The importance of user experience

Something that has interested me (at least for the past couple of years) is user experience. Whether it be online or in “real life” I have found more and more that I find issues that make day to day tasks more difficult than they need to be. One “real life” example is supermarkets. Now I am not a big fan of shopping in supermarkets and I do prefer to do it online most of the time, but there are unfortunately times when one must pop in to get milk or bread or something that was left off the online shop. Anyway I’m getting off topic, when going to said supermarket, we assume that certain things will be grouped together, to make it easy to navigate yourself around the shop and find what you came for. Now the majority of supermarkets don’t mess this up too much. However one in particular, and I wont name and shame the supermarket in question (just hint that Bill Bailey wrote a song about them) who, no matter the store, seem to want to create the worst user experience and stress out their customers.

Now this gets right up my nose, and anyone who has been shopping with me in said shop knows about the ranting that ensues when I look for something, lets use orange squash (or is it cordial) as an example; you would assume that any normal shop would group all non-alcoholic, non-fresh beverages such as squash, juices and carbonated drinks together right? Not this shop, it puts them miles away, between aisles for completely unrelated products. It puts condiments and jams above the frozen section, but not things like gravy… It’s a very stressful experience for someone who just popped in for a few bits (and if they happen to be orange squash and gravy you’re screwed).

So how is this relevant to my online world of user experience? Simple, things should be where people expect them, information should be clear and you shouldn’t have to go around in circles finding what you came for.

So a quick list of my pet hates in web design and how they should be tackled:

1. Search – If you are going to have a search function on your site, make sure it works. You will frustrate your user no end when he/she knows something should be on your site but can’t find it. For example if you run a clothing shop and someone searches for “t-shirt” and finds nothing you more likely than not will lose a potential customer.

2. Links – In fact navigation as a whole should be absolutely faultless, if you have a lot of different parts to one page (such as a products page) then perhaps think of having a drop down navigation which illustrates that you have many different groups of products on that page. Also make use of link visited, hover, and active states, they help your customer know where they have been and prevent the aforementioned circles.

3. Uniformity – Possibly one of my earliest annoyances with the web was that people didn’t use style sheets and had about 8 different colours, multiple sizes and every different font possible used on their site. It quite frankly hurts your eyes, looks crap and doesn’t make your business look professional. Also I find the need to tell designers to embrace line-height, having a lot of info in a big block is not good user experience, unless your aim is to give them a headache.

4. Clear – If within the first 10 seconds of being on your site, your customer hasn’t been told who you are and what you do (even through imagery) they may well get bored and move on. There is no point in having a site that doesn’t instantly tell someone what it is about. Even search engines will ignore you, you should have specific text on your home page telling your user exactly what your company does, pack it with keywords and google too will know what you do.

This isn’t by any means all you should be doing, there are millions of articles out there about user experience, and I will always find new ways of improving user experience, both online and in real life.

Have you got any user experience stories to share?