This is the first question you have to ask yourself, and the forefront of all concerns when working on a new project.
Being a good designer doesn’t consist in repeated competing against other designers on the market, but fighting to outdo the success of your previous work. You know the basics, and you have enough experience with relevant design aspects – all you have to do know is to move a step ahead in your design technique, and transform your good approach into a great one.
We’ve gathered some interesting suggestions for the purpose, and we hope you will find them useful.
Sometimes, the wrong part is that there is nothing wrong
Image source: Alejandro Vizio
What did we learn from Steve Jobs and the Apple crew? It is not enough to be good, and even when it seems that there is no problem at all, we are fighting against our biggest element: static and boring design. You don’t need users to like you – you need them to love your brand, and to be interested to invest in it both emotionally and financially.
In order to adopt this approach, you have to think like you user, and to put him in the center of your design strategy.
Walking in your users’ shoes
Image source: intercom.io
Your project will either look chaotic or harmoniously organized, that depends on your capacity to bring marketing and design under the same hat, and to make them work together for the achievement of a desired action. What users perceive to be a great web design is a design that puts them in the focus of attention, namely the last piece in the puzzle that will make a website complete.
Designers have to understand that there is no room for stereotypes in the real world, and that people are different enough for them not to make broad groups and categorizations. The human aspect and common behavior of design you’re looking for is actually complex, distinctive, and absolutely unpredictable.
Image source: Bart Ebbekink
While aesthetics mean the world to some users, others don’t even pay attention to them. Certain people analyze grammatical nuances, while others don’t care about the way your text is written.
The one thing that is common for all users, however, is that they expect your design to be functional. All users want the design to work, and to be able to jump from one page to the other and to look for content without restrains and confusions. A satisfied user, whom you’ve never frustrated or misdirected, is a won user.
Image source: Michal Parulski
If you have concerns on your design’s usability, expand the method of running simple check tests to discovering the root of why something works/doesn’t work (Firebug is a helpful tool).
Being able to observe bugs critically, and to study their effect means that you will be able to offer clients the exact product they’re looking for without using focus from usability. You are the designer, and they will rely solely on your balancing skills to match aesthetics with functionality.
Appearance and feeling
Image source: Taras Bakusevych
The definition of a functional website is a website that looks nice, and feels nice at the same time. Aesthetics help you impress users at first sight, and that makes them very important. No wonder so many amateur designers lose conversions die to reasons like logo displacement and unclear navigation.
What is expected from a good side is to place their logo on the top, or the very left side of the home page, or not to have a logo at all. Great websites, on the other hand, always place their logos in the upper left corner. This is a strategy to make the logo more visible, especially if we’re discussing crisp, high-resolution design that will be recognized wherever it appears.
Image source: braind.agency
The navigation of a great website is supposed to be clean and intuitive, concentrated under the logo. There should be tabs like Home, Services, Products, About, and Contact, so that people will find any information they’re looking for in less than 3 clicks.
Translated in time terms, this means that the average time to perform an action is less than 90 seconds, and that’s exactly how much visitors want and have to spend browsing your website.
The perfectionist approach: Paying attention to the tiniest details
Image source: springsummer.dk
Focusing on details is quite challenging, but failing to do it is the most successful recipe for failure. Detail accuracy shows that you care about polishing your design, and that you include only expected elements that won’t be overlooked or confused for something else. What is very typical for mediocre web designs is that they strive to look unique by using odd icons and confusing paths.
A great designer is at the same time a perfectionist: he believes that his design is good, but he is always looking to go beyond expectations ant to improve details. Such designer knows the importance of details, and their power to transform the simplest website into a most powerful one.
Finally, a great designer is never sorry to invest time in separate elements, because he knows that details are the roadblock they have to surpass in order to take their design to the desired level of greatness.
Functionality
Image source: sonikpass.com
Good websites gave a simple function suite, and they usually provide content that can be found and read without special efforts. Sometimes, they have homepage movement based on Flash or Java Script banners to showcase their product/service portfolio.
The truth is that this is not their biggest concern, and they can go without it. Finally, good websites understand the importance of having dropdown navigation, but it still happens to them to miss it, and to confuse visitors in the least expected way.
Image source: mindspace.me
The thing that makes good websites great in their functionality is knowledge. You always have a capable developer standing behind the product, having already idenitified the profile of an ideal buyer.
If you know who your target buyer is, you’ll have no issues implementing the right, breadcrumb navigation to transform a visit into a lead. By breadcrumb navigation, we are actually refereeing to a navigation that leads users to the conversion point, extracting as much of their information as possible.
Looking outside the box
Image source: designhotels.com
Creativity is not something you learn or pick up in school, but practice and experience are good ways to improve it. While most websites have clearly defined goals and are struggling to meet them, creative designers develop a unique approach to fulfill those goals even prior to the deadline.
Stepping out of an established creative frame is not about knowing something other designers don’t: it is about using what you already have in a new and impressive way. You’re not supposed to reinvent the wheel, but to make unexpected shifts from one color scheme to the other, to mix typographies, or to add layouts.
Final thoughts
Summing up, good design is supposed to delight the user, while great one goes one step ahead: it engages visitors, and it turns their visits into conversions. The collateral effect is improved collaboration between brands and users in general.
Distinguishing between good and great design is not checking how elements are implemented, but testing the effect of potential modifications to the best possible benefit for users and visitors. When you see a great website, you know that designers worked hard to reconcile everything in a synergistic fashion. It is simply obvious!
For the good or for the bad, web design is a field where you can never stay behind and let skills stagnate. If you’re pursuing greatness, the only way to achieve it is to stay on track with every trend, development, or innovation on the technology market.
