April 28, 2022
UI UX tips for WordPress

User experience (UX) is key to growth for both small and large businesses. It helps build great digital and non-digital customer experiences.

If you manage a website, WordPress UX design can make your website stand apart. It lets you acquire more traffic, as customers can easily navigate and find what they need.

Read on to learn more about implementing UI/UX WordPress best practices and how you can optimize your website.

User Experience 101

User experience (UX) covers how a user interacts with and experiences a product or service. UX includes all the touchpoints between a user and the product or service — any interaction a customer has with the business or entity.

If you want to reach more customers and make your present customers happy, you need to improve their user experience — their experience using your products and services.

UX vs. UI

UI and UX are often confused, and you might find it hard to differentiate between the two. Let us clarify: UI is the user interface for the user experience (UX). It is the contact point where the user interacts with the technology and experiences it.

In technology (where the two terms are commonly used), UX dictates the design of the process, while UI serves as the location of interaction. And you need to optimize both to make your customers happy.

UI/UX WordPress Success Tips

Making a phenomenal user experience requires hard work, research, and critical thinking. To help you get started, we’ve compiled a list of the top tips to improve UI/UX on WordPress.

1. Understand Your Audience

If a business spends millions of dollars on a solution without understanding its audience, it might end up losing its money.

Learn how to create a customer profile to better meet the needs of your target audience. You need to understand your user’s motivations, goals, and mental models. Mental models cover your customers’ existing mental impressions: your customers may expect an email confirmation after checking out because they receive confirmation emails from their other purchases.

2. Use Interviews as a Research Tool

What’s better than guessing what your customers need?

Asking them directly.

Your customers know their issues best. Going straight to the source often helps you get the breakthrough you need to develop a great product or service. Here’s how you can interview your customers and get valuable insights:

  • Ask open-ended questions and gather as much information as possible regarding your products and services.
  • Ask for their feedback on your website.
  • Make them feel heard — rephrase their answers to make sure you heard them correctly.

3. Explore Multiple Research Methods

While user interviews are great for understanding users at a deeper level, sometimes people don’t say or even know what solution they need. You can try other research methods to gather data:

These research methods help you see the product and service through the user’s eyes, so you can better understand how to improve it.

4. Learn the Principles of Design

Even if your service or product has nothing to do with design, you’ll still learn plenty about developing a great experience by learning more about UI/UX. Website design principles like balance, contrast, and composition can apply to services like finding a product, ordering food, or buying things at the store. The key is to look at the UX from different angles.

5. Work in a Diverse Team

While many small businesses ignore this tip for quick gains in the short term, diversity is a crucial element in creating a great user experience. Getting different perspectives on the research you're looking at can spawn different solutions. The more diverse the perspectives while researching and answering users' problems, the better.

User Experience: Heuristics Evaluation

Heuristic evaluation is defined as an inspection method for computer software that helps to identify usability problems in UI design. It specifically involves evaluators examining the interface and judging its compliance with recognized usability principles.

The main set of heuristic principles used in UX and UI design are Jakob Nielson’s 10 Usability Heuristics:

  1. Information on the ongoing process — Show the progress.
  2. Simpler language — Make descriptions free of jargon.
  3. User control — Add a return or exit button.
  4. Consistency — Try to be consistent across your website and even the industry.
  5. Error prevention — Avoid critical errors.
  6. Contextual help — Offer tips to customers where they need it.
  7. Flexibility — Offer multiple ways to perform the same task.
  8. Minimalism — Avoid overcrowding the details by adding unnecessary designs.
  9. Troubleshooting — Help users resolve their errors by offering helpful troubleshooting messages.
  10. Documentation — Help your customers resolve their issues with written documentation and tutorials.

Final Thoughts: UI/UX WordPress Tips and Heuristics for Developers

By now, you should have a better idea of UI/UX WordPress best practices and how to improve your products, services, or systems. With a WordPress website focused on great UX, you will be able to stand apart from other websites and solidify your business with your clients.

If you spend more time researching your client’s user base, you can optimize your client’s offerings and help your client improve their business. And with WordPress running more than 40% of the websites, you will also change the face of the internet for the better.

You also don’t have to worry if you are also new to WordPress. Go through the tips mentioned above, install WordPress, and get a managed WordPress account.

You can also use our WordPress site design service, which will create a curated batch of UX-optimized pages for your website.

Leave the technical stuff to us with a fully managed WordPress hosting plan from Nexcess. Check out our plans to get started today.

Alberto Recio
Alberto Recio

Alberto is an experienced, full-time UI UX Designer working at SolidWP. He is focused on bettering their suite of plugins by implementing proven UX strategies, such as effective user testing and iteration. Alberto loves to mentor, write, hike, and collaborate. Check out his personal UX design website.

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