Imagine spending countless hours and resources creating your website, only to face harsh consequences of not paying attention to user requirements for website design:
- Visitors leave within seconds without ever coming back to your site.
- Potential customers abandon their purchase journey when they face sudden roadblocks.
- You struggle to rank high on Google due to technical issues you forgot to fix on time.
- Competitors whose websites are flawless capture your market share and leave you suffering.
Why is this happening in the first place?
Sometimes, businesses launch a website before paying attention to various user requirements for a website design. They get lost during the design process, lacking a clear list of things their potential customers expect.
The result? A website that doesn’t stand much chance of becoming profitable.
How can you prevent this from happening to your digital assets?
Understanding common mistakes that prevent most business websites from converting visitors is a good starting point. I’ve prepared a free mini-course, 7 Days to Profitable Aesthetics, that will show you design fixes you can make to drive more sales immediately. In seven lessons, delivered directly to your email inbox, you’ll also learn psychological triggers for subtly guiding visitors toward the desired action without appearing intrusive (they work within any niche).
And in this article, I’ll show you the essential list of user requirements for website design that my web design agency in Chicago uses at the beginning of every project.
You’ll learn how to build an error-proof website to meet your users’ expectations and avoid costly redesigns down the line.
Table of Contents
- Functional and non-functional user requirements for a website design
- Accessibility guidelines to keep in mind during the UX design process
- What do users want from your website?
- Importance of UX
Functional and non-functional user requirements for a website design
Before you start writing user requirements for a website design project you are working on, it is vital to understand the difference between functional and non-functional requirements.
- A confirmation email is sent to the user once he/she tries to sign up
- The page should load within 2 seconds when the number of users on a website is 2.000
Ensure these requirements are comprehensively tested during the quality assurance process to avoid any bugs after launching the final version of the website.
But before you start filling your website design requirements list, it is a good idea to try to understand what users actually want from your website.
Accessibility guidelines to keep in mind during the UX design process
Operable
You need to make sure that every task is performable on both keyboard and mouse, that users have enough time to complete a task, that they can easily find the content of their interest, that your content won’t cause seizures, and similar. For example, if there are time-limited tasks on your website, include an option for users to turn off or extend the limit in your website development checklist.
Perceivable
You need to ensure that all users can easily perceive your content. Provide text alternatives for videos and images, plan on implementing audio alternatives for textual content, and ensure it can be consumed by visitors who use screen readers.
Understandable
Maximizing the chances that visitors will be able to make sense of your content is vital in web design. You can do it by avoiding complex words and instructions, explaining error messages and interactive website design elements in detail. This will improve the readability and predictability of your website, making it more accessible to users.
Robust
Through quality assurance, you need to ensure that your website is accessible from all the different browsers and devices people use to explore the internet. This means that your content should be displayed in the way you intended, and the website functions without any errors no matter the browser or device.
What do users want from your website?
Before you start writing user requirements for a website design you need to deeply understand your target audience.
Why?
Understanding your ideal customers will help you plan your web project’s UX design and content strategy to fit their needs.
The key point is that the quality assurance phase starts long before coding, and continues even after the website is launched.
You need to constantly seek for audience’s feedback, and conducting interviews with your customers will allow you to improve the quality of your UX design.
However, as there are a few things that all the audiences have in common – when creating a website project checklist, keep the following in mind:
Build trust with customers
As people mostly buy products and services from businesses they trust, the e-Commerce development process needs to be focused on building a website that invokes trustworthiness. First impressions are lasting impressions, and there are several ways in which web strategists can secure positive ones:
Mirror the words of your target audience
Experience in providing website copywriting services in Chicago has taught us that imitating the tone of your target audience can enormously increase a website’s conversion rates. Avoid industry jargon that your ideal customer might not be able to quickly understand. By using words that match your target audience’s vocabulary, you can appear more trustworthy.
Provide reviews and testimonials
Before buying a product or service from you, people usually look for previous customers’ opinions. Including reviews and testimonials in your web design is a great way to give social proof and build trust with your potential clients.
Evoke emotions with visuals
Powerful way to connect with the target audience is by including photos and videos that evoke trust across your landing pages. The human brain perceives visual information much faster, and by not using them you are missing a large opportunity to create a more credible look for your website.
