INSIGHTS 

User Experience (UX) Design: Making Websites Customer-Friendly 

What is UX Design?

UX Design or User Experience Design, quite simply is the process of designing the experience that you want your users to have with a product, a service or a website but for simplicity, we will focus on UX Design for websites in this blog. UX Designers will focus on feeling and how the user might feel at certain points of their journey, they also leverage data to identify areas or even entire pages or processes like the checkout that could be improved. 

You might also hear the term “UI Design” and although elements of UX Design overlap with this, they are not exactly the same. A UI Designer or User Interface Designer will focus on the visual elements of the website and consider things like Font Type, Icons, Colours and Animations whereas a UX Designer will focus more upon the feelings a user might have as they use the website to guide the design. They will aim to iron out any friction points a user might encounter and improve traction. 

You might also hear UX being discussed with CX which is Customer Experience. UX is part of the Customer Experience but CX looks at the entire interaction process for a customer with your brand and UX tends to focus on a single point of interaction… in this case, a website.

Why is it important?

If great user experience is not baked into the design of a website - you could find yourself losing customers and sales. People are inherently lazy and they expect to be pretty much spoonfed the information they need in order to make a decision to convert and they need to be able to do this as easily as possible. If they can’t, then they might not bother and may even go to a competitor.

You might also hear UX being discussed with CX which is Customer Experience. UX is part of the Customer Experience but CX looks at the entire interaction process for a customer with your brand and UX tends to focus on a single point of interaction… in this case, a website.

What basic elements should you look out for? 

A great UX design ensures that the user has positive influences that contribute towards them completing a specific goal on your website. In extremely basic terms, you should incorporate the following:
  • CTAs (Calls To Action) at key conversion points on a page or in the process. Put yourself in the shoes of your user, how are they feeling at certain points? If they’ve just been reading key benefits - do they need to find out more or are they ready to enquire?

  • Think about where the user will go next and ensure that there are no errors in their path.

  • Accessibility - Does the text have a good enough colour contrast ratio against the background to allow the visually impaired to read it? Is there alt text to assist them even more?
  • Check the flow of the page - are you overwhelming the user with too many different signposts? Overwhelm can negatively affect the user and you might even lose their interest.

  • Key Information - Is the information you have for the user easily seen by them? Is key information high up on the page where the majority of users will read it?

  • Trust - Do you have elements like a reviews carousel in the right place to reassure and build trust with new visitors?

Backlinks and authority.

Another core aspect is link building to raise your Domain Authority. If you’ve got a brand new website and want to give it a little boost, having a link to your website in external directories can help. Acquiring do-follow backlinks from websites with a high domain authority score, can pass on some seo benefit to your website. However, it’s not a simple case of getting as many backlinks as possible from whatever source. The best backlinks to your website are always do-follow, are from a high authority website, link to a very relevant page on your website from their content and are from websites with high trust levels in your niche.

For example, a self-employed builder would benefit from a backlink from a website like B&Q to a blog page on his website where he’s discussing the best tools to use when building a house. This boosts page authority and can help that webpage rank better. Not only that, the traffic going to that page on the other website, will likely click on the link and be taken to your website, therefore helping with traffic acquisition.

How to start improving your existing website.

It all starts with a reason. Usually the reason is that a drop in sales or conversions has been noted at a particular stage in the user journey or perhaps even on a particular page. 

Alarm bells can start to ring and you’ll be keen to figure out exactly what’s going on. This is why data is so important - if you can marry up a drop in sessions to a page, then you can likely eradicate UX as a potential issue (as long as the page isn’t showing a 404 Not Found Error!). If however, sessions have remained steady but you’ve seen a more gradual decline in conversions, then it might be time to revisit the page and give it a bit of love and attention. Websites are never ever fully completed and that there is always opportunity to grow and improve. 

The very first place to start is to map out the entire customer journey both online and offline. This process will enable you to focus your time and attention on the pages or elements where improvements will have the most impact. Things that you’ll need to consider as part of this can include:
  • The type of device a user is using. 
  • The channels the user uses to find you.
  • The pages they will land on.
  • The pages they convert on.
  • The intent they have when they find your website
The more insights you glean from data, the better the hypotheses you’ll have. If you’re able to answer the above questions, you can use tracking tools like Hotjar or Clarity to see recordings and heatmaps of your users to gain further insights about real user behaviour on your website. The observations will then help shape your hypotheses about existing website usage and form the basis of your experimentation plan. 

You can then set up testing to see if the changes you make have a positive impact in terms of conversion rate before rolling it out to the live website.

Need some help? Find out how we can help with a UX Audit or Training. Contact us today.

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