Speculate, you have a website, a landing page, an e-commerce website, or just a blog.
Either way, it has an intent — either to sell a product, or a service or you desire people to subscribe to your mailing list.
But, things aren’t working out as you had conceived.
You open Google Analytics, and you perceive that people are visiting your website, but they aren’t doing what they are expected to — at least not what you wish them to do.
Even if whatever of them do change over, they’re not coming back. Your website didn’t make over much of a striking in their minds that they would come back.
If you set an agreeable endeavor into rising the user experience of your website and everything that goes with it, you can twist things around and amend your conversions.
This is what I’ll cover in this post:
What is User Experience? And Improve Your Website’s User Experience
“User experience (UX)”, according to usability.gov, “focuses on having a profound perceptive of users, what they demand, what they worth, their abilities, and also their limitations. It also takes into report the business goals and verifiable of the group managing the project.”
In short, it’s about how we can form the experience of the visitors as substantive and priceless as realizable.
- An enhanced user experience would mean that:
- the user visited your website,
- scrolled through the different pages,
- understood what the website is all about, and
- finally, got what they wanted.
There are galore factors that determine user experience which in turn can form or break your business. They are:
- Value — Does your content/product/service make their time spent on the website worthwhile?
- Usability — Is your website easy to use?
- Usefulness — Does your website satisfies users’ requirements?
- Desirable — Does your brand strike an emotional chord with the user?
- Findable — Is your website easily navigatable?
- Accessible — Can people with disabilities access your website?
- Credible — Does your brand, identity, content, and/or service builds trust and belief of the user?
Every step you proceed to amend user experience optimizes the conversion funnel.
The objective is to trim down as many obstacles as achievable. Such that, the visitors don’t acquire stuck thinking about what is happening and how to acquire what they want.
Let’s say, somebody: Landed on your blog post.
While consuming the content they perceive a sign-up form that outlooks sole content (such as downloadable ebooks).
They sign up and are blissful with the exclusive content.
A week later, you send them an email about a 12-hour video course, that takes them to a landing page.
There are two realizable outcomes of this (provided that they are interested):
They take up the video course.
They didn’t because of whatsoever UX thing (like an unsettling GIF) that put them off.
You see, cipher likes conflict. And you don’t wish people leaving your conoid because of the detrition they clashed while navigating through your website.
Here’s the business deal: improving user experience has a batch to do with common sense.
In other words, our goal is to minimize the mistakes that might make the people think:
- “How do I contact the owner? I can’t discover the contact page/number/email.”
- “Ugh! This website is a mess. So cluttery.”
- *click’s a button* “Hold on! That’s not a button?”
- “What the heck is this website all about?”
Instead, an abstract user thought would sound like:
“Okay. These are the features. I get what the product is. There’s the pricing link on the navigation menu. And there are the plans. Got the thing that I want.”
8 Tactics to Improve Your Website’s User Experience
There are tons of covariant when it comes to optimizing user experience. From market investigation to usefulness assessment and from user interface design to availability, there’s a lot that goes into this.
You see, a visitor is always on your website with an operation. Now, it’s up to us — how effortless we make it for them to carry through that mission.
However, there’s no boundary to optimizing the crap out of everything on your website. But for starters, here are several maneuvers that you can start out to amend the user experience of your website.
1. Make use of conventions
Use conventions when it comes to websites.
Why? Because people are utilized to those conventions. Like how we easy recognize the stop signs on the road. Therefore, we can yield advantage of this human behavior.
Some people would contend that if you don’t precede the conventions then how would you be much creative?
Entirely realize. But, when it comes to an outstanding user experience, I’d livelihood my creativity aligned with the thought procedure of the masses.
Things like:
- Logo placed on the top-left corner.
- Main navigation menu placed highest up on the page, on the right side or centered.
- Contact included in the main navigation menu.
- Call to action button at the top.
- The search feature in the header.
- Sign-up form in the footer.
- Social media links (as icons) in the footer.
- Social sharing buttons sticky on the left side of the page.
Sitemap and respective other less ofttimes clicked links (like Privacy Policy, Terms) placed in the footer.