Avoid distractive design elements
Applying the concepts of minimalism can help you avoid distracting visitors away from the most important message on your website. During the quality assurance, you need to ensure that all website design elements that don’t serve any purpose are removed. This will allow you to build trust with your target audience quicker, by providing professional-looking landing pages.
Precisely define how you can help them
Once users land on your website, it should be perfectly clear to them exactly how your products or services can help them achieve their goals. Don’t expect your visitors to explore your website for long period just to find what your business is offering. Conducting tests with real users during the quality assurance process can help you get a better idea of whether your message is clear enough for everyone to understand it.
Useful and creative content
Most users will come to your website with one goal – to find useful information. To improve customer retention for your business, you need to ensure that only high-quality content ends up on your website. But to be able to deliver engaging content, you need to plan the content structure in advance, of course, with end users in mind. When defining user requirements for a website design, you need to:
- Plan a site map: Planning a site map upfront will make the whole design process smoother. It will allow you to organize your content in a user-friendly manner and secure that visitors can find any page quickly. The best practice is to Include the exact location of each page in your website requirements documents.
- Create page templates: To secure the best possible user experience on your website, it is important to adjust the design of pages with different types of content. Including page templates for your homepage, service pages, blog posts, and more in your website design requirements list will help you keep your web build projects on track.
- Define types of content: Define different types of content your users might look for on your website, such as blog articles, products, testimonials, and similar. This will allow you to plan your navigation more efficiently.
Make it easy to navigate
Before starting a user experience design process, it is crucial to put yourself in the website visitor’s shoes. Just upon arriving on your website, people will quickly skim to see how design elements are organized and then search for the information they were looking for in the first place. When writing user requirements for a website design project, you need to plan an intuitive user interface design your website visitors will be able to quickly get used to.
You need to ensure that the navigation menu is simple to understand and placed exactly where users expect it to be. The best practice is to limit the number of items to seven and give each category a relevant name that won’t confuse users. Let’s see what types of navigation menus exist, so that you can include the one that best suits your target audience in your quality assurance for website development checklist:
Horizontal navigation bar
Probably the most popular navigation menu type, that is usually located at the top of the page, just below the header. The horizontal navigation bar goes in the left-to-right direction. This type of menu will leave more space for placing other website design elements in the body area of your pages. As it is used on most websites, a horizontal navigation bar is the safest bet when designing a user experience. In your website requirements document, write down the website pages that you must place in the navigation menu since most of your visitors will look for them once they arrive.
Vertical sidebar navigation menu
This type of menu appears on the right or left side and usually stretches from the top to the bottom of the page. Because it allows web strategists to create a clear hierarchy of navigation items, vertical sidebar menus are often used when building websites with a lot of content. Another scenario in which you might want to ask your web development team to build a vertical sidebar menu is when you want to insert longer link texts.
Dropdown navigation menu
Another type of navigation menu you can put in your website requirements document when building websites that are content-rich. This approach will allow you to list the most pages in the top-level menu while providing links to other sections in a dropdown menu. That’s why it is ideal to utilize the dropdown menu when building e-commerce sites, which usually have many categories.
Hamburger navigation menu
This is a type of navigation menu that appears when you hover your mouse or click over a “hamburger” button. It is the most popular menu type for mobile website design because it occupies the least space until the user clicks on it. However, during the quality assurance phase, you need to ensure that the hamburger navigation menu functions well across different devices to avoid ruining the user experience and be able to balance your mobile vs desktop conversion rates.
Footer navigation menu
One of the website design elements that you shouldn’t overlook when creating a web development checklist is the footer navigation menu. As its name suggests, it appears at the bottom of your web pages and provides links to other useful parts of your website, such as the home page, the about us page, contact pages, service pages, etc. You can also use it to provide more information about your website that is not of vital importance to most users.
It is also crucial to understand that people will decide to visit your website for various reasons. Besides designing your navigation for ideal customers, ensure that the quality assurance of your user experience design covers the needs of your staff, journalists, other business owners, and other potential users. The users finding any web page within three actions should be included in your acceptance criteria checklist. This will allow you to organize website design elements in a user-friendly manner.
