If you’re wondering how your website design stacks up, start by asking yourself the following questions:
- Is information across your site clear and easily consumable?
- Is the design universal so that it does not exclude any users?
Just because a website is usable, does not mean customers will use it. Web design in 2020 is much more than usability, from accessibility to user engagement, our Creative team explore the web design trends to focus on when it comes to your eCommerce website.
Design to Promote Trust
In recent years, consumers have become more in tune with identifying false information and brands have at last realised the importance of customer trust as a purchasing decision. As a result, companies are making changes to their policies and in some instances, the design of their website.
Major social media platforms have introduced policies and new designs to help users better identify and judge false information and sponsored content, but how does this translate in website design?
AYKO Creative Team Suggest:
- Clearly label your types of content, i.e. organic and paid-for content so readers can make a better judgement.
- Make content sources and authors (including their credentials) more obvious so readers can evaluate its credibility.
- Use related content to add context to content, especially for opinion pieces.
Consider Accessibility for All Users
We’ve touched on this topic before in our recent post ‘Colour Compliance and Accessibility on the Web’, but considering accessibility for all users, regardless of their abilities, is crucial.
Ensuring the design of your site is as inclusive as possible will prevent valued customers from encountering difficulties that might otherwise stop them from achieving their goals. You’ll need to consider many factors which affect accessibility, including colour compliance, font size, alt text and HTML elements.
AYKO Creative Team Suggest:
- Weave accessibility checks into every step of the project, not just at the end of the process to ensure all designers own their responsibility and time is not wasted amending signed off designs.
- Finally, check your design project against Vox’s Accessibility Guidelines checklist to see what you score.
Design Without Bias
As designers, we relentlessly aim to consider other views through user research, A/B testing, heat mapping, and so on. Still, as humans, we’re subject to our unconscious assumption that what works for us will work for everyone else.
Inclusivity is more than accounting for disabilities; it’s also about accounting for the difference in people’s interests, upbringings, viewpoints, and so on. To design without bias, designers must study intended audiences in-depth and bear their audience in mind throughout the design process.
AYKO Creative Team Suggest:
- Always work with the constraints of a framework or design system to avoid going off track and our biases leading the way.
- Complete in-depth user research considering cognitive habits, viewpoints and identities, and lean on this to consciously limit biases.
While there are many new web design trends, techniques, tools that are improving UX in 2020, we have chosen not to focus on those in this article, but to instead focus on the overarching trends we believe matter most. Fundamentally, we find a web design that is committed to helping users better understand the content, regardless of their ability and identity, will pave the way in 2020.