2. Maintain visual and typographic hierarchies
Text in contented should be easily differentiable to gain its comprehensibility. There are normally three-four levels:
- Title (H1)
- Headings (H2)
- Sub-headings (H3)
- Paragraph/body text
- Sometimes, a sub-title is also seen.
There are a few ways to found optical hierarchy:
- Size
- Weight
- Color
- Position
- Type Contrast
The most essential text is bolder, darker and/or larger. As the value decreases, the standing of the text also decreases.
It finer to have some plane of variation when it comes to heading levels.
3. Format text for the kids
When it seeds to formatting text in a much user-friendly way, here are some thoughts:
Use a sans-serif font for better readability
Sans-serif fonts like Arial, Helvetica, etc., are easier to read on digital screens than serif fonts like Georgia, Times New Roman, etc.
Use plenty of headings
The actuality is, almost people don’t interpret the primary content. But, some will feature the headings. Also, they assist break the text and form it look improved organized.
Keep paragraphs short
Short paragraphs are effortless to interpret than big blocks of text that cognizant like running a marathon. If you perceive any ample paragraphs on your website — attempt to happening them into littler paragraphs. Abstractly, two or three statements per paragraph work fine.
- Use bulleted lists
- They help break large blocks of text,
- into easy to read format, and
- make key information stand out.
- Feel free to use numbered lists as well.
- Highlight key terms
Like I said earlier, most grouping don’t construe the content. They scan the content.
So, it’s improved to highlighting the keywords and phrases that visitors are looking for. Formatting them in bold and erstwhile also italicized makes them effortless to brainstorm.
But recollect, don’t particular too more as it will lose its effectivity and believability.
4. Don’t let your website shout
Ever visited websites that aspect as if they’re begging for attention? I’m talking about the websites with loads of animations, colors, redundant clutter, disorganized content, and long popups.
Here’s the deal:
Nobody likes a peaked designed website. And numerous websites easy fail in that category.
When it comes to smasher, websites aren’t that assorted from people, buildings, nature, animals, and monuments. People wish to be close to things that are esthetically pleasing to expressive at.
You see, a cluttered website isn’t an aesthetic difficulty but a business problem. A trouble that could cost you a batch of money.
If you say you are outstanding at something or your product is amazing, then your web design company should be given duly credit.
Use white space
Dividing the page into distinctly undefined sections makes it effortless to scan and focusing.
You can also use various background colors, images or other design elements to determine contrary sections.
Organize content in a logical way. The most crucial things come first.
If you have big blocks of content, divide them into abstracted sections as they are effortless to savvy. Use white space, break up the page into intelligibly characterised sections, keeping the noise down.
- You don’t demand too many popups
- Get rid of redundant animations and popups that come into the style of a beautiful experience.
- I’m not asking you to get rid of all popups. But, there’s a boundary. Popups should apprise, not annoy.
- A simplex, clean design always wins
- When you get rid of excess stuff from your web pages, you are left with a much cleaner interface.
5. If it should be clicked, make it obvious
The dealings is that people are normally on your website have an operation and are always in a bit of precipitation. So, they wish to acquire what they desire without wasting a respective second.
And, the goals of the website are met when someone takes activity, which in our proceeding is by clicking on a link or button. Hence, you wish to make it easy perceptible and evident.
Buttons and links visage various in assorted browsers and operating systems. Luckily, with the assist of CSS, you can livelihood a consonant style for all browsers and devices.
Most significantly, a link should aspect like a link. So should a button.
A link is normally emphasize and colored, which changes on hover, focusing and visited. Make certain the colors are set assorted for all of these various actions.
A button can be easy known when they have a shadow, assorted (darker) background color and/or bold text (sometimes uppercase). The shadiness can alteration and/or colors can change on hover and click.
Note: On the flip side, if a component on your website is not meant to be clicked, then it shouldn’t aspect like so.
6. Omit needless words
By now, you must knowing that people don’t feature content, they scan.
So, you wish to get rid of the easygoing that is most probable going get disregard. You demand to ask yourself what is it that you tending about the most and what your visitors should aid about the most.
