Category: Communication

Skills required for UX Designer

Collaborating on a user interface

Below is a set of skills that makes you a passionate UX designer. These skills are truly simple to learn and adopt in your design process.

Number 1.

A must skill for UX designers is to do research, and do it at all the time. Keep yourself up to date with latest trends. Spend the maximum time you can to explore upcoming designs, techniques and tools in your field. Always compare the knowledge that you are attaining each day and see how quickly things are evolving. (Usually very quickly)
Its a great feeling when all that research and effort clicks, and falls into place.

Search Engine Optimization.

 

SEO = Search Engine Optimization.  This means making your website easily searchable (and find-able) on search engines, like Google.

 

Think about how searching online works: You put a word or a phrase into Google that describes what you’re looking for:

Then you pick the search result link that seems the best or most useful for your search, from pages of results that look something like this:

But there are millions of sites in your search results! How does Google figure out which sites should be at the top of the list? How do you figure out which site is the most relevant to your search? Webmasters who use search engine optimization help Google match their site to the right search results.   There are lots of different strategies to make your website appear higher in the list of search results and to make it more likely that someone will click on your link.

SEO Tips

Did you know that Google takes into account more than 200 different factors to help it determine which search results appear each time you search? There is lots and lots of SEO methods that take advantage of these factors (which change all the time).  For this activity here are a few you can try!

  1. Page Title: Make sure you’ve added a good, clear title for your page inside the <Title></Title> tags! Keep your page titles short. Google only shows a certain number of characters in their search result pages.
  2. Keywords: Keywords are the words you enter into a search engine to find what you’re looking for. Keywords for our unicorn example might be “buy unicorns” “unicorn shopping” “unicorn store” etc.  Think about what words people might use to find your site, then make sure to use these words all over the place:
  • In your URL, Page Title, the text of your website should be filled with helpful keywords.
  • Bold your keywords with <strong> tags.
  • Add keywords to headings: <h1> or <h2>.
  • If you add images, change the file name of your image to include a keyword, and put your keywords in the Image Alt Attributes.
    • Example:  <img alt=”buy a unicorn” src=”unicornforsale.jpg”>
  1. Meta Description: In your site header, add a “Meta description”. This allows you to decide how Google describes your page in its results. Keep the description short (1-2 sentences) to make sure you do not exceed the maximum number of viewable characters.  Example:
  • <meta name=”description” content=”This is an example of a meta description. This will often show up in search results.”>

 

4.Use only one H1 tag. The <H1> tag in the body of your site is the most important text on a webpage. It tells Google exactly what the page is about. If you have several H1 tags, you can confuse Google crawlers and your page will appear lower in the search results

 

  1. Social Networks – Share your site! After your site is ready, take some time to share it on your social networks; ask your friends to share it, ‘like’ it, ‘+1’ it on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.  Google uses a site’s popularity as a signal to determine it’s quality and legitimacy. You should also get other sites to link to your site.  Ask a blog to write about your site and link to it, get people to review your site. etc.

6. Make your site awesome.  You can ask a thousand people to go to your site, but if there’s nothing interesting there, they won’t stay or share! One of the best ways to get your site seen, liked and searchable is to create great content. Whether it’s a video, writing, cool graphics, a comic or another resource, great content naturally attracts links as people visit it, share it and talk about it.

Who will design your site?

creating a web-design

To help answer this question, it’s important to understand that web design is about a lot more than making a site look good. This common misconception confuses one of the tools of site design-visual appeal­ with the actual goal, which is to effectively communicate whatever the website is required to do: entertain, sell, convince, inform, and so on.

Web design requires expertise in designing graphics and text, lay­ing out pages, and translating it all into HTML and CSS. Keep that in mind when considering who will design your site.

Target your audience

Target your audience.

A website is a communications tool you’re building to help achieve the goals
you’ve set.

But, it’s a communications tool unique in the history of the worldbecause it can perform a variety of tasks that no tool before it could have hoped to perform on its own. In fact, a website can be virtually every communication
tool that ever existed, and then some.

A website can be a diary, brochure, book, television, telephone, radio, slideshow,billboard, business card, and on and on. Not only that, but it can be all of them at the same time, or it can be some now and others later. And a year from now it could be something no one has thought of yet.

However, all this power and flexibility can be a bit daunting.Even when the purposes of your site are clear, you face a myriad of choices for accomplishing those goals. Of course, time and money will limit everyone, but that still doesn’t resolve the question of exactly which tasks your site should perform; what kind of communications tools it should be. You’ll need to look at which tools are best for reaching your audience.