UX Design and Drupal in 2020

User Experience Design (UX Design) has gone from a ‘good-to-have’ aspect to a ‘must-have’ for businesses to generate leads from websites. UX Design is no longer a trend but a discipline and organisations need to put more thought behind the overall user journey on their website.

According to Adobe, consumers regularly use an average of 2.23 devices simultaneously, which means your design needs to have a responsive design that caters to multiple desktop and mobile devices.

Optimising a site for user experience leads to better customer adoption and can raise your conversion rate by 200-400% according to Forrester.

The crux of UX Design is that it ticks all the boxes in terms of Usability, Consistency and Consumerization. The flexibility and out of the box functionalities offered by Drupal 8 make this a compelling framework to build dynamic, responsive and highly intuitive web apps. 

Drupal 8

Drupal 8 brings a host of advanced features such as automation of HTML and CSS, ability to handle traffic-heavy websites, compatibility with modern PHP standards and Symphony 2 framework. It has also improved upon the integration with object-oriented programming which helps in code reusability and maintainability. Let’s see what Drupal 8 offers in terms of UX Design.

Beautiful web pages with Twig

Drupal 8 comes with a brand new theming engine called Twig. Twig is a modern PHP-based template engine that’s fast, secure and flexible. Twig has been created by Fabien Potencier, the creator of the Symfony framework. Twig lets you create beautiful web layouts with simplified PHP code. Twig compiles templates into plain optimized PHP code which reduces the overhead as compared to regular PHP and also makes it easy for a non-PHP developer to build web apps with great aesthetics and functionalities. 

Multilingual Improvements

Drupal 8 offers built-in multilingual capabilities right out of the box to develop and display content in a host of languages. To build a multi-lingual site, you can leverage the 4 modules within Drupal core – Language, Locale (Interface Translation), Content Translation and Configuration Translation modules. Drupal 8 has exhaustive documentation and Multilingual guide that explains the steps involved in leveraging Drupal’s multilingual support. This means that you can now create websites that show the site’s content in multiple languages. With translation capabilities, you can translate content, user profiles, image styles, views, comments, feed, blocks, menus, taxonomies and more. Drupal 8 allows you to translate the full site to deliver a customer and region-specific, native and personalized experience.

BigPipe Integration

The average user decides to stay or leave a website within the first 3 seconds of hitting the URL. Imagine the user’s pain point if your website barely loads and populates all critical information that’s intended for the end-user. Drupal has adopted the BigPipe module with Drupal 8. The BigPipe module was invented by Facebook in 2015 and is one of the most popular methods for fastest page load speeds.  Earlier being a separate module, Drupal 8.3.0 has now integrated BigPipe with the Drupal core for developers to optimize the site’s loading performance. If your website is information-heavy, BigPipe can tweak the performance for faster load times.

Out of the box support for web services

Drupal 7 forced developers to use third-party plugins for web services. Hypertext Application Language (HAL) in Drupal 8 allows leveraging Restful services a breeze. Drupal 8 has built-in integration for RESTful Web Services API. This allows for creating a decoupled Drupal site that is more secure. Additionally, Drupal 8 allows itself to act as a data source and output content as JSON or XML. This is a huge boost in terms of loading content on a web page and saving user data from the frontend itself. 

Advanced Caching

Drupal 8 has improved its caching mechanism. It caches all entities and only loads the JavaScript entities as required. So when a page is viewed once, the next time the user visits this page or even refreshes the page in real-time, only the JavaScript gets refreshed avoiding the entire page from reloading. Caching is automatic in Drupal 8 once it’s configured and enabled. 

Enhanced Accessibility

Drupal 8 has vastly improved the adoption of standard accessibility technologies such as WAI-ARIA. The improvements to ARIA Live Announcements API and TabManager allow for the creation of Rich Internet Applications (RIA). Components such as newly added font sizes, color palettes, jQuery UI’s autocomplete and more uplift the content creation and consumption by end-users.

Key Takeaways

Good UX Design is not about creating a website that’s pretty to look, but one which enhances the overall user journey. UX Design doesn’t necessarily mean you need to reinvent the wheel. You need to understand your target audience and design a website that’s intuitive and responsive across devices. Businesses need to cultivate the importance of UX Design as a strategic step in the design process and align it across departments within the organisation.

Drupal is the leading content management system and understands the need for content admins, creators, editors, evaluators and end-users in 2020. The versatility and latest features in Drupal 8 help you ensure that you create the best content delivery platforms for your users and developers.

If you’re looking to secure your Drupal websites, talk to our experts at Lumturio.com or start a free trial to experience Lumturio in action.