By Owen Fay . Posted on November 2, 2022The experiences a user has with your website can be the difference between a customer that converts and one that goes with a competitor. A website needs to provide a seamless interaction that gives the user everything they need to know about your business and tells them exactly how they can reap the benefits of the products or services you offer.
Several factors can affect the UX of your site. All of them are directly under your control. In this article we will cover 8 important factors that can have a big impact on your website’s user experience.
What is User Experience?
UX or user experience is how a user interacts with and experiences a product, service, system, platform, or website. It includes the user’s perception of the utility, ease of use, efficiency, and every part of their interaction with your website. It can be anything from subtle transitions to your site to more interactive experiences such as forms and search bars. There are a number of elements that contribute to creating great UX like interface design, usability, and user research.
UX is essential to every site design and should be a well-thought-out process.
Enhancing the Online User Experience
With more and more people going online to buy anything from toilet paper to cars, it’s becoming easier to distinguish forward-thinking companies from the rest of the pack. What you’re offering online needs to meet the experience people get when buying from a physical store while making the process faster and easier.
Sites with confusing user interfaces will simply not generate conversions and will only lose users to the competition. You need to make sure the site has a well throughout design and that your team has a plan to continuously improve UX.
Innovative companies take advantage of user research and testing to optimize UX and get insights into how site visitors interact with the website, what they engage with the most, and how they can improve designs. Today, this can be done by any organization with emerging research platforms like Poll the People.
Here are 8 of the most important factors that influence the experiences a user has with your website.
1. Usefulness
Usefulness means that your site design should have a purpose, it means that it should meet the goals of the users. A user needs to be able to solve their problems or accomplish their goals through your site.
You need to focus on your unique value proposition and the problem you solve for the user. If you don’t find the site useful, they will find a competitor or another site that is easier to understand and navigate.
Site designers should ensure that all features and options are helpful to the user. It’s never a good idea to give them a half-baked design.
2. Usability
Your site’s navigation and structure create a good base for an excellent user experience. If the site creates a seamless journey for the user and doesn’t require any support, the user is more likely to complete a purchase. Additionally, a call-to-action (CTA) is essential and should be clear and straightforward to understand. You need to tell the user what they need to do to benefit from your business.
You should also know the user’s goals when creating a layout. That way, you can easily transition users from point A to B. Check out these five useful UX metrics to consider.
Usability is key to creating effective user experiences, if you can’t use a product why would you buy it? Even if you have the best product or service on the market if a user can’t find it, engage with it, or understand what it does there is no way they will become a customer.
3. Consistency
One of the common ways that you can disengage site visitors is to be inconsistent. Therefore, all your site elements, from your fonts to brand colors to your images, should work well with one another.
Your goal is to provide them with a user-friendly design that will compel them to return to your site on more than one occasion.
Although a lot of web page viewers are not entirely aware of it, some of them can be annoyed or dissatisfied with the following:
- Color scheme changes
- Frequent changes in navigational tools
- Layout shifts
Make sure you settle with a single design strategy and use that strategy on every page of your site. It makes viewers feel more comfortable and gives a better user experience overall.
4. Security
More than half of web pages cater to internet users. 2/3 of the time those users spend online happens on sites with HTTPS management and these figures are only expected to rise in the future. Your site needs to provide a secure experience to the user to build trust.
That’s why security has become paramount. There are several benefits of sites under HTTPS. Implementing an SSL certificate on your site is crucial as well as SSL monitoring to ensure its validity.
Besides HTTPS, here are several things that you need to look into to decrease the security risks on your site:
- Performing a site backup
- Keeping your site updated
- Managing user permissions and necessary access
- Installing a CDN and firewall
If you provide users with a secure experience they are more likely to be comfortable with your business and trust you enough to become a customer.
5. Accessibility
Accessibility is another critical factor of UX because you want to give everyone interested all of the information they need to solve their issues. On websites, information should be intended to be easily accessible by everyone.
Moreover, having a more accessible user experience shows that you care about everyone that visits your site. It elevates your brand reputation in the long run. For instance, users with limited physical capabilities. These people shouldn’t be hindered from accessing the information on your site.
Integrating features like color filters, magnifiers, and screen readers help a lot in enhancing website accessibility. You can incorporate these features into your site design for more inclusive access.
6. Credibility
Trust is synonymous with credibility. Users need to trust the products and services that you’re providing. Building trust through your website can be difficult, but with clean designs, valuable information, and showing users that they can clearly benefit from your offerings, it’s possible.
Without that trust, people won’t believe that what you’re offering them can really help and it will drastically hurt their experiences
Avoid publishing content that is inconsistent or inaccurate. Additionally, reviews, testimonials, and showing users that other users or businesses trust your business goes a long way in building trust.
A credible site will only present facts and information that are entirely verifiable. This will convince the visitors to continue to learn about your business and they will be more likely to convert.
7. Personalization
One of the best ways to personalize the buyer journey is to show them product recommendations.
You can base it on the browsing history of the individual or the browsing habits of others with similar profiles. Then implement these on the ecommerce platform via machine learning algorithms.
You can also personalize the website by sending users to a landing page that matches their search queries or clearly addresses their problems. This will show the user that they are in the right place, they will find the information they need and take the next step toward becoming a customer.
8. Valuable
Finally, after covering the previous factors, you need to consistently deliver value. A good user experience translates to higher conversion rates, increased traffic, and more sales.
Your final design should be high quality to improve the value of your site. Let’s say you’re looking up a particular design pattern that stands out from the current design of your competitor. It’s smart to use a design that will keep you ahead of your competitors now and in the future. That way, you’ll get more value from your design than what’s expected.
Additionally, the content you use to display benefits needs to be effective, the headlines, body copy, images, CTAs, and every other element of your design need to clearly display value to the user.
The best way to consistently deliver value to the user is through user research. With Poll the People user testing you can optimize every aspect of your business in minutes, without wasting your design budget. The platform gives you ready to go templates to compare designs or evaluate your current one.
Final Thoughts
It’s essential to have a great UX if you want your site to succeed in the long run. User experience is influenced by every aspect of your website from the colors and fonts to the navigation and trust you build. It is essential to create, process, optimize, and continuously build on the design to give users a place where they can benefit from your products.
These key factors are crucial in site design and give a better user experience. Once you have incorporated these tips into your site design, head over to Poll the People and get actionable insights on how you can create the best experiences for your users. Sign up for free and launch your first test in minutes!
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