UX: How to Provide a Better User Experience on Your Website
The web is becoming more and more competitive every year. A website design that seemed innovative 5 years ago may now be completely outdated. This is because the web has developed at an incredible speed in the last decade.
Designers have studied the market and discovered the factors that make one website perform and another stagnate. One of these factors (and one of the most important) is user experience, or UX. This means putting the user’s needs and the path they will follow on a website at the centre of their design. It is necessary to master this aspect of your design if you want to remain competitive. Here’s everything you need to know to give your visitors the best possible user experience.
When it comes to creating a good user experience, there are 4 fundamental principles at play:
Clarity, ease of navigation, relevance, and trust. If you respect these principles, your customers will have a good time on your website, and they will be happy to do business with you. If you don’t, they will leave your website frustrated and unhappy. Let’s take a closer look at what constitutes each of these principles and how they affect the user experience.
Clarity
Most people think that good design is complex and elaborate. They will go so far as to sacrifice the clarity of their website to get that kind of result. This kind of mentality can be costly because the clarity of a page is directly related to the results it will achieve. When you create a website, you need to have a clear idea of what you want your visitors to do. Do you want them to subscribe to your newsletter? Learn more about your product or service? Call your company? If it is not clear to you, it will not be clear to your visitors.
The clarity of your website is reflected in several elements:
The text: Try to structure your content in a simple and easy way to follow. Break down your ideas into several paragraphs. Nobody likes to read a huge paragraph that never ends. Use a simple font and background. If you’ve taken the trouble to write content, you might as well make sure it gets read!
Images & videos: A picture is worth a thousand words, and this is even truer on the internet. Your visitors want to understand quickly who you are and what you offer. You will please them if you can communicate this with a picture. The same goes for videos. They allow you to convey clear information, without effort on the part of your visitors.
Calls to action: Make it simple for your visitors to do what you want them to do. If your main goal is to get them to call you, make it clear. Make sure they aren’t distracted by two other calls to action to sign up for your newsletter and learn more about you. Separate the important calls to action from the less important ones.
Ease of navigation
If a visitor can’t navigate your website easily and quickly, that’s one visitor you’ve just lost. As simple as that. Here are a few things to optimise to make navigation effortless:
Loading speed: Internet users are becoming increasingly impatient. If your website takes too long to load, you will lose a considerable number of visitors. Consider this statistic from Pingdom (https://www.pingdom.com/blog/page-load-time-really-affect-bounce-rate/):
If your website’s load time goes up from 3 seconds to 5 seconds, the percentage of visitors who will leave your page goes up from 11% to 38%. So, make sure your website is as fast as possible.
Menus: As with many things, it’s not about quantity, but quality. If your menu has too many items, your visitors will be paralysed by the abundance of choices and will end up doing nothing. So, try to create a clear and intuitive menu. Instead of having a dozen pages on your menu, put a few categories with several sub-menus.
Optimisation for mobile: It may seem obvious, but even today a huge number of websites are not optimised for mobile. Yet almost half of all web browsers are on their phones. It is essential for any website to be optimised for mobile as well as for desktop. If it is not, you will lose many visitors that you could easily have converted into customers.
Relevance
When creating the content of your website, it is essential that you keep your customers’ needs in mind. Make sure your pages answer these few questions, clearly and comprehensively:
What are the most common concerns of your customers? Be sure to address any possible objections that might prevent your visitors from doing business with you.
What information do they need to buy your product or service? Is all the information about your warranty, delivery, etc., easily found on your website?
What do your customers need to get the most out of your product or service? Are you able to offer a user guide, or answers to frequently asked questions, to make your customers’ lives easier?
You can also offer answers to all these questions by using a live chat system. This way, your customers won’t have to search through your website to find missing information. An agent will be able to give them all the information they need in real time, which can greatly increase the success of your website.
Trust
It goes without saying that your visitors must consider your company trustworthy before doing business with you. To show them that this is not a concern, keep these two elements in mind.
Security: Show to your visitors that your website is secure. In the case of e-commerce, obtaining an SSL/TLS certificate can make all the difference.
Testimonials: Offer testimonials from your current customers on your website to reassure your visitors. It shows them that you are trustworthy. This is sometimes all that’s missing to get a visitor to take action and become a customer!
And there you have it! This is all you need to know to create a good customer experience for your visitors. If you apply these principles, they will enjoy their visit to your website, and eventually, they will enjoy doing business with you!
