User Experience explained for Best Practice Website Creation

User experience explained for best practice website creation

Adam McCooey B00136630

User experience is an important factor that needs to be taken into consideration when creating nearly every piece of media. In terms of content management systems user experience is just as important. You need to think about how easy it would be for a user to navigate through your website whether they have bad vision or they cant see certain colours and so much more I looked at different pieces that explored the importance of user experience and they were :

What is UX Design and how can Content management systems help both by Maja Carlyle on the Quext website. https://onequext.com/blog/what-is-ui-ux-design-and-how-can-a-cms-help-both

The relationship between CMS and UX by arganoUV  https://weareuv.com/the-relationship-between-cms-ux/

UX considerations for bulding an amazing CMS by UX booth https://www.uxbooth.com/articles/ux-considerations-for-building-an-amazing-cms/

                                                                                       

The first article opens up with it explaining what UX is to the reader. That being the overall experience a user will have while on your website. They also gave the definition of what the creator of the term user experience Don Norman stated saying That user experience "encompasses all aspects of end users interaction with the company its services and products". The article also explained three of the most important things to think about with your CMS. The first being that a good CMS features a centralised dashboard, the second being a strong seo. SEO stands for search engine optimisation, which essentially means increasing your chances of appearing in the search engine like google and bing by using strong words which users may frequently use. The third being a CMS that offers mobile responsive features. Due to the strong possibility that most of your users will be visiting your page by using a mobile phone with a smaller screen compared to a laptop or pc monitor screen. So your information and content is not spaced out or in the wrong position which could make it hard for the user to navigate and read your website.

I also found the article by Argano UV basically had the same opening as the previous article by Quext which explained what is UX but expanded further by also mentioning navigation of the website also. Further down the article it went on to gave a brief summary of what content management systems is. Stating that the reason that CMS exists is to help organise, showcase, publish, edit and manage a websites content. When you mix the two of them together, user experience and content management systems the two of them work hand and hand with each other. The CMS removes some of the stress of UX which will allow the creator of the website to focus a lot more on presenting well produced and interesting content.

The article UX considerations for building an amazing CMS by UX booth starts by stating that you should keep the CMS simple stating that CMS design is for carrying out certain tasks. You do not need to have loads of plugins that do loads of different things and not have a website that tries to do everything for everyone rather focus on a smaller amount of tasks and completing these tasks effectively. This can be done by trying to anticipate what will be the most frequently used tools and make them as accessible as you can. The example they gave was 90% of users wanted too created a blog do not hide that feature from them by putting it in a sub menu or a secondary page rather have it present on the main page or somewhere with an icon so it is visible and easy for the user to navigate too.

Another aspect that needs to be considered is if certain features need to be placed in submenus you should make sure they are placed in the most common sense place on your website. I really like the example they gave for this which is to ask yourself or ask other people

"Where would you expect to find a particular tool"

"What do you think the label on the button be"

"Is the user likely to say "how was i supposed to know that" when they do eventually find the button or piece of information they were trying to locate"

 Also you should look over your cms to possibly try to improve certain sections of your website that do not seem 100% clear to your user by maybe adding small descriptive documentation or imagery to lay things out or to direct the user to what it is they want to complete on your website. Finally you should try and do user usability testing by a group of people to mark down where you may have flaws or on sections where they might have gotten confused or found any difficulties trying to navigate or doing a certain task. Which then allows you to make it clearer or a lot easier for the user.