Would you believe that you could get a return of anything between $2 and $100 for every $1 you invest in user experience?
That's not the end of it because, with strategic and intentional user experience, you'll have the potential to hike your conversion rates as high as 400%. This makes you wonder why only 55% of companies are doing anything about their user experience.
Your website is by far the most powerful marketing tool you have at your hands in this day and age. It's at your disposal and acts as your salesperson 24/7, which makes it one of your most valuable assets. Now, the most important thing you have to understand about your website is that it represents your brand and will leave a lasting impression on your visitors.
Whether your customers leave with a bad or good impression depends on a wide array of things, one of the most essential ones being user experience, better known as UX.
In this guide, we'll learn more about user experience, what it is, and the most effective ways to create an exceptional user experience for your customers.
Before we dive into how you can improve your user experience, let's define UX. Essentially, UX is the experience that a user has when they interact with your product. Hence, user experience is the process used to determine what the experience will be like when users interact with your website.
The minute you design your website, all the decisions you make, from the colors to the size of the font and buttons, you are creating the UX design. By creating that website, you have already made decisions about how consumers will interact with your website.
Good UX design happens when you make the right decisions based on understanding your customers and fulfilling their needs and those of your business.
User experience design is an approach that takes the consumer into mind. With proper UX design, you introduce customers to your brand, show them around your business, and showcase your products or services in a way that leaves a lasting impression.
With a great user experience, your customers will want to see more of your website. It'll be incredibly easy for them to navigate and understand that they'll consider doing business with you. Great UX has the potential to rake in loyal customers who recommend your brand to others.
Now that you understand what UX is all about, let's define UI, shall we? UI, which stands for user interface, is everything users interact with when using your website. UI is a part of UX in the sense that it plays a major role in how engaging consumers find your website.
User interface draws on the website's visual design, the interactive design, and the information architecture. It contributes to an overall better UX through a seamless use of icons, buttons, colors, visual elements, and a responsive design. It makes your website as intuitive as possible.
Now a lot of people use UX and UI interchangeably, but these are two completely different aspects. When you improve your UX design, visitors have an easier time going through the conversion funnel. They encounter minimal to no obstacles on their way to making their first purchase.
You see, a great conversion funnel turns prospective customers into leads and then turns them into customers. When a potential customer visits your website, they start by checking out a web page they were interested in or a blog post.
If they are impressed by what they see, they peruse more of your websites, poke around to find more blog posts, and check out the main navigation pages.
If the user experience leaves a great impression, they might start following you on your social media pages. They may go the extra mile and sign up for your email list. Now, this is exactly where you want them to be because once you have their contact information, you already have a lead.
This will be your opportunity to nurture the customer into making a purchase. You can achieve this goal by providing exceptionally valuable advice about your products or services, great tips on using the products, or offering them discounts.
With bad UX, the customer will not feel inclined to explore more of your website, the lead will grow cold, and you will lose that potential customer.
Now that we have defined user experience, you now understand why you must have a kickass user UX design. Let's get down to the juicy stuff and explore how you can improve your marketing strategy by enhancing your user experience.
When it comes to user experience, the most important question you have to ask is who you are designing your website for. Understanding your target market and anyone else who may be interested in your website is where you begin with your UI design. Understand what they are interested in, what exactly they are looking for, the age, demographics, values, and the like.
Are you targeting the younger generation or seniors? Are you targeting professionals, parents, students, stay-at-home-mums, etc? Are these people likely to be foodies, musicians, gamers, fashionistas, and travellers?
What similar products or services are they currently using, and what kind of reviews do they leave for those products? This will provide great insight into what your competition is doing and what you can do better based on the comments and grievances left on the online reviews.
Check out the competitor websites and see exactly what they're offering. The point of this being improving your brand and offering your prospects better, which will be your competitive advantage.
If your current website layout is not simple, you may want to reconsider a redesign and get rid of any unnecessary components. The point of your website is so that your visitors can take particular actions every time they visit certain pages. If they have to navigate through a maze of components to find what they're looking for, they're going to hit the back button before they do.
