What is User Experience?
User experience refers to emotions and feelings a user perceives while interacting with any digital product: website, application, and service. To provide the top level of user satisfaction, the online platform has to be intuitive in use, robust, and ready to meet & adapt to the expectations & needs of the customers. This, coupled with good-looking design and simplicity, creates a unique journey for each user which results in positive or negative user experience.
In this post, we talk about user experience in terms of the Drupal website. UX is predefined based on how intuitive or confusing the interaction with your site is. Particularly, UX on the Drupal website refers to navigation, content personalization, interactive elements, performance, and more. Thoughtful user experience combines user intention with website workflow. It means that UX designers have to map out users' interactions with the website step by step, think about what users want to find on the platform, and after that start creating designs with the representation of their discoveries on user behavior. Another important task for UX designers is to determine user pain points during interaction with the website and eliminate them in design.
Why is UX Crucial for Drupal Websites?
Here, Drupfan web developers outline 3 reasons why UX design is essential for the Drupal site.
- Enhanced level of user satisfaction
The ground reason to invest in Drupal UX design development is an increase in user satisfaction and retention rates. A good UX guides users from the entry point to their desired destination with intuitive and clear interaction steps. This way, users get just what they expected, increase loyalty, and return to the website again.
Drupal is the best CMS for good UX design, as it has a modular structure that allows you to customize the website freely. Personalize the Drupal website to display your brand’s identity and engage users.
- Improved search engine rating
Search engines, particularly Google, rank websites with good UX higher. Such things as responsiveness, HTTPS security, and loading performance are measured by search engines.
Drupal is SEO-friendly out of the box and is a good match with a UX-focused design. Together, they can significantly increase your website’s SEO rankings and organic traffic.
- Better conversion rates
As a result of all mentioned above, with good UX design you get more website visitors and, as a result, conversion rates increase significantly. Proper UX leads users directly to the conversion points without being demanding or intrusive. For example, placing an eye-catching Call-to-Action (CTA) button near an appealing image can direct users toward conversion.
Drupal is the best choice for creating a well-structured and good-looking layout, as well as for placing customized CTAs in strategic zones.
What is the Difference Between UX and UI?
People who are not working with web design usually confuse the terms User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) and very often combine two concepts in one term: UX/UI design. However, the difference exists. Below, the team at Drupfan explains the difference between them.
While UX refers to User Experience, UI means User Interface. UI represents the visual part of your website, such as color scheme, fonts, buttons, responsiveness, etc.
The key difference between these concepts is as follows: UX is related to the overall feeling and experience of the individual user after the interaction with the website while UI is about how the site looks. While a UX designer creates a scheme of a user's journey across the website, a UI designer makes this scheme possible.
Checklist for Improving UX on Drupal Website
Here, Drupfan web designers created a short checklist for enhancing your Drupal website UX:
- Create clear call-to-action buttons
- Develop intuitive streamlined navigation
- Develop short registration & contact forms — people don’t like to fill out too many fields :)
- Make your design responsive and mobile-friendly
- Make your website accessible for people with impairments
- Add a search field to the header
- Conduct performance optimization
- Regularly check your website for broken links and 404 pages
- Customize error messages
- Use interactive elements on your Drupal website
- Delete all unnecessary fields, content, and elements
- Only use images and multimedia with high resolution
In Conclusion
In the modern digital world, you should consider and create the UX design before the Drupal website development. A thoughtful and well-crafted design enhances the level of user satisfaction, increases conversion, and improves the Drupal website’s SEO rankings. By investing in user experience design beforehand, you are investing in a successful and engaging future for your online business.
We understand that good website design requires pixel-to-pixel perfect and responsive realization. Drupfan web agency is well-equipped to assist you with turning UX design into a reality with Drupal. We possess advanced expertise in developing Drupal websites that prioritize the needs & requirements of the owners. Contact us today for any Drupal-related services.