User experience is vital to the success of any product or service and websites are no exception.
Having a good online presence is as important as having a clean and tidy storefront; a business’s website is its face. Nowadays, users are savvy about web design and have come to expect a certain level of sophistication.
As the bar rises higher, many businesses, especially small ones, can feel overwhelmed by expectations to provide a well-designed website UX. However, improving user experience is not as tough as it may seem, and even a small effort can turn into a huge advantage.
Design Advisor has noted that enhancing user experience can lead to better search rankings, more business leads and increased revenue. In the following post, we’ll help get you started by discussing five key steps that will help to improve any website’s UX.
1. Provide Engaging Content
Providing engaging content is key to a good website UX. Nowadays, visitors want more than a purchase; they want an experience. A great way to achieve this is by adopting an engaging content strategy.
Effective content strategies focus on telling a brand’s story with the aim of establishing a connection between a business and its client.
With the right strategy, content can come in any format such as a blog post, vlog, or even a separate website. Using content to establish a brand identity helps to ensure that potential clients know more about who they are purchasing from.
Familiarity increases trust; 82% of consumers are more likely to trust a business after reading their custom content.
2. Use Layout Strategically
When it comes to styles, brutalism continues to be on the rise in 2019. Brutalism involves a raw and minimalist approach to layouts with a focus on user experience. Alternatively, a beautiful, artistic site, can go a long way in establishing your brand as a leader in the market and a true risk taker.
If you want to be more conservative, thinking in terms of how a layout can help a visitor understand the information being presented is the way to go.
Other trends that have popped up are minimalism and broken-grid layouts. These trends also highlight the importance of reducing clutter, which we will discuss later in the text in more detail.
3. Provide Information Concisely and Efficiently
Visitors go to websites with the aim of getting some sort of information. The previous statement might seem redundant, but some businesses don’t seem to understand this based on their web design.
By providing information in an elegant and structured way, you can ensure that a user gets what they came for.
Web designers today seem to be gravitating toward simpler designs. Many are implementing bullet point lists to convey information and experiencing great results.
While 55% of users look at lists without bullet points, 70% look at lists with bullet points. Providing information in a clear way is also profitable, as businesses can ensure they convey the intended message successfully and draw attention to appropriate elements.
4. Don’t annoy your visitors
Up until now, all our tips have been about things you should do. However, it’s equally as important to discuss what you should avoid at all costs when it comes to web design and user experience.
Website visitors are exposed to pop-ups, autoplay and information bombardment to the extent that makes them appreciate it when a site avoids the temptation to implement these annoying features.
When designing your web presence, steer clear from clutter, walls of text, background music and videos that play automatically. These factors certainly don’t help visitors feel at home.
5. Optimize your website
Lastly, it’s important to work on the backbone of your site; factors such as speed and mobile responsiveness have a considerable effect on user experience.
This, in turn, has consequences on revenue. For instance, high expectations when it comes to website speed mean that when a site is perceived as slow, a visitor is less likely to buy from it. In fact, slow websites are estimated to cost $2.6 billion in lost sales per year.
Things like site speed optimization and mobile responsiveness aren’t too difficult or expensive to implement, as there is a plethora of web services and tools that can help test a site’s performance and optimize any necessary features.
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