Basic ways to improve your website’s User Experience
You have a website to sell a product, a service or you want people to subscribe to your blog.
You open Google Analytics, and you see that things are going wrong. People are visiting your website, but they aren’t doing what they are supposed to. Even if some of them do convert, they’re not coming back.
Can you turn things around and improve your conversions? The short answer is yes, you can. How to do that? You should improve the user experience of your website.
The importance of User Experience
What is a User Experience (UX)?
User Experience is how a person feels when interfacing with a system (website, applications, software) that means any form of human/device interaction.
UX is important because it tries to fulfill the user’s needs. It aims to provide positive experiences that keep users loyal to the product or brand. Additionally, a meaningful user experience allows you to define user’s journeys on your website that are most conducive to business success.
Well, UX is important because:
- UX reduces costs for web development/bug fixing/marketing/SEO and provides improved return on investment (ROI)
- The user-focused design helps to represent your product/service differently that makes the product/service stand out.
- UX improves the conversion rate of your website.
Many factors influence user experience which in turn can make or break your business. They are:
- Value. Your content makes users’ time spent on the website worthwhile.
- Usability. Your website is easy to use. Your website is easily navigatable
- Usefulness. Your website satisfies users’ requirements.
- Emotional. Your website strikes an emotional chord with the user.
- Accessible. People with disabilities can access your website.
- Credible. Your website builds the trust and belief of the user.
The weight of factors varies from one case to another. For example, emotions are more important for a fashion website, than for a website that represents industrial equipment. The plumber’s website can be emotional, but a lawyer’s website needs to be credible. The weight of each factor depends on your target audience and marketing strategy.
The most important thing to remember when you review website user interfaces is that you are not your users. Don’t assume you know what they want or what they need.
How do you define a great experience? Identify your target audience. Segment your target audience. Get close to your users. Talk to them, watch them use your product, get inside their heads and ask yourself questions about their decisions. Your users and customers will teach you, so pay attention! Listen, observe, and question.
Unfortunately, it is very difficult to create a great UX on the first try. Also, users’ behavior may change. This is why it is very important to improve the website User Experience.
How to Improve your website’s User Experience
Improving a website’s UX involves the whole UI/UX design process of collecting and uniting the product, including aspects like branding, design, usability, accessibility, and functionality.
Make use of conventions
Conventions are things like:
- The main navigation menu is placed highest up on the page, on the right side, or centered
- Logo placed on the top-left corner.
- Contact is included in the main navigation menu
- Call to action button at the top
- The search feature is in the header
- Social media links (as icons) in the footer
- Various other less frequently clicked links (like Privacy Policy, Terms) are also placed in the footer.
Do these things make your website less creative? The answer is yes. But people are used to those conventions. Therefore, when it comes to great user experience, web designers should keep their creativity aligned with the thought process of the masses.
Do not reinvent the wheel. You can use many other ways to create a creative website design. For example, you can use a trending website design style (F5 Studio’s UI/UX designers used Neumorphism to create a business site). Also, you should focus on the content value, fonts, icons, elements of brand identity.
Improving the site navigation
When a person is browsing your website, the last thing you want for them is to get lost. The site navigation should let users know where they are and how they can get somewhere.
A website can have several navigation menus.
The main navigation:
- Place it at the top of the page
- Include the most important links to the pages like home, about, contact, and login/signup
- Include the links to pages that can further help reach the goals and clear details like the products or services pages
- Order the items based on importance
- Have the ability to search, which is very helpful in making your website more usable.
Large websites like eCommerce, news, enterprise business require mega navigation. This kind of website menu consists of links that help browse categories and sub-categories. Should have a clear hierarchal structure and be well-organized such that the parent categories are connected to the children. All links should be clickable.
Avoid using the hamburger menu on the desktop version of your website because hidden menus hurt revenue.
The footer navigation is placed in the footer and consists of the website sitemap, contact information, social media links, and links to legal pages (Privacy Policy, Terms on Services). Avoid putting links to the guarantee, shipping, or refund pages into the footer navigation.
