Top Tips for User-Friendly Design

Your User Friendly Design Starts Here…

With the surge in e-commerce trading since the beginning of the digital age, user accessibility has never been more important. With business websites acting as the digital equivalent to a shop floor a great user journey is essential. It’s time to begin visual merchandising online. In our latest blog, we bring you our 5 top tips for user-friendly design.

Less is more

One of the biggest downfalls of businesses moving their shop floor online is over-complicating things.   Simplicity is the number one rule of any design, whether you work in digital or print media. There’s no need for extra bells and whistles on a website. They don’t attract more traffic and they don’t help your bottom line. Don’t include flashing animations, auto-loading sounds or scrolling text. All you need high-quality imagery, clear navigation and simple SEO optimised text.

Steer clear of big photo files.

Contrary to popular belief, great quality imagery does not always translate to large file sizes. Photography can be outstanding and resized to mere kilobytes for uploading to a website. Make sure your image file sizes are small so that they load seamlessly and your page appears instantly. There’s only one thing more annoying than waiting for a page to load, and that’s a pop-up window. Just look at these beautiful photos! Would you believe these images are only 140kb

Speaking of… 

Whilst we’re on the subject, nothing says spam 90’s website quite like a pop-up window. People don’t like to have their web-viewing experience interrupted by pop-up windows – they’re annoying, intrusive and ruin the user journey. You don’t want your customer to lose interest, so why would you offer them a distraction?

Keep it clean.

Don’t bombard your audience with scrawl-like handwriting. Sure, it may be the hipster thing to do, but how long will it be before your readership switch off to book an eyesight test at their opticians?

Choose a body font that’s simple and easy on the eyes. The following fonts typically work well for websites: Arial, Georgia, Helvetica, Verdana and Times New Roman. If in doubt, opt for a font belonging to the sans-serif family.

POSH Top Tips for User-Friendly Design

Deciding on design is a perfectionist’s worst nightmare. If you find yourself drowning in a sea of mediocre templates lacking that wow-factor, then a trip to POSH might just be for you. Be sure to head on over to our Pinterest for more tips for user-friendly design.