mindful user experience

Are you in charge of a website - 12 things you should be doing

Bruce Klopsteins -

If I was in charge of your website this is what I would consider in no particular order:

  • Mobile first content
    as a stepping stone to more fluid content processes and a thorough content strategy

  • Responsive design – design for design breakpoints

  • Browser, device, display support and testing – both progressive enhancement and graceful degradation should be considered. Consider and document what you are supporting... yep you gotta do IE (Internet Explorer would probably go with a polyfill solution at this time)

  • Performance budget – consider load time as critical, minify, optimise, and cut content bloat

  • CSS framework – have a principles based approach something like SMACSS or simpler set up is also okay

  • Standards compliant and accessible– Follow the standard of common sense, but also make use of front end web WC3,CSS, HTML, WhatWG, etc. Make use of WAI ARIA (if needed) and cater for multiple modalities of use, text only, keyboard only, etc.

  • Consider the existing mental models of your users on the UI side, don’t break them without a good reason

  • Leverage research into the psychological and emotional characteristics of people and tasks

  • Evidence Based design – user test that you are achieving the business outcomes you want

  • Convert analytics into a performance dashboard – pull out a couple of key performance indicators (conversion, search terms, page views, load time) and create a performance dashboard.

Smoosh this in with your user research results and your business aims and let this drive your activities

  • Work iteratively don’t try and do everything at once :-)

  • Read and network widely and share what you are working on/towards with your peers and your users