A high bounce rate is the last thing you want because it means you're not getting any customers. Now, when we say simplicity, we mean having a clean layout with a maximum of three color schemes. You also need a lot of white space and a maximum of two fonts, with an extra one for your brand logo.
All the graphics on your website should have a purpose, meaning they should be insightful and clickable. Every one of your pages should have a single and definite goal. For instance, the checkout page for an e-Commerce website should only contain whatever is needed to process the payment.
Contrary to what a lot of people think, white space is necessary to catch and keep your users attention. This is simply one of the best ways to improve your user experience. Even the most subtle amount will leave your design looking more polished.
One of the best things about white space is that it improves concentration and comprehension up to 20%. The trick with white space is striking a balance because white space takes up, well, a lot of space. Find the most important message you want to communicate and surround it with white space to highlight the other text or images included.
If you have ever experienced impatience with a website that takes too long to load, then you know what your users are going through if you have a slow-loading website.
Consumers expect fast results when trying to access information, and they bounce the second they don't find it. A slow-loading website will be nothing short of frustrating and will do nothing more but increase your bounce rate.
Get this, if it takes longer than 5 seconds for your websites to load, the probability of bounce rate will increase by 90%, and one second more will increase it to 106%. Start by checking out your page speed on Google page speed, and then take all the steps necessary to improve your website loading speeds.
You may not know this, but two of the most valuable factors in a website user experience to consumers are efficiency and convenience. They beat personalization, service, and technology. Now, if your website currently has dozens of pages but not all the content you have is efficient, consider cutting back.
This is more important for consumers starting out on the customer journey and that are just exploring your website. Eliminate any unnecessary web pages to maximize efficiency and convenience. Make sure that you have no pages that lead to a dead-end and those that feature no CTA's.
Talking about CTAs, it's of absolute importance for you to make sure that yours are very attractive. Your CTA buttons can have a significant impact on your click-through rates.
For instance, when the buttons are a contrasting color from the rest of your website, your click-through rate could shoot through the roof and hit up to 122%.
Moreover, the placement of your CTA button is very critical. The closer they are to the top of the page, the higher the click-through rate will be. Of course, this may not work for every website, so your design team can experiment on what placement, colors, and graphics work better.
Cybersecurity has become a major concern for just about everyone as data breaches and identity theft have become an everyday occurrence. The last thing you want is for your customers to abandon your website because of security issues. Consumers have become increasingly skeptical and concerned about their personal information.
This means that you need to ensure your website has optimum security. Get a security system if you don't have one already. Beyond that, make sure that you display all your security features with trust badges that customers can clearly see through their website.
Visuals are an incredibly important part of your website. For instance, if you include a video on your landing page, you stand to increase conversions by up to 80%. Even better, product images have been proven to increase not just engagement but conversion rates as well.
When you do this, it's important to remember to keep whitespace, which doesn't have to be white, by the way. Text-heavy landing pages can especially be overwhelming to customers. They want to know where to focus their attention, so image and video size and placement are very important.
Would you believe that more than half of your website traffic comes from mobile devices? This makes mobile device compatibility vital if you want to enhance your user experience. The thing is, you will turn away as many as 80% of organic searches with an unresponsive website.
This essentially means that you will be turning away a significant number of potential customers. Besides consumers, search engines such as Google use both your desktop and mobile websites to index your website. The problem with an unresponsive website is that search engines are likely to rank your website lower on the search engine result pages.
The work you have to do on your website will never really be complete because there are always more UX design trends coming up. There will always be room for improvement. It's imperative for you to conduct user experience and SEO audits on a regular basis to make sure that you satisfy your customers at all times.
One of the best ways you can do this is by listening to your customers and reading their reviews. You can also send them surveys asking them to rate your website usability and what you can improve.
Beyond that, try using various UX auditing tools together with analytical data that will help you improve your user experience.
About a third of the people who interact with your website will abandon your brand after one bad user experience. Now, you can take advantage of the fact that over 50% of consumers are unsatisfied with the UX from most brands. Leverage this fact and stand out from the crowd by applying these tips to your website.
Are you excited about applying these user experience strategies to your website? Do you think it's overwhelming and need professional help? If so, please chat with us, and we'll be more than glad to help.
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