Five wrong ways to design the UI for your website
I have been working on Muziboo for the last 11 months now. We have done one major design revision and countless small iterations to improve the design (and ofcourse the usability). Things have show a lot of improvement and often even surprised us a lot. Being an engineer by graduation and at heart, its pretty tough for me to do the UI stuff so I thought of writing down my learnings here for other people who are in the same boat. You should (and most likely would) know that i am not a UI or usability expert, so if you wantsome real advice, go hire one. I think they are worth the money.
If you want to learn about usability, Jacob Nielsen’s website and Don’t make me think make an excellent read.
So here is how not do design your UI :)
1. Lets make it look beautiful
This is certainly the worst way to design. Its good to make your pages look nice but that alone should not drive your decision about placing things in your layout. A good way to design is to decide on the purpose of the page and see what makes the most sense. What can make it clear what the page does and help your users in doing it.
2. Lets put more content in this page. Too little right now
This is another mistake that I have personally made too often. For example, putting another tag cloud so that users don’t quit the site on this page and have something to hop on to. Putting stuff thats not related to the theme of the page, dilutes the purpose of the page. Certainly no page should be a dead end but other links on a page should feel like a logical hop rather than some random links thrown in. So while music recommendations for related music is a good idea, a tag cloud probably is not.
3. Giving equal importance to all page elements
If you land on a page and nothing stands out, you will be confused. You would spend some time in figuring out what the pages does. The purpose of your page should be clear. You can use big fonts, graphics etc to make sure you can get the message across before everything grabs user’s attention. A great example of that is Flickr. “Share your photos Watch the world” has big impactful font. Enough to catch your attention before anything else grabs it.
4. Not having a consistent structure across the site
If your pages don’t follow a theme, your users would have to figure out stuff on every page. For example. when you go to orkut or facebook, you generally know where to find the comment box or where to find the apps, where to find fans (in groups/pages) etc. You even know where to find the “Share” link on every page. Once you have learnt a page, you don’t need to spend as much time learning other pages. Define your site’s structure and then follow it.
5. Designing based on user inputs alone
Its great to listen to your users and it really helps, but most likely you will be able to talk to only a few people and that would never give you a clear picture of whats working or not working. I recommend using google analytics or similar software to find out your weak pages. These are pages with highest exit rates or bounce rates. You can also find the entrance sources on the page (keywords that people use to find this page on a search engine). If your entrance keywords are related to the page and the bounce/exit rates are still high, may be people are not getting your message right and its time to redesign the page.
These were some of my personal learnings that I am applying to come out with a new design for Muziboo and I will post the results of my experiments in another blogpost. In the meantime, let me know your feedback.
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Hi prateek
Nice dig on common UI bloopers.
I think the bigger aspect to UI is not just design but understanding what your users really need and how they can achieve it using your product. Design is just the means to an end to help the user.
Some factors I would consider especially while doing a redesign would be
1. What are the demographics of your users or targeted users ?
2. What are the most used sections / features on your current product ?
3. What are the least used sections / features on your current product ?
4. Do you expect users to repeatedly come back to your product, or does it satisfy a one time need ?
5. Are majority of your users returning users or first time ?
Quantitative data from this should definitely help you take design decisions to give a better user experience, than just looking at aesthetics of presentation.