation, establish patterns and draw parallels when it comes to users’ current experiences. In the define phase, effectively use the data gathered in the “empathize” phase to garner insights. 

Ideate: Brainstorm crazy, creative ideas to address unmet user needs identified in the define phase. During this phase, bring together your team members in a collaborative spirit.  Chart out different ideas and share them with one another, revamping and building on them.

Prototype: Build tangible representations for a subset of your ideas. Understand which components of your ideas work and which do not. Assess the impact vs. feasibility of your ideas through feedback. Be open to changes and iterate.  

Test: Return to your users for feedback. Test your prototype in front of real customers and verify whether it achieves your goals. As you are executing your vision, continue to test along the way.

Implement: Put the vision into effect. Ensure that your solution is materialized and touches the lives of your end users. Remember, design thinking for an organization is all about transforming end user’s life. 

Advantages of Design Thinking 

Design and design thinking has at its heart the motivation to solve problems. It could be simplification of a complex journey users need to take. It can be about solving time problems, a new method of product development, or helping customers make choices or informed decisions.  It involves:

• Designing integrated solutions where each part syncs with the system in whole and not designing silo or disjointed pieces.
• Getting closer to current and potential users.
• Building customer-centric products and solutions.
• Developing empathy with customers. 

Essential Elements of Design Thinking & its Implementation

Educating users is the key to successful adoption. Define and communicate milestones, share progress reports and evangelize your successes. Each phase is meant to be iterative and not a linear process. It is common to return to the two understanding phases, empathize and define, after an initial prototype is built and tested.

One of the most challenging parts of the process is resistance to change. In most cases, it is observed that people feel anxious about change that is imposed. The processes of design thinking should be an integrated and collaborative approach, giving voice to people’s opinion across the organisation.  The process should allow the team to be a part of a defining moment. 

All emerging ideas will take shape and everyone should be reassured that they have been considered. While the obvious assumption is that design thinking is what happens to the product at the end, the truth is that the process is in fact about a methodology of analysis. The process is a catalyst for change and evolution.

Conclusion 

Businesses are heavily investing in discovering and deploying new solutions. Design thinking brings about a new wave of change for better-designed products and services and great value to the organisation in terms of user experience, as well as driving growth and profitability.

The post Understanding Design Thinking & its Role in Improving User Experience appeared first on SiteProNews.

Marketing your content online demands a steady stream of material like guides, articles, and podcasts. And to create this material, one needs ideas; a constant influx of ideas.

Say for a particular month, you might choose to write an article about procrastination. Or you could publish one useful guide, or start a podcast. Ideas are many, execution is the key.

How do we define content marketing?

It can be termed as the act of creating, publishing, and promoting content to attract, engage, and retain customers for the purpose of your business.

Below are some ideas to come up with impeccable content marketing strategies. We will take into consideration strategies targeted for particular months of the year.

Content marketing ideas spread across the span of entire year

1. National Science Fiction Day

This is a speculative fiction that has been made popular for a very long time. It dates back as far as 1818 when Mary Shelley published her novel “Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus.” Science fiction has been at the forefront of popular genres for movies and books; engaging advanced technology and human themes.

Science fiction has helped humans think and ponder about possibilities. It gives us hope for what we can achieve. Science fiction has changed perspectives and shaped societies.

Use the theme of science fiction as a good source for content marketing in the month of January. Let’s say you run an online store that sells books or a store that sells merchandise, you could write an article that describes how science fiction books, television shows, or movies impacted the development of real technologies.

2. National Croissant Day

In France, the country where it originated, Croissants are known as Croissants de Boulanger. It is a type of fermented dough layered with butter and given a succession of folds that create the distinctive profile of classic croissants, originating from the word and shape, crescent.

This makes for a perfect day for one who sells bakery items online or for anyone dealing with food and confectionary. Write articles or blogs, create videos or special recipes about this food. Describe the history and how it originated. This will interest consumers more, eventually tempting them enough to buy from your website.

3. The Spacewalk

Combining a bit of history with science, back in 1965 in the month of March, a Russian cosmonaut became the first person to step out of a spacecraft and float in space. This was a long 12-minute spacewalk and marks an important day in space exploration.

This was one of the greatest feats of human effort and will go down in history for the longest period of time.

In order for you to use this event to your benefit in content marketing, you need to figure out the end-goal of your strategy. You will need to look closely to find a connection to this event with your product. If you are going to provide lifestyle-based content, this story at its face value will be more than enough.

