Did you know that you have about 50 milliseconds for users to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they'll stay or go? This means you have less than 1 second to not only capture their attention but make a good first impression. Does your website do this?
Often the first experience a customer has with your brand, your site is one of the strongest tools you have in your digital marketing strategy. It's your 24/7 salesman. Unfortunately, with the ever-evolving digital landscape, it can seem impossible to stay up to date with the dos and don'ts of website design. To help keep your website effective, we've put together a list of 7 items that will improve the user experience of your website and help it continue to drive conversions.
What is User Experience (UX)?
According to usability.gov, user experience "focuses on having a deep understanding of users, what they need, what they value, their abilities, and also their limitations." Basically, it's about how you can make their experience on your website meaningful and valuable. A good experience means that the user visited your website, looked through a couple of different pages, understood what your website was, and was able to get what they wanted. Whether this includes finding a phone number, purchasing items, scheduling an appointment, or signing up for a newsletter, make sure your customers leave with a positive impression.
7 Ways to Improve Your Website's User Experience:
- Utilize White Space: It's easy to look at the white space on your website and think that it would be perfect for more ads, more text, or more product images. But using white space can work to make your website feel open, fresh, modern, and help you draw your visitor's eye right to valuable information.
- Optimize Load Speeds: If there's one thing website users can agree on, it's that nothing is more frustrating than clicking on a link and having to wait for the page to load. As one of the most important parts of your website, both Google and Facebook take load speed into account when ranking and prioritizing links.
- Utilize a Strong Call to Action (CTA): Strong CTAs on your website are used to tell your viewers exactly what you want them to do and why they should do it. Place these in strategic locations around the site in colors that pop, and your viewers will be so enticed they won't be able to resist clicking on them.
- Incorporate Lists: People have short attention spans and the last thing they want is to be faced with a wall of text when looking for a quick answer to their question. Help your users quickly get the information they're looking for with easy to digest lists. These can be simple bullet points, numbered items (see the blog you're currently reading), or can be more creative with icons and other non-conventional bullets.
- Be Responsive and Mobile-Friendly: This is one of those items that you just cannot ignore. With the amount of web users doing their online surfing on phones and tablets, it's imperative that your website not only loads properly on different sized screens, but that the design and navigation continue to make sense. In fact, Google has started penalizing websites that aren't mobile-friendly with their search engine rankings. And if that isn't enough to convince you, according to a recent Google study, people are 5 times more likely to leave your website if it isn't mobile-friendly.
- Focus on Simple and Clean Navigation: When a person is browsing your website, you want to do everything you can to help them quickly and efficiently find the correct information they're looking for. You would never go into a brick and mortar store that's dark and a total maze just to find an item that you can get at the place down the street. Why would you expect the same for your website? Make it easy for your users to find what they need and for them to know where they are.
- Consistency is Key: Your website is an extension of your brand. Not only will you want the design to reflect this (colors, logos, imagery) but you'll want to make sure every page on your site is consistent with heading sizes, fonts, button styles, spacing, design elements, etc. Everything you place on your site should be centered around making your design coherent between pages.
Overall, it's up to you to help make it as easy as possible for your visitors to complete the action they're looking to take. While these are some simple steps you can take to begin with, the next step would be to really analyze what your customer's user journey looks like and how you can incorporate that data into your website. Have questions or interested in taking these next steps? Contact the experts at Informatics and start to see your return on investment as first-time visitors become life-long customers.
