As they say, the “customer is king”. This saying has never been truer than in today’s times. That’s because your customers can either make or break your company.
In fact, 75% of customers say they will invest more in businesses that provide a good customer experience. Naturally, one of the important aspects of a good customer experience or CX is your website design.
Don’t be confused. Customer experience or CX and User Experience or UX are linked. That’s because CX refers to becoming a part of a brand, while UX refers to interacting with a part of a brand.
For example, CX refers to signing up for a subscription to an online magazine. On the other hand, UX refers to interacting with a particular article within the online magazine. Let’s understand UX in detail below.
Understanding User Experience and Why It Matters
It refers to the user’s feelings and thoughts after interacting with: a:
- Specific product
- Part of a brand or company, such as a website.
How they move through or interact with your website also impacts your website performance. That’s because Google’s spiders or bots study factors of ‘dwell time’. It refers to the time spent by the user on the website.
This is impacted by:
- How well your website is organized
- Its load speed
- Whether or not differently abled people can access it or not.
Load speed refers to the time it takes for your website to fully display its images, text, and other web pages. So focusing on your UX is essential, since 88% of customers say that they would not return to a website after a bad UX.
Optimizing Website Navigation and Structure.
Just as with your home, your customers won’t appreciate clutter on your websites. So you should ensure that you have:
- A simple, clearly demarcated menu.
You should ensure that the products or services are divided into categories like ‘UX Design’ and ‘UI Design’. This will ensure that your customers can view what you offer with ease.
For example, you can create a menu with different categories like the following for your eCommerce website:
- ‘Lifestyle’,
- ‘Electronics’
- ‘Books’ for your eCommerce website.
- Utilizing breadcrumbs and internal linking to ensure that they explore your website easily.
Breadcrumbs refer to the multiple sub-links that are present on a website to help users understand where they are. These breadcrumbs are present on the top most section of a website, beneath the address bar.
For instance, let us consider an eCommerce website.
If you’re shopping for a sports shoe by a particular brand, then your breadcrumbs might look something like this: Home>Lifestyle>Shoes>Sports Shoes>Men’s/Women’s Sports Shoes>XYZ Shoe.
All the terms mentioned in the breadcrumbs are actual web pages, which you can navigate back to.
Internal linking refers to embedding links within a website to ensure that users can visit other pages. For example, say you have a blog on your eCommerce website, with an article about men’s/women’s cricket sports shoes.
You could insert a link to men’s/women’s football shoes somewhere in the article, along with hiking boots, if applicable.
This will ensure that your users can explore your other product pages as well. When they do that, it will increase their dwell time and positively impact your website’s ranking.
Apart from that, you should not forget to implement clear Call-To-Actions on your website. In other words, you should have clear buttons urging people to:
- Buy a product
- Subscribe to your newsletters.
That’s because 34% of people leave a website due to a poor navigation structure.
Mobile-Friendly and Responsive Design
You should ensure that your website is mobile-friendly. That’s because about 4.69 billion people own a mobile phone nowadays. It means that more people are accessing websites on mobile phones.
Some of the ways in which you can optimize your website for mobile phones are:
- Utilizing Responsive Design
You should use a responsive website design, meaning that it should modify itself as per the device it’s being used on. For example, if your website has a rectangular tile-based layout, it assumes a square shape to fit mobile screens.
Apart from that, 1.71 billion websites have implemented responsive website design. So you should do that to avoid losing out to your competitors.
- Reducing Pop-ups
commend reducing the number of pop-ups on your website, since it distorts your users’ field of view. Imagine that they are scrolling through an article. In such a scenario, if a pop-up comes up, they will be unable to see anything else.
Additionally, the ‘cross’ symbol to remove the popup, is too small for a mobile screen. This increases the discomfort.
So, if you have pop-ups asking people to sign up for a form, we recommend using a button for that.
- Increasing Your Website Speed
A slower load time or website speed makes people leave your website quite fast. For instance, 70% of people say that website speed impacts their decision to purchase something from it. You can enhance your website speed by:
- Reducing HTTP requests
- Remove web pages with unnecessary backend code
- Reduce The Size of Your Images
You should reduce the size of your images to decrease the page load time. That’s because high-quality images put a strain on the website servers, leading to a slower load speed.
- Testing The Mobile Friendliness
After implementing all the above measures, you should use reputable sites to test for mobile friendliness. The results will let you know which areas of your website still need work.
Improving Content Readability and Engagement
It’s no secret that users prefer content that is easy to read. So instead of writing chunks of content, you should section it. In other words, you should ensure that you:
- Write three-line paragraphs, wherein each sentence does not exceed twenty words
- Use simple words that can be understood by everyone
- Section lengthy points with the help of bullet points and headings
- Utilize good quality images and videos
- Use a conversational tone to appear approachable and friendly
- Embed internal links
- Personalize your content as 54% of users prefer the same
Doing these things ensures that users can spend a lot more time on the website, increasing the dwell time.
Enhancing Website Accessibility
We would recommend that you use alt text, text-to-speech, and balanced colours to ensure a user-friendly experience. You should include an option on your website where the user can listen to all the literary content on your website.
This will ensure that people who cannot see it can get a mental picture of what’s on your website. Apart from that, you should follow the WCAG or Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
These guidelines list a variety of parameters which make a website friendly for differently abled people.
Testing and Continuous UX Improvements
Finally, we would recommend using heatmaps and analytics tools to map how users move across your website. That’s because heat maps indicate which areas your users spend the most amount of time on.
You can use that data to improve and update the areas on your website with the least amount of ‘heat’.
We would also recommend running A/B tests to see which updates work well with your users.
Finally, don’t forget to collect user feedback to understand your audience’s insights.
The Final Word
While you might think that optimizing UX is a lengthy task, it will have benefits in the long run. So you should make all the efforts necessary to upgrade your website to enhance the UX. Don’t forget to get in touch with us in case of any doubts.