User-friendly website design

How self check-outs get it wrong

You go in for one thing. You scan it. Then: would you like to donate to our community fund? How do you want your receipt? Do you have a loyalty card? Is this your first time here? Have you heard about our app? Please place your item in the bagging area, followed by UNEXPECTED ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA.

By the time you leave, you have answered approximately 3,242 questions, involved a staff member at least once, and questioned every decision that led you to this moment.

The user was never top of mind. The machine was designed for the business. And that is the fastest way to make someone never want to come back.

Your website can do the same thing.

User-friendly website design puts the visitor first

This sounds obvious, but it’s not always practiced.

A user-friendly website design asks: what does this person need, and how quickly can we get them there?
Not: how many things can we ask them before they leave?
Not: how much can we fit on this page?
Not: how do we make sure they see our promotion before they see the thing they came for?

Every extra step, every unnecessary pop-up, every form that asks for more information than it needs, every page that takes too long to load — are self-checkout moments. Small friction points that individually feel minor and collectively make someone give up and go somewhere else.

The question to ask about every element on your page

Does this serve the visitor, or does it serve us? If the honest answer is the latter, it might be time to rethink it.

Clean design is user-friendly design

One of the most underrated principles of user-friendly website design is also one of the simplest: leave space.

A cluttered, overwhelming page is hard for everyone to navigate and harder still for users with cognitive disabilities, attention challenges, or sensory sensitivities. Plenty of white space, a clear visual hierarchy, and an uncluttered layout make it easier for every visitor to find what they are looking for without feeling like they accidentally walked into a Times Square billboard.

Clean design is not minimalism for the sake of aesthetics. It is a communication choice that says: we thought about how you would use this. We did not just pile everything in and hope for the best.

Design for the connection they are actually on

Here is one situation not often considered. Not everyone is loading your website on a fast fibre connection in a well-lit home office. Some of your visitors are on shaky mobile data in a rural area. Some are in a building with terrible wifi. Some are on older devices that chug through heavy pages like dial-up modems from the early 2000s, and if you remember that sound, you know exactly the kind of patience we are talking about.

User-friendly website design accounts for the real world, not the ideal one. That means optimizing images so they are not massive files, limiting scripts that slow down load times, and building pages that do not require a perfect internet connection to be usable.

It is also an accessibility issue. Slow connections disproportionately affect people in lower-income areas, rural communities, and regions with limited infrastructure. Designing for their experience is both the smart and the right thing to do.

The simple version of all of this

Get out of your visitor’s way! Make it easy to find what they came for. Do not make them answer 3,242 questions to get there.

For more on what goes into building a site that actually performs for real users, here is what we consider on the technical side of every build.

Want a website that works for real people in the real world?