Typography
When writing user requirements for a website design, it is also crucial not to overlook the importance of typography in UX design. To enhance the readability and accessibility of your web design define the following elements in your website requirements document:
Typefaces
When writing user requirements for a website design it is important to define the typeface classes you are going to use in your web project. The two most popular are serif and san serif typefaces. Serif typefaces are characterized by the small, decorative lines that run along the edges of the letters. San serif typefaces do not have these lines and are less formal. They are often used for headlines or other text that is meant to be read quickly. You can combine serif and san serif typefaces for achieving the optimal user experience.
The number of fonts
To create a high-converting digital landscape, it is vital not to lose the preferred number of fonts out of your website design process focus. The best practice is to use a maximum of two fonts on your website. To create better contrast and guide users smoothly, we recommend using one serif and one san serif font. However, you won’t make a mistake if you stick to only one font in your web project, just ensure that it is listed in your website requirements document to avoid confusing your design teams.
Line heights
Line height is the distance between the lines in a text or graphic element on a web page. It affects how easy it is to read the text or see the graphics. A line height of 1.5 (150% of the font size) is common, but you can specify another line height in your website design requirements document if you believe it will make the text or graphics more legible.
Letter spacing
Letter spacing is the distance between letters in a word or phrase. It is measured in points and is set in pixels. The default setting for most browsers is 16px. When you change the letter spacing, it will affect all the text on the page. You can also use CSS to set letter spacing for individual elements. It is vital to write down the preferred letter spacing in your website requirements document so that your design teams can follow the plan and quality assurance goes smoother.
Site speed
Page load time
Around 75 percent of people will return to the SERP if your page doesn’t fully load within 3 seconds. Ideally, you should aim for less than a second page load time, but if achieving such speed doesn’t seem realistic, settle for nothing less than a 1-2 seconds loading time during the requirements gathering process for your web project. Every quality assurance checklist for a website design needs to contain page load time as one of the top priorities.
Time To First Byte (TTFB)
This metric indicates the time browsers need to wait before they start obtaining data from the server. During your quality assurance, you should aim to reduce TTFB to a maximum of 200ms. Enabling browser catching is one of the best ways to achieve a better TTFB score.
The number of images
While images are a powerful way to increase conversion rates by presenting your products in the best light, they are usually the cause of slow page load times. If you can’t avoid having a lot of images on your website, experts from our SEO firm in Chicago recommend optimizing image file sizes. This approach will allow you to keep the image quality without sacrificing page speed.
Amount of traffic
The number of users who visit your website simultaneously can have a significant impact on your website speed. Keeping the desired amount of traffic in mind when writing a website requirements document will allow you to choose the best hosting option and adjust your web project design on time.
Is your site mobile responsive?
As more and more people are using smartphones and tablets to browse the internet, your web development team needs to ensure the mobile-friendliness of the website during the design process. If your website is hard to use on mobile devices, most users will leave before even exploring your offers. That’s why it is crucial to utilize the power of responsive web design to make your website look and function equally well on desktop and mobile devices. Mobile-friendly web design will secure a better user experience and give you an SEO boost. A quality assurance checklist is unfinished until it contains the detailed plan for testing a website on various screen sizes.
Importance of UX
User experience is the totality of a user’s interaction with your website design. It encompasses all aspects of the design and development process, from the initial conception of the system to the final delivery to the end user.
Poor user experience can lead to frustrated customers and lost business opportunities. Various factors can cause it, such as poorly designed websites, difficult-to-use interfaces, slow response times, and more.
That’s why you need a comprehensive UX design quality assurance checklist and a website requirements document that will help your development and design teams easily keep the website building project on track. Integrating responsive design is essential in this process, ensuring that the website is adaptable to various screen sizes and devices. This approach is a long-term strategy that positively impacts the user experience.
Moreover, the job title of the professionals involved in this process, such as UX designers or web developers, is crucial, as it denotes their expertise and responsibility in creating a seamless user experience.
As you can see, creating a list of user requirements for a website design project can help you organize your team and build a visually appealing website that is also bug-free.
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