UX: Make Better Websites in 2016

Happy New Year to everyone! Please note that our January meeting has been rescheduled for the middle of the month. We'll start the new year with some tips to make better websites using the UX methodology.

We all want to make better websites, and we can if we approach our work from the perspective of website users. As designers and developers we often approach websites from our own perspective and design to make our clients happy. However, the actual visitors are often their clients who may have a completely different expectation of what a website should be. This concept is the basis of User Experience design.

The User Experience (UX) methodology has been a very popular and powerful trend over the past year and will continue to grow in 2016 and beyond. This approach involves developing and designing websites for the people that will be actually using the websites. Not just for us, or our clients, but for the people who will be using the website. The end goal of a website is to make contacts, or make sales, or provide information to the audience we are after and it's clear that websites designed with that audience in mind do much better than those that are not.

We will cover some tools and the basic concepts of UX including:

• Research - both client and end user demographics

• Information Architecture - content evaluation and auditing

• Wire framing - design, content structure and interactions

• Visual Design - appealing to the visitors

• Testing and Analytics - user testing, evaluations and results

• Iteration - repeating the process and making it better

The UX methodology can be applied in Joomla, or any other website platform or project, and the concept can be worked into an existing workflow to improve conversions and usability for every website on every device. We can all make our websites better by thinking about the people who will actually be using them.

We’ll start at 6:30 with introductions and pizza. Hope you can make it!