Which type of graphics will the customers like, will the website design be preferred by all the customers, does the target audience gets convinced by the animations used in a website or logo- there are a lot of things that are going on in a designer’s mind while they are working on a designing project. A designer’s job might seem interesting to us, but believe me, it is not at all a cakewalk!
A designer has to go through a lot while keeping a lot of things in mind apart from the user’s perspective- grabbing customer’s attention, meeting their expectation level, meeting industry standards, staying ahead of the competitors, and so on. And especially for the newbies who have just started their career in the design industry, it becomes a daunting task for them to meet the customer’s expectation level while offering superior quality of services to the customers.
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Understanding the Common Challenges Faced by a Web Designer
In today’s time, an average user doesn’t spend more than three seconds on a website, which simply means that if you fail to impress the customers in the first place, you lose them right away. So, designing a website is no joke and takes a lot of effort, skills, master plans from the designer’s side.
In order to deliver appealing web design, designers often go through a lot of challenges throughout their design journey. So, in this post, we are going to discuss the major challenges that web designers commonly face and how we can address all these challenges. So, let’s get started!
Responsiveness
In today’s times, the majority of the traffic comes from mobile devices since PC usage is becoming obsolete gradually. People no more prefer using PCs and have made a switch to smartphones, tablets, laptops, and other digital devices to browse the Internet. Being a designer, if you have designed a website that seems perfect over the PC screen, but not on other devices, it is a problem for you since the customers have to go through a lot of trouble while browsing your website on other devices.
In that case, you need to focus on making your website responsive i.e., mobile-friendly. It will ensure that your potential customers experience a great view and experience of your website on all sorts of mobile devices. For this, you’ll have to focus on majorly three elements of a responsive website– adaptive images and text, fluid grid, and media queries.
Poor Loading Speed
As we discussed earlier that a visitor doesn’t wait more than three seconds on your website if your website pages take more time to load, you are simply out of the race. Speed and performance issues are another common challenge that web designers face.
Most of you might be unaware that improving the website loading speed is a simple task, you just need to focus on a few important things like- you must not use heavy images and animations or videos that take a lot of time while loading. So, you must try to compress the images you are using on your website. This can be done easily as there are many software available to compress images.
Ensure that you don’t add all the information on a single web page itself, rather try splitting it into multiple web pages and distribute the because short pages will load faster as compared to a single web long web page with a lot of text, images, and animations. Moreover, you need not complicate the code since web crawlers understand only clean and simple code. If you use distorted and complicated code, you are simply confusing the web crawlers, which is a bad thing for your website performance.
User Experience
Every website visitor expects an appealing and user-friendly experience while he visits a website. If you succeed in doing that, good enough. Otherwise, he ends up investing in one of your rivals. Delivering a rich user experience and understanding what customers are expecting from a website is another challenge that web designers commonly face.
To overcome this and deliver a great user experience to your target audience, you need to stay informed and active about a few important things like- make your clients feel special with interactive web pages, especially you need to focus on the home page since it is the first thing a person will notice on a website. Add appealing and convincing ‘Call to Action’ buttons and you also need to have strong content management.
Poor Navigation
Designers often add a lot of graphics and animations so as to grab the customer’s attention, but end up complicating the user’s journey. If the customer feels lost over your website, all your efforts spent on graphics and animations go in vain. It’s not that you don’t need to invest in graphics and animations, but you need to balance them out so that the users can easily locate what they are looking for. If they are finding it difficult to locate the web pages or some specific services over the website, it is a bad thing for your business.
So, ensure that you make use of graphics and animations on the relevant positions only and don’t flood the website with irrelevant design elements that irritate the customers. Focus on making the user journey easy and offer easy navigation, rather than making their website journey complicated.
Another thing you need to focus on is that- you must keep the business logo on the left side always since it draws the customer’s attention right away. Placing it somewhere else just to look unique might be a bad decision.
Browser Compatibility
Being a designer, you can’t stick to a particular browser and ensure that your website works perfectly over that browser while ignoring all other browsers. It is like you are targeting not even half of the customers. So, you need to not only focus on making your website compatible across different devices but browsers as well.
To ensure great browser compatibility, you should make sure that you don’t over-stuff the pages, and you have flexible media. You must use a validator to get rid of coding errors.
Website Security
Another thing that bothers the designers is website security since there is a lot of risks, and countless hacking attacks take place every day. You never know at what time a hacker might get a chance to peep into your network and hack the most confidential data from your website- it could be your business data or the customer’s data. And comprising with the customer’s data is not all an option as this will break the customer’s trust, and you’ll lose that customer forever.
Well, there are great plugins and methods that you can use for high website security like- iThemes Security, Block Bad Queries, and so on. You need to ensure that you make your website HTTPS instead of HTTP and use SSL encryption so that the encryption technique keeps the data in encrypted form and safe from all sorts of hacking attempts. Also, you need to make your site FTPS and ensure that you set strong passwords that are not easy to crack. Focusing on all these things will help in gaining the trust of the customers in the long run.
Visuals
Some web designers have a misconception that the visuals that are being appreciated today will remain to gain attention in the upcoming time as well. Since the competition is very stiff in today’s time and customer demands change every day, so there is no chance that the visuals and graphics you are using today will grab equal attention in the future as well.
So, you need to ensure that you update visuals from time to time based on the market demands and growing trends in the industry.
User Retention
Another challenge that web designers face is that despite their endless efforts and hard work (including all the time they have spent on deciding the logo, color palette, design strategies, animations, graphics, buttons, CTAs, and so on), still, user retention becomes difficult for them. The foremost reason for poor user retention is that the emphasis is made on impressing the new customers, and hardly any attention is paid to the existing customers.
For better user retention, you need to ensure that you equally focus on your present customers as well because you can let all your sweat and blood go in vain. You need to keep them engaged throughout the website journey while ensuring that you regularly post new things, content and everything that is going on in the market so as to keep the customers engaged and active. You can even use social media integration so that you can target a wider audience and keep the audience engaged.
As the web design industry evolves and customer expectations increase with time, web designers will definitely encounter new challenges and you need to be capable enough of how you can address it and improve the user experience in the long run. Focus on all the above challenges and the ways how you can tackle them perfectly!
Jessy James, a Content Crafter at UIUXDen, UI UX Design Agency. Being an avid blogger she enjoys sharing her thoughts through words. When she is not working, she enjoys travel adventures and reading literary masterpieces.