Four Secrets of Web Design Revealed

We met some inspiring people at the Awwwards Conference 2016 at Amsterdam’s beautiful Royal Tropical Institute, all of whom revealed some of their best-kept secrets in the world of web design, or, as we like to call it, the world of experiences.

Today, we’re going to share a few of these insider secrets: tips and insights from people like Patrick Hamann, Trine Falbe and Josh Payton that prove once again that UX design thinking should be at the core of every brand. So, are you ready to design even more effectively?

Design for Reality, Not the Perfect Scenario In reality, nothing is perfect and things don’t always go as planned. That’s why Patrick Hamann says that you need to accept one thing: that whatever you design can and will fail. Keeping this in mind will help you to think differently about your product, and ultimately design something people actually care about. We, as designers and developers, can recover from our failures both better and more easily if we keep testing and monitoring in real time.

Embrace the Network A network is unreliable and, as a developer, it’s out of your control. So according to Patrick Hamann, it’s best to just embrace it and even to test your products on 2G networks. This is important because it has been shown that even a 5 second longer loading time can lead to 12 less conversions. That means that monitoring all response times, timeouts, and errors will help you to understand network performance and act on it faster.

Design for Kids We also agree with Trine Falbe: in order to make awesome digital products, we’re actually missing a big opportunity if we don’t see kids as our main consumers. Children exhibit a widely diverse range of behaviors and abilities that can help us see opportunities to create better products for all of us. Keep these basic practical tips in mind: • Visual language is an outright verbal language • Use auto complete and visual search • Use icons and images • Use simple data entry • Design for social interaction • You cannot rely on age as your primary criteria to define user behavior

Design for Kids by Trine Falbe

Design with Empathy. Build for Scale. Today, we all know that the lines between the physical and the digital blur. We're in a world of experiences where people connect the dots themselves, both physically and digitally. Therefore, as Josh Payton explains, standalone products no longer make sense. We need to learn how to design a whole ecosystem that supports people’s needs and that expands to the experience.

It was really good to see how the UX community is growing, especially for the users who will get the most out of it in the end.

See you next year!