Elevating Customer Experience with Minimalist Design
Minimalism is arguably one of the most popular design approaches.
Breaking composition, experimenting with color, navigation, and transitions or even completely removing entire design elements is at the heart of minimalistic design and their practical implementation is only limited to your budget and, as cheesy as it sounds, imagination.
But what does breaking, experimenting with and removing anything have to do with customer experience? And how can you use it to improve and elevate your customer experience?
Let’s dive in and learn how to improve basic web page creation.
Basic Web Page Creation
Minimalistic web design principles
When looking for and at information on the internet, we are constantly being bombarded by an endless stream of ads and commercials, overly intricate and saturated designs choices and simply, a bad customer experience.
Although “less is more” is an age-old mantra you’ve probably already heard of, it is, in fact, in the very core of minimalistic design. Information should be logically available and easy to find, not buried under what could only be described as digital fluff.
From a more practical perspective, the bloated design takes more time to load. The more design elements your website has and the more complicated they are, the longer it will take to fully download.
Considering our ever-decreasing attention spans, the average visitor would rather go to a competitor’s website than wait for yours to load. In order to combat this, web designers have taken some of the core minimalistic principles and translated it into clean web design practice.
In short, this includes a lot of empty space, simple (if not completely hidden) navigation, limitation in the number of used colors, little to no excessive details such as buttons, color transitions, CPU-heavy textures, and shadows.
While creating and maintaining a minimalistic website is not that difficult, even experienced designers tend to hide important navigation elements and make products and services look and feel “unfinished” due to a lack of in-depth thought regarding the actual design. There are examples of minimalistic web design in California that should give you great examples of what is popular nowadays, and what gives the best UX results.
Related: UI UX design firms
Navigation is the single most important part of your website that visitors use to move around and explore your website. As such, your navigation needs to be simple and effortless to use, even if it’s hidden behind a hamburger. If your visitors become confused or irritated at any given moment while using your website, you will lose them. Simple as that.
If you’re selling books, you can safely hide the genres under a drop-down menu. Subscription services, on the other hand, benefit from anchored menus with links leading to product categories and recurring subscriptions. Removing seldom used elements is one thing, but hiding important features and parts of your website can only result in visitors leaving.
Let’s learn more about basic web page creation.
Focus on the content
https://pixabay.com/photos/cms-wordpress-265127/
You can have the most amazing piece of content this world has ever seen, but put it all in a wall of text or use an off-putting font and there isn’t a single person who would read it.
The way you present information is important, but at the end of the day, you need to use a font that is legible and easy to read regardless of its size. A carefully chosen typography has the power to compensate for the sparse use of graphics and animations. Furthermore, there are more people browsing the internet using a mobile device than desktop users, so make sure to pick a font that is legible on a mobile screen.
Add more whitespace
Negative space or whitespace refers to space in-between different design elements. When used on a website, white space can help focus visitor’s attention on a specific point on the page, such a CTA, products, service, etc.
As noted by a Houston digital marketing agency, whitespace can help balance out the design, remove unnecessary clutter and makes their content more easily digestible. Even though the word “white” is a part of its name, you can create white spaces with virtually any color you want. While we’re on the subject of colors…
Colors and contrast
The majority of minimalist web designers stick to the tried and true method of using only black and white as a part of their design.
But, as we already mentioned, you can use any color you can think of. Color can make your content difficult to read, but it can also make it stand out.
This is called “contrast” and it is excellent for pointing out specific design elements. Just make sure to use compatible color pairs so your design doesn’t end up looking off-putting.
Explain text with images and videos
Although most people would use text to explain pictures, the minimalistic design allows you to do quite the opposite and that is use images to explain your content.
Literal explanations are excellent for reinforcing, but you can also use images as an off-balance to your text. The image is still there, but it’s there to complement something else instead of grabbing all the attention.
Intuitive grids and unique wireframes
Intuitive grids are ideal for separating different elements and interface functions, allowing users to find what they were looking for quickly and with ease.
Intuitive grids are all about how your content is displayed, while unique wireframes take into consideration how your content is organized. The only caveat about wireframes is that you have to pay attention while creating the content hierarchy. This might take more time and effort than usual, but it does pay off tremendously. Consider the type of content you’re hosting and what deserves to be seen immediately and what can be safely stored behind a hidden menu.
Wrapping Up: Basic Web Page Creation
At the end of the day, minimalistic web design revolves around usability. Creating new ways to interact with and display content might be honorable, but your users are only concerned with usability, which translates directly into the positive customer experience. Experiment with bold colors and contrasts, place the focus on the content and subtract unnecessary elements until you reach a breakpoint between design and usability. Just remember to keep things simple and, more importantly, user-friendly.
Readers, please share so webmasters learn these seven suggestions for basic web page creation.
Are there any tips you would add for improving user experience with basic web page creation?
Author: Vanessa Davis
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