Jay LeonardUser experience (UX) design is an important factor that all businesses must consider when creating a website. Business owner’s goals are usually to increase blog views, generate leads, or sell products, and all three of those components involve UX.
When you ask the average person what they qualify as UX design, they often go to the physical layout of the website. While physical attributes such as color play a part in UX Design, real user experience translates to more than how it looks — it’s about how it functions. Can users get on your website and find what they are looking for in seconds?
Business owners tend to get caught up in the big picture and can lose sight of small tweaks that can improve the UX of their website. We are going to look at four tips you can start using today to begin improving the user experience of your audience.
4. Improve Your Speed
The first tip we are going to talk about focuses on the functionality of your website. Users are far more likely to leave your website before it loads if the site takes longer than three seconds to load. Google published data that shows if your website takes up to 6 seconds to load, the chance of a user bouncing goes up to 106 percent. After 10 seconds, the chance increase to 123 percent.
When a user bounces from your website, you have just lost a chance to engage with a prospect and turn them into a customer. The best way to speed up your website is to make sure you’re using a page optimizer like Google’s PageSpeed Insights. This developer tool analyzes your website pages and allows you to make small tweaks to improve your overall speed. You should also take the time to optimize your images.
3. Add Search Functionality
On-site search is one of the features that we didn’t realize we needed until they popped up on almost every business blog online. It’s one of those things that you’ll notice if you land on a website that doesn’t have an on-site search function.
Users now expect an experience where they can go to a website and find exactly what they are looking for without spending a ton of time searching. A simple search bar was proven to nearly double eCommerce rates from 2.77 percent to 4.63 percent.
If you’re selling products or have a blog, you should consider adding search functionality on your website to improve the experience of your audience.
2. Appeal to Your Mobile Audience
Smartphones and tablets have changed the way we communicate, shop, and browse the web. Believe it or not, 52.2 percent of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices. We are long past the days where you could create a desktop version of your site and call it a day. Even mobile-friendly websites that offer a compact version of the desktop site isn’t cutting it for users anymore.
When you create your desktop site, make sure you create a mobile version or app, if applicable. Part of a good user experience involves customers being able to go to your website from any device and still get the same high-quality experience.
1. Survey Your Customers
Finally, surveying your customers is an excellent way to improve your UX. Your customers are the ones who visit your site on a daily or weekly basis. They are not directly connected to the development cycle and thus have nothing to lose by being honest. Customer satisfaction forms should include questions about missing features and areas of opportunity.
Similarly, you can examine your customer experience metrics in Google Analytics to gain insights about how the typical user perceives your website. For example, if you notice that one page has a much higher bounce rate than another, you could check the speed of the page with a high bounce rate for speed issues.
Conclusion
User experience has a few pillar rules, despite slight differences across different industries. A good user experience is one that allows customers to come to your website, easily navigate through your content, and get crisp, clear answers to their questions. As your business grows, you’ll get a feel for the type of features and tweaks your users want to see. UX design is something that continues long after the initial development project comes to a close.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
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