User experience (UX) is essential for guiding your customers towards your services. Great UX can help increase engagement and improve overall user experience, leading to higher levels of satisfaction and loyalty. A poor UX, on the other hand, can drive your customers away and damage your reputation.
What is UX?
UX refers to the overall experience of a person using a website, including the usability, accessibility, and overall enjoyment of the website. A great website is easy to use, intuitive, and provides a positive experience for the user. This can be achieved through effective design, clear navigation, and useful content.
Your UX is important because it can help to improve customer satisfaction with the website, increase their engagement with the content, and ultimately drive more conversions and sales. From the first landing page, the UX needs to guide the user to your desired outcome easily. Every step should have the end goal in mind, whether that’s a direct sale or a contact button.
Within the idea of UX, there are practices you can implement to keep your users engaged. You don’t have to be a web developer in order to implement an efficient UX for your website. You just have to arrange your content and design features correctly.
Does your content have direction?
Did you know, users only read about 27% of your online content? What can we take from this? That most users are skim-reading your content.
As most users are skim-reading your content, you need to ensure your content is optimised for these users to quickly get the information they need from your site. Your online content needs to be getting to the point faster than your users are able to think about what they are reading.
To optimise content for skimming, you can try the following techniques:
- Use clear, concise language and avoid long, complex sentences.
- Use subheadings and bullet points to break up the text and make it easier to scan.
- Highlight important points or keywords with bold or italicised text.
- Use images, graphics, and videos to break up the text and make the content more visually appealing.
- Make sure the content is well-organised and easy to navigate.
Remember, not all content is suitable for skimming, and it’s important to strike a balance between making the content easy to scan and providing enough detail to convey important information. It’s also a good idea to test the content with a small group of users to see how well it works in practice.
Signpost your user to the right places
The use of call-to-action (CTA) buttons throughout your content can help to effectively signpost the page navigation to a user. Call-to-action buttons are an important part of user experience because they help guide users to take specific actions on a website. For example, a CTA button might invite a user to sign up for a newsletter, make a purchase, or download a resource.
CTA buttons improve UX in several ways:
- First, they make it clear to the user what the next steps are, reducing confusion and helping to move them through the site.
- Second, well-designed CTA buttons can be visually appealing and attention-grabbing, making them more likely to be noticed and clicked on by users.
- Finally, effective CTAs can help to improve the overall user experience by guiding users towards actions that are beneficial to both them and the website owner.
Interestingly, CTA buttons are often 4 times more effective when placed in the corner of your site rather than more obviously in the centre. Use your navigation tools as a guide rather than a hard-selling feature.
Site linking that makes sense
Ever land on a page that looks more like a list of links rather than a helpful guide? Or there aren’t any links at all, and it seems like a dead end? Use site links that act as a signpost to your user.
Internal links will direct your user to your other web pages. For example, if you offer video marketing services, perhaps you’ve got a blog on ‘How to create a B2B video marketing strategy’. Drop a link in the right place and you can gain trust from your user. The key is to put them in places where it makes sense.
Internal links can also help to establish the hierarchy and organisation of a website, making it easier for users to understand the structure of the site and find the information they need.
In addition, internal links can also help to improve search engine optimisation (SEO) by indicating to search engines the relative importance of different pages on the site. You might want to consider this if you are trying to optimise your website, but as we’ve mentioned above, only use these links where it makes sense. It’s also worth asking yourself, do you want to direct your users away from your website? No, is often the answer.
Make your site mobile-friendly
Mobile internet traffic accounts for almost 55 per cent of total web traffic. In theory, this means that over half of your website users are visiting on their phones. So it’s important that your website is mobile-friendly.
The best way to approach this? Design with a mobile-first approach. Consider the following steps:
- Start by understanding your users and their needs, goals, and behaviours. This will help you to design a mobile site that is tailored to their needs and preferences.
- Use responsive design to ensure that your mobile site automatically adjusts to different screen sizes and devices. This will help to provide a consistent and seamless user experience across different devices.
- Keep the mobile site design simple and uncluttered, with a clear hierarchy and organisation of content. This will make it easy for users to find what they are looking for and take the desired actions.
- Use large, easy-to-tap buttons and controls to make the site easy to navigate and interact with on a small screen.
- Optimise the site for fast loading times, as users are often accessing mobile sites on the go and may have limited data or slow connections.
- Test the mobile site with a small group of users to gather feedback and make any necessary improvements.
Remember, the key to successful mobile UX is to focus on the needs and preferences of your users, and design the site with those in mind.
Make your site accessible for all
Mobile-friendly design and UX as a whole comes under the idea of website ‘accessibility’. Is your site easy to use for everyone, i.e. people who may have a disability? This is not only a matter of inclusion and fairness, but it also has practical benefits for the website owner. For example, making a website accessible can help to improve search engine optimisation (SEO) and make the site more user-friendly for all visitors. Essentially, Google will trust your site more if you implement good accessibility features.
In some cases, accessibility may also be a legal requirement, depending on the nature of the site and its audience. So, it is important for websites to be accessible to ensure that everyone can use and enjoy them.
Who are GetCrisp?
We are a collection of industry professionals, including developers, marketers and designers. We specialise in finding ways for companies to connect to their customers.
If you want to find out more about what we can do for your business, don’t hesitate to get in touch.