The Importance of User Experience

Have you ever been so intensely frustrated with a website that you’ve just completely given up and opted out? It could be the subtle website transitions or even the placement of the search bar. Each of these little elements can make a big difference to User Experience. Having a really attractive website is absolutely useless if it’s difficult to use.

Think of it as a real life situation. If you walk into a restaurant you will consider the menu, music, lighting, decoration, accessibility to toilets etc. All of this will alter your perspective of the experience. 

This is why User Experience (UX) must be continually considered throughout the web and app design process.

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Umm, what is User Experience (UX)?

UX, in a wide sense, is how a person feels when using a system such as a website or app. The purpose of UX is to focus on fulfilling the user’s wants and needs. A good UX aims to provide positive experiences in order to keep those users loyal to the brand or product/s in question. It makes complete sense that a customer who has had a positive experience will be more likely to return, right? But even more importantly, it will increase your ROI, improve your brand reputation and will win over those conversions and sales.

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So, how can we ensure that the experience is meaningful and valuable to the user? 

Let’s take a look at 7 factors that influence UX.

• Useful – your content should be original and fulfil a need.
• Usable - your website must be easy to use.
• Desirable - image, brand, and all design elements should be used to conjure emotion and appreciation.
• Findable - your content needs to be locatable  and easy to navigate, onsite and offsite.
• Accessible – your content needs to be accessible to people with disabilities.
• Credible – users have to  trust and believe what you tell them.

With these factors in mind, I would like to share some general best practice hints for creating an optimal User Experience.

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Get to Know Your Audience – User Personas

Getting to know who your audience allows you to develop an experience that will be enjoyable and will relate to your users.

Create one or multiple user personas. This means describing the person(s) that your website is talking to. If you currently have a website, you can use your website’s analytics and your current customer data to understand your customers at a deeper level.

To gather more valuable information you can conduct short surveys and interviews (think a 15% discount incentive) to dig deeper.  You might want to know about their demographic traits (age, location, career, family status etc.) personality, motivations and anything else that your consider important. 

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Make it Accessible

A good website is one that can be used by everyone. There are so many details that could be mentioned but I’ll just mention some important points;

• Use descriptive URLS so that the user knows exactly where they are.
• Structure your content logically and use the right level of headings (H1,H2,H3) when you’re doing this.
• Add ALT text to all images. This is useful if the image fails to load and for screen readers and search engine bots (also great for your SEO).
• Use colours wisely. This means considering things like making sure that the text stands out from the background colour and ensuring that colours on your website aren’t too similar and create enough contrast to be distinguishable from each other.
• Use a font size that is readable.
• Use clear wording on menus and CTA buttons.
• Plan for multiple paths through the site. Websites aren’t usually A to B. Think of as many paths as possible to keep visitors flowing towards the end goals.
• Make multimedia accessible. This means catering to a wide audience with different needs. For example, deaf users can watch a video but cannot hear sounds therefore you can consider providing subtitles to help a wider range of users. There are a range of free tools that you can use to ensure that your website is accessible such as webaccessibility.com and Wave

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Have Clear Navigation Tools

Clear navigation on every page is important. There should be no room for confusion or a lost user! 

Users should expect to find drop-down menus, search bars and log in buttons at the top of the page along with company and contact information at the bottom of the page. These are basic elements that users have learnt to expect over the years.

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Keep it Consistent

Successful brands have consistent design across their many integrated communications. When you see their marketing, packaging and other brand aspects they all have a style that is carefully considered and planned. This should be the same when it comes to designing your website. Your design should be consistent on every page (think font, mood, images etc.).

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Incorporate Social Proof of your Page

How often do you look in multiple places before buying a product? Instagram? Facebook reviews? Google reviews? Influencer marketing is booming – just another form of social proof.

Make it easy for your users to find that reassurance that they need before clicking through to purchase. Place it right near your CTA buttons that lead to your conversion pages. 

Give them that much needed peace of mind without them having to search for it.

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Test, Test, Test 

Sometimes it’s impossible to know what works better. Which word should I use? Which CTA sounds better?

That’s where testing comes in.

It can be really useful to test the effectiveness and quality of experience between different pages. You can perform this kind of interface testing one VWO, which splits your website impressions into two groups. Each group will see a different version of the website, and you can see which version of the website is outperforming the other before making permanent changes. Useful and pretty cool!

So how important is UX? It’s as important as keeping your customers and users happy and retaining that loyalty.  Along with SEO, It is an on-going process that needs to be revisited regularly, but it's a clear investment in keeping your customers happy and in turn, ensuring business growth.

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If you want to explore how we can help you improve your customer experience, book a discovery call with our team.