Improve Your Website's Performance With these UI/UX Design Tips

---

It is important to have an appealing user interface that offers a good user experience. 

Most potential customers first interact with your business website or mobile app. So, an interactive UI/UX design is critical in creating a good first impression and addressing user queries.

Also, trends in the user interface and user experience industry are never-ending. So, you will lose out on the competition without upgrading your website. 

Moreover, complete redesigning of UI and UX is time-consuming and expensive. Thus, you must know some tips and tools to improve website UI and UX. 

What is the User Interface?

User interface refers to how users interact with a website/mobile application. It includes how it responds to users on various devices like desktops, mobiles, tab, etc. 

 It appeals to different human senses like vision, touch, hearing, etc. 

A well-designed user interface is easy to access and responds well to user needs. 

What is User Experience?

User experience refers to the way users feel about your website or mobile application. 

It considers the way users interact with the website and uses the research material to keep them loyal. Also, a great user experience can anticipate user needs apart from meeting the current ones. 

Let’s take a look at 9 UI/UX design tips to improve website performance

1. Improve Website Load Time

The loading time of your website doesn't just frustrate your users but also affects your bounce rate. Thus, if you do not want your user to leave your site with an awful client experience, you must ensure that your site loads fast. 

There are elements of UI/UX design that can significantly impact website load speed. These include UX elements like obscure fonts, heavy social media plugins, hidden content, animations, etc.

UI elements like HTTP requests, CDN, caching, CSS, HTML, and image compression can affect website load time. 

Tools to check website load time and speed issues 

• Pingdom: The Pingdom tool scans your website for UI/UX performance issues that can affect website loading time.

• Google Page Speed: With this tool, you can see how long it takes for a user to see the primary content. It also tells you how quickly a page is interactive and how fast it takes to display everything. Take a

• GTmetrix: This extremely useful tool allows you to compare your website to other websites’ performance. It also helps you monitor your load time and set up performance alerts. 

2. Perform Usability Testing 

Usability testing checks the website for issues before releasing it in the real world. Designers observe volunteers who use the website and note any issues they encounter. 

This helps UX designers compare different designs and see which elements are user-friendly. Also, they get direct feedback from users, which helps them remove and add elements that make the website better. 

For example, the below image shows how usability testing helps enhances UI. 

Tools for usability testing 

• Lookback: This tool lets you access the views of your users and get their responses in real-time. 
• Loop11: It gives you access to perform usability tests, A/B tests, and prototype testing on your website.
• TrymyUI: You can run website usability tests and get recorded videos of users. This allows you to get rich insights into website elements. 

3. Fix Broken Links 

Broken links are known as 'dead connections' or 'Error 404'. They are the parts of your website which appear as clickable links but do not load anything. UX designers need to remove these pages from the website completely. 

These links do not only slow down the website performance but affect your search engine rankings. 

UX designers must crawl the entire website to get a list of all the links. Bad links can be broken, blacklisted, and lead to different locations, which designers must fix. 

Tools To Check For Broken Links 

• Broken Link Checker: It is an easy-to-add tool to your site as a plugin. Also, it shows all relevant data about broken links on your dashboard. 

• Screaming Frog: The tool will provide clear and accurate information about all broken URLs.
• SEMrush: It allows you to view the list of all broken links and errors through the SEMrush website audit report.

4. Use High Contrast 

UX designers must always take care of different visual aspects of the design process. One such aspect is the contrast ratio. Websites with a low contrast ratio are difficult to read as users need to strain too much. 

The high contrast ratio is more appealing and easier on the eye. The foreground and background colors of the website need to have high contrast across all pages. Also, they must always create a healthy balance between hue, saturation, and brightness. 

Tools To Check Website Contrast 

• WebAim: Check the contrast ratio and color values of different elements on your website pages. The below screenshot shows how the contrast is represented here. 

• Coolors: Make your website more accessible by calculating the contrast ratio. It is the ratio between your text, foreground, and background. 
• Contrast checker: It helps you adhere to web content accessibility guidelines. It does so by checking the color contrast ratio of your webpages.

5. Consider Prototyping 

Prototyping is an important part of the UI and UX design process, like usability testing. The prototype's goal is to visualize the feature first and see how easy it will be to integrate it into the final product. 

