What Single Change Can Dramatically Improve User Experience as a UI Designer?
In the quest for the holy grail of UX design simplicity and efficiency, we've gathered insights from UX designers and managing directors. From adopting visual height for page elements to implementing a five-step onboarding process, explore the five transformative design tweaks that have significantly enhanced user experiences.
- Adopt Visual Height for Page Elements
- Simplify the Navigation Menu
- Streamline Menu and Highlight Call-to-Action
- Hide Pause Feature Behind Shortcut
- Implement Two-Step Onboarding Process
Adopt Visual Height for Page Elements
Switching to VH (visual height) for elements on the page, the reason why? After years of designing and seeing my designs being used (via apps like Hotjar or Clarity), I realized people tend to have quite similarly sized screens in terms of width, but the height varies massively. There are users out there on 500px-high desktop devices! This means most of the stuff you designed doesn't work for them, especially if you haven't been using VH for padding, text elements, or containers.
Simplify the Navigation Menu
Implementing a simplified navigation menu on our client’s e-commerce website dramatically improved the user experience. Initially, the website had a complex and cluttered menu structure, which made it difficult for users to find products and navigate the site.
By reorganizing the menu into clear, concise categories with intuitive labels and adding a prominent search bar, we made it easier for users to find what they were looking for quickly. This change led to a significant decrease in bounce rates and a notable increase in average session duration and conversion rates, enhancing overall user satisfaction and engagement.
Streamline Menu and Highlight Call-to-Action
I've found that simplifying the navigation menu will dramatically improve the UX. By reorganizing and streamlining the menu items, you will make it easier for users to find what they are looking for, resulting in a significant improvement in user satisfaction and engagement.
Another change that has had a big impact on user experience is implementing a clear and prominent call-to-action button. By making it easy for users to know what action to take next, whether it's making a purchase, signing up for a service, or simply navigating to another page, you can greatly improve the overall usability of the design.
Hide Pause Feature Behind Shortcut
Our manual time tracker allowed users to pause the current timer and resume it later. Many other time trackers don't offer a pause button and instead stop and finish the current entry. Pausing and resuming can be beneficial for keeping your entry history clean and avoiding clutter from numerous small entries.
However, if you pause and resume over several days, it can become confusing as to which day the resulting entry belongs. Is it the day you started? (This makes sense as the creation day.) The day you ended? (This makes sense if you forgot the start day.) Or should it be split across all days it was paused/resumed? (This makes sense since you worked on all those days, but it defeats the purpose of pausing if it gets split up every time.)
During our alpha tests, we quickly saw the confusion. While some people loved the feature, the majority found it confusing and didn't need pausing at all.
So, we hid the pause button behind a shortcut (holding Shift while hovering over the component). This way, only those who knew about the feature used it, eliminating confusion while still providing the feature for those who loved it in a fairly easily accessible way for them.
Implement Two-Step Onboarding Process
One change that significantly improved user experience for a client involved simplifying the onboarding process for their mobile app. Originally, the app required users to fill out a lengthy form with multiple fields before they could access any features. This was causing a high drop-off rate, as users were getting frustrated and abandoning the signup process.
We decided to streamline this by implementing a two-step onboarding process. First, we reduced the number of required fields to just the essentials—name, email, and password. We moved additional information requests to later stages, after users had already experienced some value from the app.
I remember the team brainstorming session vividly. One of our members suggested, "Why don't we let them explore the app first and ask for more details later? This way, they can see the value before committing too much time." It was a lightbulb moment for all of us.
Additionally, we integrated social media login options, allowing users to sign up with a single click using their existing social accounts. This small change made the process feel less like a chore and more like a seamless entry into the app.
