Sweet Boutique
- design
- / web
- / seo
- / social
Designing a web page that has a lot of content and details can cause users to feel overwhelmed. In order to avoid this situation, consider the following tips to organize all that content and put it into a more comprehensive, interactive layout for your users.
Do some homework on your users to see what it is they are looking for immediately. With this information in hand, you can then layout your content in a better way that will give your users the relevant information they’re looking for first. Doing this will help users save time navigating the web page.
When visitors land on a web page that they’ve never seen before, ideally they should be able to easily and quickly know where to go and what to look at first. Page visits last only a few seconds, so you need to capitalize on that very short period of time and make it easy for visitors to find what they need.
Use a clear hierarchy of information by using a main heading or navigation bar. Make it easy for visitors to know how the page works. Understand that users scan content from left to right, then top to bottom. Keeping this in mind, the most important information should be located at the top and along the left side of the page.
You don’t want to have every piece of information on your web page at once – doing so will just make the page look messy and cluttered. Instead, just provide enough information that will allow users to clearly understand it, then provide the information users want only after they request it.
You can do this by using tooltips that provide further detail, using ellipses to shorten long sections of content, hiding text at the beginning, middle, or end, and giving users the ability to search for a certain collection of data.
Users will undoubtedly make mistakes while navigating your website, but you can take steps to minimize the number of errors made to make the user experience a more positive one. Icons can quickly represent an idea, but if it isn’t immediately recognized, it can just confuse the user. Any descriptive text should also be used for each action item as well.
Users should always know where they are and how they can get back to the home page. You can make the navigation of your website easy through the use of simple visual queues. Exposing a navigation menu can provide your users with enough text to get comfortable. Make navigation visible by default which will allow users to navigate through the website quicker and easier.
Keep these guidelines in mind when designing a website with content-heavy UI!