EX3 – UI/UX design and user-friendly interfaces
The main points to focus on are: Navigation, Accessibility, Responsiveness and Visual appeal.
User Friendly interfaces
One of the most important things to think about as part of web design is the user friendliness, this is because without being user friendly it doesnt matter what the content of the website is like users wont get to it. To illustrate this point try thinking of the last time you spent time on a website that was buggy or hard to use, most times unless the website is for something you need to do people will just leave the website upon running into bad user experience and move on to the next website. It’s incredibly important that users don’t get a bad first impression of a website as the first minute spent on any website people are way more likely to leave so why give them a reason to.
Interactive design
When it comes to user friendly design one of the most influential to how the user feels about a website is the interactions, both the small and large, the interactive animations can make a huge impact on the final experience.
There are many different ways to achieve this. If a website achieves all of these customers are more likely to continue exploring the website further, it also helps to have interactivity in the website in some capacity as this helps keep users engaged in the website and the information it provides. The main example of this being buttons, its often overlooked but when a cursor hovers over a button it changes either colour or size in some capacity in order to let the user know its working correctly, these subtle interactions although you might not notice them are key to a responsive feeling website. A similar concept applies to the navigation bar, the quality of life of a subtle interaction letting you know what page your hovering on or already on can make the users experience with a website much better.
Responsive Design
Another one of the major points needed to create a user friendly experience is responsive design. This is the practice of having a website that loads quickly and can be accessed on multiple form factor devices without losing design quality. Some choose to design for mobile first and work backwards to the website design from there however i believe designs produced that way tend to look less presentable at larger form factors due to the lower amount of content required that’s in the website.
Accessibility
The final major consideration when creating a user friendly interface is accessibility, this is the practice of tailoring certain features in order to accomodate people with disabilities, allowing them to access the website and its information just like anyone else. This can be achieved using a number of different methods including; Alt text, using colours with high enough contrast to allow colour blind people to see it, ensuring it can be navigated via keyboard and providing transcripts for video content. By tailoring the website to these it greatly improves their general user experience.
Applying this to my Freedom Festival Design
Now moving on to how this applies to my freedom festival website, as you can see here i’ve implemented some interactivity into my design where the button has a hover effect, while also including a hover and toggle effect on the menu, the toggle effect allows me to simulate how it would look when letting the user know what page they are on at any given moment. In an attempt to make the website visually appealing I mostly use the brands colours in the design which also works quite well as they should be accessible to colorblind people due to the change in contrast.