Remove everything that doesn’t instantly touch people’s decisions. Alternatively of writing a lot of content, make a custom of saying more with fewer words.
Also, you don’t wish to whelm people with too many content. Your website should be casual to grasp.
The trade is, people are visual. For happening, they will perceive a YouTube video’s thumbnail before they even interpret the title.
Have more visual content such as:
- images,
- infographics,
- slideshows,
- videos, and even
- gifs.
Retrieve to not exaggerate it. Having a cracking balance of visual and textual content will:
alteration the time spent by users on the website, because the visual content is effortless to realise than text, Addition the sharability of the pages, and amend the user experience.
7. Tell your visitors where they are using the site navigation, the right way
When a person is browsing your website, the past thing you wish for them is to get lost. The site navigation should let users know where they are and how they can acquire somewhere.
A website can have various navigation menus:
- The main navigation
- Place it at the top right of the page.
- A must have.
- Include the most essential links to the pages like home, about, contact and login/signup.
- Include the links to pages that can advance assist reach the goals and clear details like the products, services or resource pages.
- Have a link/button that completes the main goal like “Buy now”, “Download now”, “Contact us”.
- Order the items based on importance.
- The logo should link to the home page.
- Have the ability to search, which is very helpful in making your website more usable.
- The secondary (mega) navigation
- Place it right below the main navigation.
- Large websites like eCommerce, news, blogs require this kind of navigation.
- 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 attached to the children. All links should be clickable.
- The footer navigation
- Resides in the footer.
- A must have.
- Consists of the website sitemap, contact information, social media links, and links to lawful pages.
- The “Back to top” link/button is praised.
- Also, bespeak where you are. The actual page should be detailed on the navigation bar.
- Mobile navigation
With mobile screens, you have controlled space. Which substances, you can’t exhibit your navigation menus like the manner you do on larger screens.
What you can do alternatively is — on the navigation bar — consider a hamburger icon that opens a drawer with all your designs. This can be accomplished with a responsive-design (will get on that in a minute).
There are different variables as well — to how you wish to demonstrate the navigation. For example,
- 1. Bottom navigation bar
- 2. Tabs
You can usage one of these in aggregation with the drawer as well.
Also, make certain that the buttons and links are adequate for an average human thumb to press easy.
8. Optimize website performance, for a smooth user experience
Not only the design and content of the website are essential, how your website is developed and preserved are evenly momentous.
- Good website performance helps improve:
- User experience, obviously
- Search engine optimization
- Reaching your conversion goals
- A well-optimized website simply means more money.
Optimize website speed/load times
Website page loads times are captious when it comes to user experience. You don’t wish people with poky internet connections to delay for the images to load.
Why? Because each extra second it takes to load your website, you lose people.
Although, this is post is not about techniques to optimize page load speed, here are some citations:
Optimize your images. They bestow the almost in downloading webpage assets. Reduce the file size as much as achievable without losing quality.
- Minify scripts and stylesheets.
- Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and cache website resources.
- Get rid of unnecessary assets/features that slow down the speed and frustrates the browsing experience.
- These are some methods, but there’s a lot more to it. There are many tools for testing your website speed. Start with GTmetrix or Google’s web.dev.
- These tools will give you recommendations on how to improve the website speed.
- Responsive and mobile-friendly design
- We live in a multi-screen world. This is great.
But, when it comes to websites, we have to make certain that our website looks outstanding on all of these screen sizes. That’s why it is crucial to form your website responsive.
Responsive design helps solve many problems.
- It adapts to the screen size.
- It improves the user experience.
- It is cost effective.
- It is easier to code. Hence, easier to manage.
You can appraisal whether your website is responsive by resizing your browser size. Your website should mechanically adapt itself.
Connecting The Dots
There you have it. The basics to amend your website’s user experience.
Recall, these are only the elementary. The next step would be to beginning analyzing how people are visiting your website and what they are doing on it.
Do A/B (split) testing: test assorted variant of the same page (change text, colors, organization, etc.). While doing so, you’ll build which fluctuation works improved and how you can promote amend.
If you wish to continuant do well, you necessity to outset optimizing your website, livelihood testing and see what works the high-grade.
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