In today’s web design community, sites aren’t thought of merely as a collection of different pages containing content. Instead, many websites are regarded as web services. For instance, although Facebook is divided into pages including users profile, news feed, etc., but it is still thought of as a web service used for socializing – than just being considered as any other social media website.
Simply put, creating a service-oriented web design proves a lot more beneficial than a website divided into various pages. That’s because a service design help users quickly find the most relevant information about a site that assist users in making an informed decision. Such kind of design helps shorten the path businesses need to follow to boost conversion.
As you may know, in order for a service to be successful, it must provide a satisfying experience to users from start to finish. Likewise, a design that you’ve created for web services must also deliver a fulfilling and enjoyable user experience (UX) to succeed.
Reading this piece will help you know about the increasing popularity of user experience design (short for UXD) in web services. To understand the reason behind how user experience applies to web services, let’s look at a real world example.
Example: Demonstrating The Role of UX in Web Services
Today, many businesses and companies are chaining together different sites/services to help their target audience achieve a single goal as quickly and efficiently as possible. Doing so, help increases the likelihood of encouraging users to take some desired decision (ideally the one you want them to take).
Still wondering why you should chain services together?
Let’s assume you want to plan a trip with your friends to your favorite destination. In that case, you’ll possibly follow separate services:
First, you’ll likely try to obtain details about the place from a popular travel website.
Your next step will be to ask your friends to accompany you to the concert via messenger services like Whatsapp or any other.
You’ll search for a web service that helps book online tickets for the trip and so on.
So, just to complete one task, a user is required to access several sites/services. This can be a time-consuming process which might make the user think twice before taking some action. But, you can increase the chances of convincing a user to take an immediate action by reducing the chain that is needed to accomplish just a single goal. One best way to fulfill such an objective is to create link together different sites/services in a single web service.
For example, Orbitz Travel offers a broad range of travel-related services that not only help you access information about the destination you want to visit, but also contribute to making hotel reservations, book airline tickets, and so on. Apparently, using a travel web service such as Orbitz Travel will save your users from searching for different websites and/or services to complete a single task of planning a trip.
Developing a site that could help users immediately plan a trip, book tickets and organize everything from one source, users will be likelier to take the desired action in your website. But, often offering all such services to users can make the service design cluttered and messy, which can frustrate users to the extent that they might abandon your site. But, you can avoid such a situation by customizing your service design to provide a better user experience (UX).
ESSENTIAL TIPS TO IMPROVING USER EXPERIENCE
- FOCUS ON USER RESEARCH
You can’t possibly succeed in offering an enhanced user experience via your web service without knowing the user’s needs. The best strategy to understand their requirements is to research how users respond obverse when looking at competitor products and how they respond. This will help you understand your users likes and dislikes, which ultimately will assist you in finding the right context for your service-oriented web design.
2. DESIGN UX KEEPING IN MIND MULTIPLE CHANNEL NEEDS
Remember that a website is no longer the only solution to expand your reach and promote your products. You might also need to build an app to extend services to a broad audience base. But, it’s not necessary that apps will be present in mobile devices only. So, when designing UX for your web service, ensure to provide a consistent experience across multiple channels. This is where responsive design comes in handy. Creating a responsive layout for your service design will help in maintaining a consistent look of your site across different devices.
3. ACTIVE COLLABORATION
The best tactic to design service-oriented pages is to work in sync with your whole design and development team. Basically, you must work in collaboration with other designers from the beginning of the project, or you might end up getting an unexpected outcome. Moreover, interacting with other professionals will likely help you express your product in a much better way.
4. GET RID OF INVALIDATED FEATURES
You might have spent an enormous amount of your time in building features for your web service. But, if you won’t track these functions or aren’t using them anymore, they’ll build up. And, as a result, your users will have to face an endless list of options to find a feature that they’re interested in using, which will eventually degrade the user experience. So, make sure to remove any invalidated features from your service design that are no longer used.
Wrapping Up
Many businesses are now finding creating service-oriented web design than a website more profitable, as service designs help bring users attention towards the most relevant content quickly. But, merely creating a service design is not enough to succeed in today’s competitive online marketplace. You also need to ensure delivering a satisfying experience to your users to attain success in your endeavor.
Author Bio. :- Arun Som is the technical content writer of Hopinfirst that helps startups and enterprises in mobile technology and having a great experience in travel app, e commerce app, grocery app and financial app development.