Get inspired by space exploration and connect your products with this event. Space and astronomy has never failed to intrigue people.

4. April Fool’s day: April 1st

Sometimes, for content marketers, April 1st becomes a gold-mine for ideas. It provides an opportunity to create a harmless hoax, a practical joke, or the occasional prank with no restrictions. 

Come up with a product announcement or video which you are sure will entertain your audience of customers and potential customers, and, perhaps, earn some links for SEO sake. If you have a website based on say, for example, Shopify, it would be a great idea to hire shopify developers who will help you create a page on your website for the new product or announcement that makes it look more genuine.

Best April Fool’s marketing examples. Wind, Solar, and Compost powered Chromebooks

Conclusion

Content marketing has immense possibilities and contains a great amount of potential ideas when it comes to attracting customers and gathering more audience. Get the maximum out of your Magento or Shopify eCommerce website development with these precisely targeted content marketing strategies.

The post Best Content Marketing Tweaks for Your eCommerce Store appeared first on SiteProNews.

This is just the beginning. The theory of Artificial Intelligence (AI) means development of a computer system that functions just like a human with capabilities of language translation, decision making, visual perception and speech recognition. This technology is at the nascent stage, but already being explored by several industries.

Let’s look at the usage of Artificial Intelligence and its impact on different industries:

Manufacturing

As per a survey report from Infosys, a majority of manufacturers look at AI as a revolutionary technology to boost productivity.

Adoption of AI is a giant leap for many manufacturers as it requires full support of both people and regimented machinery processes. Initiation of AI strategy is dependent on detailed planning and guidance to ensure that the usage of AI is successful. Employees and customers need to be supportive and willing to adapt to new working practices and changing working landscapes.

Packaging and Shipping: Goods Distribution Industry

The Goods distribution industry is utilizing the strength of AI through the use of robots to make distribution more effective and managed. The most successful example of automated packaging and distribution is Amazon – the company that has over 45,000 robots in its warehouse. The company had a futuristic vision to implementing AI strategy in its operations. It acquired a robotics company called Kiva Systems in 2012 for £632 million. Kiva robots are now utilized to automate the picking and packing processes for efficient working processes.

“It’s a bit of an investment that has implications for a lot of elements of our cost structure, but we’re happy with Kiva. It has been a great innovation for us, and we think it makes the warehouse jobs better, and we think it makes our warehouses more productive.”

— Phil Hardin, Amazon’s Director of Investor Relations

Customer Service

Chatbots is the new buzzword for customer service. Companies are showing interest in developing chatbots that could harness the strength of natural language processing and machine learning to create friendly robots that could imitate human speech and give natural replies. Experts are still in the research phase to build chatbots that are high-tech, understand user queries and give the most relevant replies. The day is not far off when humans will be unable to differentiate whether they spoke to a chatbot or a human.

As per a report from HubSpot, 40% of consumers do not care whether a chatbot or a real human assists them, as long as they are getting the necessary help. Another survey by PwC says that 34% of executives focused on deep thinking and creating after having their time freed up by chatbots.

Finance

Banks and other financial institutions are turning to AI to derive insights from a voluminous amount of data. Programmed Robots can replace humans to manage finances and forecast stock trends, in fact, more efficiently than humans.

“Based on UBS Evidence Lab survey, an optimal scenario of limited disruption suggests Artificial Intelligence technology could potentially lead to 3.4% revenue uplift and 3.9% cost savings over the next three years.”

— UBS strategist Philip Finch

Robo-adviser is the new trend in the finance industry. It is the replacement of humans with robots that can provide suggestions for simple financial problems. Hussey-Yeo, who is the CEO and founder of Cleo, reveals his research on a chatbot app that uses AI technology to give advice to people on how to manage their finances.

Healthcare

Artificial Intelligence is rewiring the modern concept of healthcare by using AI powered machines for a variety of medical procedures, including diagnosing diseases, delivering anaesthesia and performing surgery.

Take a look at following categories of healthcare applications that are impacted by AI technology:

• Virtual Nursing Assistants
• Robot-Assisted Surgery
• Dosage Error Reduction
• Automated Image Diagnosis

On a Concluding Note…

Artificial Intelligence is the most disruptive technology currently influencing the major industries of manufacturing, retail, real estate, ecommerce, healthcare and logistics. Companies are investing in this technology to get fruitful returns in the near future.

The post Top 5 Industries Influenced by Artificial Intelligence appeared first on SiteProNews.