Your website is truly important to your business and when used effectively with your marketing can act like a salesman on your behalf. Websites that leave a good impression on a user and allow them to carry out their desired action or help them find the information they are after in the most seamless, effective, and enjoyable way when end up with more traffic, more conversions and encourage repeat purchases. Effective User Experience (UX) is vital to make your user’s journey as easy as it can possibly be.
Incorporating UX into your website doesn’t necessarily mean you will need a complete redesign. Whilst this may be the best option in some cases, especially if your website is tired and outdated there are some UX best practices that are relatively simple to implement. There is no need to wait to start considering and improvising your user experience. Here we share tips to improve your website’s user experience that you can implement now.
What do we mean by User Experience (UX)?
User Experience is how the user interacts with a website or app. You want your users to carry out a specific task whether this is successfully purchasing a product, downloading an ebook, filling out a form, or calling your business to book an appointment. No matter what the goal or task is, you need to ensure you make it as easy as possible for your user to carry it out. This is where UX design plays a huge role. Websites that are designed with usability, accessibility, and efficiency in mind throughout will avoid customers from ever getting confused, and struggling to find the information they want and will increase the likelihood that they will leave without taking action.
Top Tips to Improve User Experience
Carry out User Research
Before you make any changes ask yourself what exactly is it you want users to do on your website. Are users getting the information they want when they look at your website? Is it clear what benefits your products or services are having? Are there any barriers to purchase? If so, what are we doing to help the customer overcome this?
Also, ensure you are fully aware of who your ideal customer is as you need to ensure the UX is tailored with them in mind. What is your target demographic? What interests do they have? What social media or other websites do they currently use?
Read more about creating buyer personas here to help you with this task
Carrying out the research now will help you make more impactful changes in one go rather than noticing more and more changes as you delve deeper into the UX project.
Keep things simple
It is so easy to overcomplicate things and sometimes simplicity is best. Just because you can do amazing things now with website design, doesn’t mean you have to. For example, whilst home page banners look amazing with video content on them, ensure the video is enhancing the experience and not taking anything away or distracting the user. All your graphics should have a purpose.
Give every page a specific goal
For the most effective UX, each page of your website should have a specific goal. This goal should be immediately clear so always remember this goal when thinking about the design and content to ensure you stay focused and help the user achieve this goal as simply as possible.
For example, on the checkout page just include the information you need. Try not to clutter the page with additional content that is not directly relevant to the user at this stage as they just want to complete the purchase and you don’t want to interrupt them or distract them from doing this.
Use white space strategically
This is a quick and easy way to easily enhance your web design. White space adds simplicity to a website and can help people understand your content easier. Whilst it is called white space, the page does not need to physically be white- we are just referring to the empty space between blocks of images or text. To help make your website easy to read try increasing the line space in paragraphs of text and have white space to the light and right of blocks of text.
Consider colour carefully
Colour grabs people’s attention but you need to choose the colours on your website carefully. They need to tie into your branding but you shouldn’t choose too many colours as it can end up making your website confusing and difficult to read. Establish your brand colour palette and ensure your marketing materials all match this. Don’t just consider the colour, you need to think about the hues and shades you are opting for as well and ensure that users can easily read your website.
Make the journey clear on all pages
Don’t assume that people will enter your website on the home page. They are more likely to enter your website via a blog or a different page that you are pushing on any paid ads you are running. The user experience needs to still make sense regardless of what page they are landing on.
Keep testing the site internally. Give different members of staff a goal to complete on the website but start them off on different pages of the website. Can they easily complete the goal without unnecessary clicks, searching hard for information, or getting confused or frustrated?
Ensure page speed is quick
People are used to finding things online instantly so if a website is slow to load users will lose their patience FAST. Even if it takes more than a couple of seconds to load, the majority of people will decide to leave your site and either try again later (hopefully!) or go somewhere else. Make sure your website is quick to respond so customers can do what they want to do with ease and without frustrating delays. If they have to wait for your website to load the information the chances are they will lose interest.
No surprises
You want everything to work how they expect it to. If not, it can throw them off or cause confusion or frustration. Neither of these is ideal.
Establish a consistent tone of voice
It is not just the design of the website itself that is important for UX, you also need to consider the content you are writing. Ensure your business has a consistent tone of voice that is the same across all your marketing materials, as well as your website. Use the same terminology throughout and ensure your user will understand all the terminology you use. How your content is written will go a long way in making an impression on the user and when used effectively, it can help convert users.
You want all your communications and content to sound like it is written by the same person (ie the business). For example, if your business personality is relaxed and casual, you can inject some humour into your language. However, if you do this on your website, you can’t have your other marketing be too formal or professional as it will cause a jarring contrast that doesn’t match.
Mobile first
We live in a mobile age so a website that is designed with solely desktop in mind will never have an ideal user experience. More than half of web traffic is now coming from mobile devices so ensure your design looks good on mobile. If it doesn’t, users are likely to just leave. Make images scale to the size of the device, ensure all the text is easy to read on all screen sizes, and make sure all buttons can easily be clicked with one finger.
Conduct a user experience audit
Taking all these points into consideration, getting your website’s user experience as seamless as possible can be a true game-changer and can help you stand out from your competitors. These are just some quick ways you can start improving your user experience straight away however they only just scratch the service. In order to ensure your website is performing at its full potential, you should consider having a full user experience audit carried out. Doing so will provide you will a comprehensive list of actions specific to your site which could be improved. These changes could make all the difference when it comes to conversion rate.
At DBS Digital, we can provide you with a FREE Website Performance Review to help you understand how friendly your website truly is to users. Get started with us today.
