Guidelines for improving your website’s user experience

Your website is the most powerful tool for online marketing. It is your salesman 24/7 at your disposal. A business website can leave a lasting impression on a customer, whether good or bad depends on a lot of factors.

       When you open and see Google Analytics, you see that people are visiting your website, but they aren’t doing what they are supposed to. Your website didn’t create much of an impact on their minds. If you put consistent effort into improving the users experience [UX] of your website than everything will flow smoothly and can enhance conversion ratio. 

What is UX ?

Digital trends are rapidly changing and can make your website feel old and outdated. To overcome this challenge, there are some ways and tips to improve your UX, to make it more helpful and useful. UX is the process of increasing user satisfaction, by improving the usability, accessibility and efficiency of user with the website. A good UX means :  * The user visited your website.

  • Scrolled through different pages.
  • Understood what the website is all about and
  • Finally got what they wanted.

Tactics to improve your website’s user experience

      A visitor is always on your website with a mission. Now it is up to you- how easy you make it for them to accomplish that mission. So here are the tactics that will improve your website UX and help users find the products more easily.

#1. Have a plan :

Now that you know that your site needs some improvements, it’s time to work to tackle them. Start research your customers journey from the time they visited your website to the moment they became a customer. While doing research, think about which pages they are going to view, what content they would like to read, what offers will convert them into customers. Understanding these things will help you to design your website accordingly. Knowing the needs of the customer, will help you know the key points of your website and can make changes accordingly.

#2. Simplify your design :

To have best UX, your website should be clean, in proper order and clutter free. Visually your website should be simple, as it will be easily understood by the user. Web visitor usually visit website to seek answers and not for creativity. So avoid complicating the website with designs. When you want a particular action to be taken by a visitor coming to your site, make your site hassle free with less clutter. Every page should have a single goal. The check out page for instance, contains only what is needed for the process of checkout.   

#3. Interactive content :

Using interactive content will make your site design fun and drive engagement. Keep churning out the new content. Nobody wants to visit a stale website. So keep producing a steady stream of content to keep the site relevant and current. High quality and informative content boosts the UX and in driving massive traffic to the site. So it is well said “content is king”. To enhance the UX try adding videos, games, quizzes. Make your content simple and clear. It should be accessible to a wider audience. Visitors should be able to engage with content after a quick glance.

#4. Optimize website speed :

If your website isn’t fast enough, most people will leave it almost immediately. Almost half of web users tend to leave if a website doesn’t load in three seconds and this will definitely have a big impact on your conversion rate. Site speed is one of the main factors for ranking websites in search engines. There are many tools available to make your site lightning fast, like web page test, Google page speed, yslow and others. 

#5. Mobile friendly design :

More than 50% of all internet traffic is from mobile devices. Google also has shifted its algorithm towards mobile users. The websites that perform best on mobile will enhance your website user experience. We live in a multi screen world. This is great. But when it comes to websites, we have to make sure that our website looks great on all of these screen sizes. That’s why it is important to make your website responsive. Responsive design helps solve many problems:

  • It adapts to screen size.
  • Improves user experience.
  • It is cost effective.
  • It is easier to manage

You can check whether your website is responsive by resizing your browser size. Your website should automatically adapt itself.

#6. Easily navigable :

website’s navigation is tied in with the user experience and your conversion rate. Bad navigation will lead to people leaving your website and not coming back- while good website navigation will not only keep people engaged on your website but also help convert more users. Best example for easy navigation is Amazon home page, everything is easy to find. At first glance you can see offers that are relevant to you, as well as any deals of the day or last minute deals. All you have to do is to click on them to see the offers. The easier you make it for them to navigate through your website, the better and better the chance they will convert.

#7. Use of white space :

white space is any empty space: on the sides, between paragraphs and around product images. White space has a significant impact on both user experience and your conversion rate. For instance use of white space can

  • Help you highlight a specific message that you want your visitors to see.
  • Draws people attention to something if you want people to notice something specific on your website [like an offer/discount],use white space around it.
  • It helps you to better organize your content and elements.

#9. Customers review :

when people search for products on platforms like Amazon or Flipkart, they tend to see the product reviews that contains mostly four or five stars. These reviews are from people who wrote out their experience with a product. Adding such reviews to your website helps the customer to gain trust in the product, which in turn pushes the customer to purchase it. As long as the reviews/testimonials are genuine, your website will surely enhance users experience and help in conversion too.

Conclusion:

To have a strong and positive impact of your website on visitors, your website should be speedy, mobile friendly, easily navigable, and a clean and clear website design, easy to understand. If your website is efficient and effective with your customers need, you will definitely be high. Year by year , you have to apply new strategies of improving your website. Improvement of website is necessary as expectations and technology keeps on changing from time to time.