The human-technology experience has changed dramatically since the introduction of personal computers in the 70s. Now user experience is primarily about simplicity, straightforwardness, and finding the correct balance of usefulness, usability, and desirability. A good user experience guides prospects down the conversion funnel and around typical obstacles before turning them into leads and eventually customers. This guide will help you iron out your website’s user experience (UX) and get the most out of your organic traffic.
- Understand your position
Before making any changes to your website, you first need to know how it’s doing and whether or not it’s ready for real-time use. With the help of quality assurance (QA) testing, you can tick off your UX checklist and potentially unearth problems you didn’t know existed. Effective website testing should include functionality testing, usability testing, interface testing, performance testing, and security testing. The best QA testing tools have these features built-in and offer a blend of both automatic and manual testing.
- Work on your load time
Every second matters when it comes to page load time and none of your web pages should take more than two seconds to load because this is when the bulk of the conversion happens. A webpage that takes three or more seconds to load experiences a high bounce rate, with a five-second load time yielding an approximate 38% bounce rate, up from the reasonable 9% experienced at two seconds. The surge can seem unreasonably dramatic, but most users are heedful and impatient and will click out and scroll on at the slightest hint of unreliability.
- Allow white space
White space, i.e., the empty space between elements on a webpage, makes your content easy to scan and read. It can increase the attention of the user by up to 20%, in addition to breathing a sense of organization and elegance into your website. Allowing white space contributes massively to a good user experience and can put you in favor of search engine crawlers and ranking algorithms. It’s, however, advisable to find a good balance of white space and content to avoid creating a frustrating experience in the name of giving your design room to breathe.
- Avoid wordiness
Saying more with fewer words is necessary if you want to grab the attention of internet users who have loads of alternatives to ditch you for. No matter the technicality and depth of the message in your text, going bulky is a massive turn-off. Your textual content should be brief, easy-to-read, and fluff-free. Unnecessary filler words should be kept to a minimum, as should information that does not influence user action. Create user personas and focus only on what you expect users to look for in your content.
- Adopt a responsive design
People view your content on different screen sizes. You have to take this into account when designing your website. Your mobile users should enjoy the experience as well as PC users, assuming that’s who the site was initially intended for. Your design should adapt to different screen sizes and offer the same responsiveness to all users.
- Enhance content readability
Content is considered readable if you can skim it and identify key information bits with ease. You can achieve this by using readable typefaces and fonts and adopting a typographical and visual hierarchy. Consider using multiple heading levels, highlighting key terms, writing short paragraphs, and placing images and infographics where they hold relevance. If possible, create tables of contents for lengthy pages, so users can skip to target points at the click of a button.
- Use bullets
Bullet points help people find solutions, benefits, and critical features of your content more quickly. They also reduce wordiness and make your content easier to remember and more appealing.
- Write pertinent headlines
Headlines are summaries of the content beneath them. They serve as guides that help users, particularly scanners, pick out information with ease. Your headlines should be brief, precise, and as straight to the point as possible. They should also contain keywords to further enhance readability and streamline your SEO.
- Insert calls-to-action (CTAs)
CTAs are the little directives in between content that look to prompt a response from users. They link prospects to more advanced stages of the sales pipeline and guide the user towards that final action, which could be anything from creating an account or requesting a quote to booking an appointment or signing up for a course. A good CTA should contain strong action words and naturally blend into the information preceding them. Essentially, your CTA should be the punch line of the content on your page – bold, clear, and specific on what the user has to do.
- Be consistent
Consistency is one of the principles of UX design. It ensures font, color, and button-style uniformity across pages, in turn simplifying navigation and expediting the user’s movement from the traffic source to the sales page. A lack of consistency creates disarray and confusion and would easily lead the biggest lead out of your website.
- Make your links stick out
Internal linking is one of the most critical factors of SEO ranking. It gives web crawlers a simple time flicking through and indexing your pages. It also helps users access additional information with ease and stay on your domain much longer. That being said, a link can only be helpful to a human reader if they can tell it apart from the general text around it. One of the easiest and most common ways to highlight a link is to underline it or present it in a different color. Using a longer anchor text can also make it more obvious and differentiable.
Endnote
Effective user experience design provides value to your users and portrays you as professional and, thus, reliable. There are many things you can do to increase the experience of your site’s visitors and enhance your ranking on SERPs. Start with the above tips and pay attention to the unique browsing habits of your visitors for the ultimate UX design.