Designers can create different prototypes and gather feedback on their relevance. 

There are two types of prototypes low-fidelity prototypes and high-fidelity prototypes. 

Different types of low fidelity prototypes include sketches, paper, and click-through prototypes. Different types of high-fidelity prototypes include digital, interactive, and coded prototypes.

The below images show a suitable example to depict the two prototypes.

Tools To Create And Check Prototypes

• Adobe XD: This tool allows you to turn on a function switch right inside the app. So, you can create interactive prototypes of designs you'd otherwise do statically.
• Sketch: It enables designers to visualize design ideas in a clean, efficient & low-cost manner. 
• InVision: Create interactive mock-ups of your designs using this application. 

6. Decide Typography 

Typography refers to the typefaces and fonts used in different elements in UI design. Characteristics of good typography include accessibility, hierarchy, and readability. 

UI designers must ensure that typography goes with the website structure and design. Also, it should be aesthetic and readable at the same time.

Tools For Typography

• Emotype: It offers you different typefaces based on emotions that you can use for your website. 

• Fonts ninja: It helps designers try over 3000 different fonts for their website. Also, it is easy to integrate with any design software.

• Archetypeapp: Designers can preview typography styling and spacing in the browser. By doing this, they can create a harmonious design. 

7. Use Design Patterns 

Design patterns form an integral part of UI/UX design. They are mainly categorized into six different categories. They are hierarchy, social media, data input and output, content structuring, incentivization, etc. 

They help designers solve specific issues with pre-designed templates. You can use these templates to set up different features with ease. Also, they prevent designers from designing everything from scratch. 

Popular Design Patterns

• UI patterns: It offers a wide range of design patterns that you can choose for your website design. Below screenshots are samples from the tool. It even shows various design patterns of existing brands like LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. 

• Zurb: Previously known as Pattern Tap, it allows designers to study different patterns in detail. Once done, they can use the ones as per their liking. 

• UIE: It enables you to test different design patterns on a website. Thus, allowing you to deliver better design to your users. 

8. Make It Mobile-Friendly And Responsive

Websites and applications must provide an excellent browsing experience across devices. UI/UX designers must preview their website for mobiles to check for any issues. 

It is one of the best practices to generate longer impressions on your website. Also, it can lead to more lead generation and conversion.

Tools To Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

• Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test: It facilitates easy testing of different website pages one by one. 
• Pingdom: A great desktop tool for analyzing a website on various tablets and smartphones. Also, it offers suggestions to improve the site further, as shown in the below sample Pingdom test. 

• BrowserStack: Using this tool, you can get an accurate picture of how the website looks on different devices.

9. Improve UX writing

UX writing includes writing the copy of different elements of your website. This includes labels, buttons, error messages, terms, conditions, etc. 

The copy should be easy to understand and must talk about the user’s actions. 

It is important to have excellent UX writing to get higher user interaction. If the UX writing is not good, users will not be able to navigate the website. 

Tools for UX writers

• Zeplin: It provides UX writers with the latest updates from the design team. It is an integrated workspace to help different teams working on the website. 
• Grammar Girl: This tool helps meet all the grammar and syntax rules. UX writers do not have to recheck their work for typos or spelling errors. 
• Smartling: UX writers can create content for native websites and applications. Also, they can manage different content documents in one place. 

Read: Types of Content That Help Local SEO

FAQs on UI & UX

---

Q1: How Do I Make My UI UX Better?

To make your UI/UX better, choose an easy-to-understand interface and use a well-designed page layout. 

Make decisive tone, texture, and typography and utilize appealing design components and images. 

Q2: What Is UI Design Vs. UX Design?

User interface design (UI) refers to the design of elements that allow people to interact with a product aesthetically. They include buttons, icons, menu bars, typefaces, colors, etc. 

A user experience (UX) design refers to how a product makes the user feel when interacting.

Q3: Does UI UX Design A Good Career In 2022?

At present, UX design is among the fastest-growing professions. Between 2019 and 2020, hiring for UX specialists increased by 20%. Thus, it is a good career choice.

Key Takeaways

---

• Improve website load time 
• Perform usability testing 
• Remove broken links
• Utilize high contrast
• Use prototyping 
• Check typography 
• Consider design patterns 
• Make it mobile-friendly 
• Enhance UX writing