Essential Tips for Improving User Experience (UX)
8 minutes reading
In today’s dynamic world where technology is running our daily lives, your website has become the virtual representation of your business. Regardless of in which industry you operate, whether you are running a small, mid-sized, or large company, your site in an unquestionably powerful asset. As such, it is probably the centerpiece of your marketing and advertisement campaigns with the intention of increasing brand awareness or bringing more customers.
Similarly to regular, brick-and-mortar stores, the user experience on your website impacts the overall impression of your customers and can be essential to their willingness to visit it again. Based on research, around 30% of the users who have had unsatisfactory experience on a website claim they would not return to it. Poor user experience can lead to increased bounce rates, negative conversions, and, consequently, loss of potential customers.
Whether you are new to UI design or an experienced UI-design savvy, you must be aware of how critical fulfilling UX is to your online success. As digital trends are emerging rapidly, you cannot afford to fall behind. This is the primary reason we, at HostArmada, decided to give you a heads up with some useful tips and help you do everything right!
Know Your Users and Gather Feedback
Knowing your target audience is one of the basic elements of a successful UX. After all, your users will be interacting with your website and understanding their needs and demands is essential to developing a website that “speaks their language”.
Start by performing careful research on the demographics stats of your audience – gather as much information as possible, like their gender, age range, technical knowledge, devices they use, and so on. Analyzing your audience will help you make informed decisions based on their preferences and specifically tailor your design and functionalities with consideration to their needs.
The next most important thing is to thoroughly test all your components to ensure they are functioning properly. Furthermore, try to put yourself into your users’ shoes and analyze how user-friendly your UI is from their perspective.
Your users are the most important source for gathering information on how well your website is designed. Observe how they interact with your site and try to gather feedback on their personal experience with it regularly. Analyzing their opinions on what they like, dislike, find easy or troublesome to use should be the base for improving your UX.
Simplify Your Navigation System
According to another research, 94% of the respondents claim that easy navigation is one of the most critical elements of a user-friendly website. That is not surprising at all. We are all aware of how annoying it could get if you spend a long time trying to find your way through a website. Potentially you will get frustrated, leave, and never come back.
There is a good reason for most websites to be structured in a similar pattern – it just works well, and users are accustomed to the typical navigation layers. We would recommend you to stick to the tried and proven layouts. For example, there is no reason to relocate the top navigation menu somewhere else. You can save the innovation thinking for some other aspects where it will actually have a positive impact.
When developing your navigation system, you need to ensure it is visible at first glance and allows your visitors to easily access the key features they might need. Organize everything in an intuitive hierarchical structure, so they can easily navigate back and forth.
Take our navigation layout, for example – it is clean and neat; it contains all key components of our services, it is not overburdened with unnecessary menu items, and most importantly, it is visible at first glance.
Keep It Simple
As your goal is to keep the user focused on what they have come for, you should avoid distracting them. Whenever you can, cut down on the elements on your page. Keeping everything neat and simple can positively impact your UX and massively reduce the bounce-back rates. Each page has a single primary purpose – including inessential information, can be a major user experience turn-off. A well-structured page will have the key information at the beginning and all additional details at the end. Keep in mind, the longer the page is, the less likely it is for someone to scroll down to the very bottom.
Incorporate Adequate Space
Well-though design is as integral as the proper functionality of a website when it comes to UX. Adequately used space can increase users’ attention toward the elements you want them to focus on.
You should find a balance between your page elements and highlight important products and information on your web pages by adding enough white space. A structured web page is always easier to read and navigate through compared to a jam-packed one.
Use Attractive Calls to Action
You need to follow your website users’ natural flow by ensuring their “journey” will be straightforward. To keep everything consistent, you need to think from the visitors’ perspective and what they are going to do step by step. This way, you can easily navigate them through their way no matter what the purpose is. Any interaction they have with your website has a direct impact on their impression of the brand as a whole, and you would like to keep it positive.
Using intuitive Calls to Actions (CTAs), such as buttons, links, and pointers, will help your visitors easily navigate through your website and lead them to the intended destination. When labeling these CTA elements and choosing their colors, you should consider the message you want to envoke in your users. Selecting an optimal combination could be beneficial for your conversion.
Optimize Your Page Speed
It may sound cliché, but nobody likes slow websites. Long loading period is literally a deal-breaker for most website visitors. In fact, 87% of the users who ought to wait 2 seconds for a page to load will leave the website. Furthermore, an extra five seconds of loading time can increase your bounce rates by over 20%.
Considering these statements, you understand how crucial the page loading speed is. There are various free online tools you can use to test how your website performs – Google PageSpeed, Pingdom, GTmetrix – to name a few. On top of the speed analysis, you will be provided with useful tips on what exactly requires your attention.
Keep in mind that speed-related issues might not always be caused by poor website code, unoptimized images, or large page sizes. Sometimes, the issues could be related to low server performance. As a web hosting provider, here at HostArmada, we understand how critical speed and performance are for our customers, and we are dedicated to delivering exceptional services along with individual optimizations for our clients’ websites.
Ensure Your Website is Responsive and Mobile-Friendly
Technology trends constantly change, and your responsibility is to ensure you are adapting to the new courses they take. While in the past, a well-designed desktop version of a website was more than sufficient for your businesses, now things are slightly different. Considering the number of users relying on their mobile devices is constantly rising, developing a mobile version is a total must!
We bet, you all had come across clumsy websites with broken layouts, and hard to click buttons. We all know what the end result of such user experience is – frustration, and consequently, user loss. While some users might care enough to bother and check your website through their computer or laptop, there is a good amount that would not.
With this in mind, you understand how important it is to ensure your website is mobile-friendly and optimized for several device types. Responsive graphics are suitable for smaller screen resolutions, along with that you need to use proportional Call to Action buttons placed in a thumb’s reach. Adaptive design that does not require the user to zoom out or zoom in is essential for UX. Your users must have all the information served in a quick to navigate layout.
Conclusion
Focusing on seamless UX is a powerful source for driving and retaining customers. At the end of the day, this is the main goal of any business. When they land on your page, the design is the first thing that will make an impression – well-organized, near and clean content is essential for positive and long-lasting impact. The proper functionality of your website, the easy navigation, and the smoothness of the flow are also imperative aspects that will affect the users’ interaction with it and share their overall opinion.