Improving Your User Interface

This article is a Guest Post by our pal Ryan Yockey.

If you have problems with users finding key pieces of content or generally navigating your websites, then you need to start working on your UI or user interface. I am going to help you discover ways to increase user participation and in most cases this will help increase the retention of your user base.

1. Find A Focus

Find a part of your site which is the focus of every users attention. A focus helps define a place to start and get immediate user feedback. Feedback is the golden key in all UI work. The focus can be anything from comments systems, where an important button is located or how the content on your site is formatted.

2. Measure Success

Use statistics software, like Google Analytics, to track what people are clicking on. Make it a point to get initial statistics before any changes are made to the website. It’s impossible to measure success without a starting point. This does not only have to be link clicks. You can be measuring user registrations, file uploads or emails sent. The message is find a way to measure your successes and failures with your UI changes.

3. User Feedback

The website may have gone through its first changes, but how do you know its working? I mentioned find a way to measure success through simple statistics. There is another important way to understand if the work being done is successful, user feedback. The best ways to gather feedback can be through polls, comments on the website and email responses about the website. It is important to not get stuck on one persons opinion about your changes. Look at the responses as a whole and see how the group is reacting overall. Use those reactions to help gauge what to do next.

4. Mistakes Are Okay

There is rarely a change which will cause your website to completely shutdown losing every single visitor and causing the world to explode. We all make mistakes when working on the UI of a website. The key is to recognize exactly where the mistake is through user feedback and the statistics of the website.

5. Iterations

Rinse and repeat. There is never really a ‘final’ UI design, unless the plan is to leave it and never touch the website again. Most of us want to grow a business and make life easier for the users of your website. This is when we take the feedback and corrections and make the necessary changes to the website. Here comes the repeat. Now we do it all over again until we have dialed down the website focus to work at its best. Then move on to the next focal point.

These are the same steps most UI designers go through to create usable interfaces which guide the users through the best parts of your websites. Taking a little time here can benefit you in the best way possible. More traffic, higher quality users and ideally more money.