The “Back to top” button is recommended if a user should use the scroll.
Also, indicate where you are. The current page should be highlighted on the navigation bar.
Also, remember about mobile navigation. With mobile screens, you have limited space. This means you should use a hamburger icon that opens a drawer with links to the important pages. This can be achieved with a responsive design.
There are other variations as well to how you can display the navigation:
- Bottom navigation bar
- Tabs
You can use one of these in combination with the drawer as well.
Also, make sure that the buttons and links are big enough for a normal human thumb to press easily.
Increase text content readability
Make text easily distinguishable to increase its readability. There are common levels:
- Title (h1)
- Headings (h2)
- Sub-headings (h3, h4)
- Paragraph/body text
How to establish visual hierarchy? Use:
- Size
- Weight
- Color
- Position
- Type Contrast
The most important text is bolder, darker or larger. As the importance decreases, the prominence of the text also decreases.
It is better to have some level of variation when it comes to heading levels. Also, you should remember about mobile devices users.
Use a sans-serif font for better readability.
Many content specialists think that short paragraphs are easier to read than big blocks of text. In fact, it depends on many factors. If visitors get value from website content, they will read the big blocks of text. But if write text for search engines, visitors will leave your site despite using short paragraphs.
Remove everything that doesn’t directly affect people’s decisions. Instead of writing a lot of content, make a habit of saying more with fewer words. Use visual content such as images, infographics, slideshows, videos. Remember to not overdo it. Have a good balance of visual and textual content.
Use bulleted lists because they make key information stand out.
Feel free to use numbered lists as well.
Highlight key terms. Most people don’t read the content. Website visitors scan the content to find phrases that people are looking for. So, it’s better to highlight the keywords and format them in bold and sometimes you can also italicize them.
But remember, don’t highlight too much as it will lose its effectiveness and credibility.
Don’t let your website annoy users
Have you ever visited websites with loads of animations, colors, unnecessary clutter, disorganized content, and endless popups? In some cases, this design approach could work. Bit it doesn’t work for most business sites. People want to be around things that are aesthetically pleasing to look at.
But for a business owner cluttered website isn’t an aesthetic problem but a business problem. A problem that could cost the business a lot of money.
If you say you are great at something or your product is awesome, then your website design should walk the talk.
Organize content in a logical way. The most important things come first. Dividing the page into clearly defined sections makes it easier to scan and focus. Also, you can use different background colors, images, or other design elements to define different sections.
Use white space smartly.
Avoid using too many popups (Neil Patel can use many popups, but not you). Popups should notify, not annoy.
A simple, clean design always wins and your site becomes faster.
Site speed plays a vital role in competitive niches. Not only the design and content of the website are important, how your website is developed and maintained is equally significant.
Good website performance helps improve:
- User experience
- Reaching your conversion goals
- In some cases search engine optimization (SEO)
To improve website speed and User Experience, you can:
- Optimize your images.
- Minify using scripts and stylesheets.
- Get rid of unnecessary features, assets that slow down the speed of a website.
Each extra second it takes to load your website, you lose leads and customers.
If it should be clicked, make it easily noticeable and obvious
People are on your website have a mission and they want to get what they want without wasting a single second. And, the goals of the website are met when somebody takes action, which in our case is by clicking on a link or button. This is why you need to make it easily noticeable and obvious.
A link should look like a link. So should a button.
A link is usually underlined and colored, which changes on hover, focus, and visited. Make sure the colors are set differently for all of these different actions.
A button can be easily identified when they have a shadow, different background color, and/or bold text. The shadow can increase and/or colors can change on hover and click. You can read more about buttons UI/UX Design
But if an element on your website is not meant to be clicked, then it shouldn’t look like so.
Sum up
The basics will help you to improve your website’s user experience in a cost-effective way.
You should start by analyzing how people are visiting your website and what they are doing on it. You can use A/B (split) testing, but we recommend you avoid that practice (Pros and сons of A/B split testing).
If you want to continually do well, you need to improve the UI/UX design of your website. But in some cases, redesign of a website is a more cost-effective way than just improving.
