Experience design, what is that?
User experience focuses on your users - what they need and value. In your design you want to improve the overall quality of the users interaction and how they interact with your products and brand.
Here are a few items to consider when creating your site:
- Is the content high quality that users will want to come back to in the future
- Does the navigation make sense and is easy to find
- Are your page errors user friendly
- Users scan, does your page require too much reading
Good examples of websites with great experience design:
- www.refinery29.com
- www.tumblr.com
I think these sites provide good experience design because the content is credible, easy to navigate and find, its very straight forward and the user can interact with various items on the page simply without too many steps or instructions. The sites are also intuitive which makes moving around the site very easy.
Can a site be developed with both experience design and usability in mind? I think so! The two are not mutually exclusive and I can see that if you focus too much on one (i.e. usability) it could be detrimental to your user experience (aka experience design).
For example, a designer could decide they want the user to sign up for their service as quickly as possible...so maybe they ask for a lot of personal information up front to make the sign-up process easier. Well from a user standpoint that would be really off putting. So many people are leery today of providing personal information online that this would be a major deterrent.
So as they say - all things in moderation. I think when designing you should take both these into account and find a good medium that will provide a fast website with a great UI.
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