You hear a lot about “intuitive web design” – it’s a huge trend in web development in Singapore and around the world — but what does that really mean?

Intuitive web design means your customer doesn’t have to think or make any kind of effort to find what he wants. It is centered around the customer experience, and knowing what your market wants and how he searches for information.

Intuitive Design is Not Intuitive for Businesses

This sounds simple and almost borders on common sense, but sadly, many websites forget this important detail. They meet up with their web development company in Singapore and say, “I want to talk about my brand!” and then put all their products and services, without asking the very basic question: “Who does my brand serve?”

Intuitive web design can’t happen if you aren’t putting yourself in your customer’s shoes. It’s about creating a website for your target market and then designing completely around an easy, effortless and satisfying customer experience. If you revolve your website around your brand and not the customer experience, you’re already ignoring all industry data on how people view websites. 

It’s a science and strategy that involves many things: knowing your customer persona, understanding the different ways customers use mobile and desktop, and a solid content strategy where you know your key messages and reinforce them in different ways. But as a starting point, here are the basic elements of Intuitive Website Design

Easy Navigation

When a new user lands on your website, he knows exactly what to do and where to go even if he doesn’t think. The fact is most web readers are distracted and easily frustrated. You as a company know what your products and services are, but your reader has zero background or context – it is your job to inform him, not his job to figure out who you are and what you do.  Easy navigation is about providing the right information at the right time in the easiest possible way.

A good analogy is ordering a meal at a restaurant. The first thing you do is look at a menu. What would you feel if the food had confusing descriptions, appetizers were mixed up with desserts, and when you asked the waiter what to order (the real life equivalent of a site search) his answer had nothing to do with your original question? Worse, you try to call a waiter and he takes forever to arrive!

You’d be furious if you got this kind of service at a restaurant, but many bad websites force visitors to go through that because of confusing home pages, lack of content and proper search, and slow loading times.

Visual Storytelling

Website visitors are scanners. Before they read, their eyes are moving across the page and their brain tells them what to pay attention to first. The best websites use visual cues to create a visual hierarchy: headers and photos draw the eye to important details. There’s a science to this that web development Singapore companies like MapleTree Media have studied and know from experience and following industry trends and research.

Efficient Site Maps

Your site map is an outline of how information is organized. Big ecommerce sites will have to work on their site map so that products and services are easier to find. However, even smaller websites will have to flesh out their site maps to know what kind of content they’re missing. A skeletal product site with barely no information is just as bad as a gigantic commerce site that has too much information.

Intuitive web design makes you ask, “What kind of information does my customer want and what process will he go through to find it?” If he does not find that information on your website in 1 to 2 minutes he will go somewhere else. If you don’t ask that question first, your competitor will answer it for you.

Technical Delivery

There are two important aspects to websites: speed and reliability across all devices. If your website takes a long time to load, or has a lot of broken or dead links, or looks terrible on a phone or a laptop, then you lose by technical default. You could have great content and award-winning products and services at an unbeatable price, but as far as your customer is concerned, “This website doesn’t work.”

 How to Make Your Singapore Website More Intuitive and User Friendly

  • Know your target audience. This is the first question any web development Singapore company will ask. This information will guide design decisions like site maps, visuals, content, keywords, and other search engine and digital marketing strategies. To use the analogy of ordering at a restaurant, not having a clear target audience is like telling a waiter, “Just give me good food.”
  • Develop a way to measure how your website “fits” an audience needs. This can include something as informal as showing the beta site to people who fit that demographic, or running A/B marketing tests, or monitoring your Google Analytics traffic and conversions and making necessary changes along the way.
  • Look at your data and analytics. A website is a work in progress, and the less data you have in the beginning, the more necessary it is to collect data and observe traffic in the next few months. It is important to watch how your audience reacts and design then redesign your content around that feedback. For example, if you find that most of your traffic comes from people searching around a particular keyword phrase, that’s a sign that you need to create more content around it – that’s what people want from your website, so give it to them!
  • Trust in industry research and web development trends. Design may be a subjective process where some people “like” a website and others don’t, but there are some data-driven findings about what customers like.  The best web development Singapore agencies have access to this information and are able to apply this expertise to their projects.