Improve your user experience with this simple design trick

Looking for a simple way to enhance user experience on your website?

It’s as simple as adding white space.

White space refers to the empty space between paragraphs, pictures, buttons, icons and other items on your web page. In web design, it’s one of the many areas that can affect customer perception and their subsequent experience.

Don’t misunderstand, though. We aren’t talking about creating “pretty” pages. We’re talking about design.

And in design, how you deal with white space can have a dramatic impact on your users’ experience and their purchasing decisions.

Read on to see five ways white space adds power to your web pages

Why you should care about web accessibility

Research has shown that almost 30% of internet users have a disability of some sort.

As such, as user experience designers we need to make sure that we cater for these disabilities so that the widest possible audience can use our website or application.

This means designing with accessibility and disability in mind, from the outset.

Get some simple user experience guidelines and mobile accessibility rules on Usabilla.

What is the best call to action phrase for you

When designing your website or application, one of the many areas you explore “calls to action”.

What phrases or statements do you need to encourage the user to take the steps necessary to complete an action?

What terms should you include to ensure that your calls to action (CTA) are clear to the user? What language or tone of voice do you use to get your message across?

Find out more about what works

Well, its been a busy year and this blog has been neglected.  I’ve been working with some amazing clients developing new online digital solutions which has kept me otherwise occupied – but I’ll be making every effort in 2013 to keep my site more up to date.

The good news is that I have still been writing and publishing user experience articles on other blogs and here’s a round up of some of my most recent posts.

Published: July 2012

One of earlier articles this year, the post seeks to explain user experience in day to day language as well explain how it could benefit you.

A great deal of organisations these days have analytics on their websites and a load of data about their users. Many don’t actually make use of these effectively, so this post explains how to use customer data and website analytics to help build a better user experience.

Published: August 2012

Everyone is talking about responsive design it seems. This article seeks to explain how it can help you, so businesses can see why they need to do this!  I’m a strong believer in mobile first responsive design as well, having seen first hand what can go wrong when you don’t follow this approach.

Published: September 2012

My post on designing mental models is very much from the viewpoint of how it can help in your UX strategy.  This post uses examples from Indi Young’s work on mental models and for those that want to learn how to do these, I recommend Indi’s book and checking out the website for information on best practice in mental models.

Published: October 2012

This article gives you 6 Top Tips to optimise your eCommerce checkout process including how to approach the account creation process, when to show shipping charges, and how to lay out forms.