The ability to develop excellent, cutting-edge websites that offer a great user experience is a critical skill for web designers and an important aspect to consider for business stakeholders. Customers that do not like the experience you are offering will most likely bounce the website. Therefore, it is essential to master the best UX development processes to get more satisfied customers, translating to more revenue.
A great UX can help individuals aiming at standing out as a designer and getting more business for the company. How can you master this skill and implement it in your business website? Various factors contribute to good UX and here are the best tricks you can start implementing now.
Apply Consistent Branding
Customers despise confusion and the gray areas when dealing with company’s they want clarity and transparency throughout. One way you can offer this is by having consistent branding throughout your entire digital outreach campaign. Most importantly, you should maintain consistency on your company website and avoid presenting two different brand images.
Therefore, you need to brand the website with the same logo, font, and with a consistent color palette. When customers pick up on any inconsistencies, they might bounce the website, and, in this case, the little details mean a lot. Create a stable environment that allows customers to easily find what they need and recognize your business instantly.
Walmart is a great example of this because this large chain store has only one simple logo and an easy-to-use interface with consistent colors and imagery throughout. Another rule of thumb is creating consistency throughout the website pages. It must use the logo located at the top as a button to return to the home page.
Optimize Call-To-Action
Call-to-action (CTA) elements play an integral role in increasing the conversion rate a company receives. Above that, CTAs also affect the UX of a business website, and that is why you should be careful when generating them. The CTAs used on your site should be optimized to improve the user experience.
There are many factors that you should consider in this case, including the way they are displayed, color, and size. For example, Dropbox uses spacious buttons to wrap their CTAs that have enough negative space. That is the best way to use CTAs to increase revenue through enhanced user experience.
The CTA button needs to have some room for the text to breathe, enabling better visibility and increase the chance of the link being clicked. Also, a CTA like the one used by Netflix can increase the UX because it lets customers know that they are not forever bound when taking their trial account. The words you use and the visual button used on the CTA or around it should be well-considered for it to succeed.
Automate Some Website Sections
One of the most popular ways of improving the UX of a business website is automating sections of the website. That involves various parts of the website, including filling out forms and cutting the ordering process short.
A lot of ecommerce businesses have got this right by automatically populating the form after editing one entry. For example, when asking for a customer’s shipping address, you can first ask for the zip code and using that data to fill out the rest of the form. You can also expedite the ordering process by automating the error response instantly when filling out the information needed to place the order.
Automating sections of the website in this way will contribute to positive user experience because users will not have to do redundant tasks that irritate them. You can think of other creative ways to automate some processes to simplify the interactions.
Bliss, a beauty product company, simplifies the process when making a repeat purchase by automatically populating the required fields to checkout. That applies even when you bought as a guest and did not register an account the previous time. Users can enjoy this feature because it makes their checkout process much quicker.
Consider Customer Cart Retention
Customers can face an error before placing their orders; the issue might be on their side or yours. Regardless of the cause, you need to have a cart retention strategy to save customers the headache of filling their cart all over again after facing problems. Do not make the mistake of working on the assumption that customers abandoned your cart, so you don’t need to retain them.
Instead, have a feature that allows customers to pick up right where they left off when making a purchase. Customers might not be keen on starting all over, and you might start losing business because of failing to manage the cart abandonment rate.
That can be done by using the latest eCommerce tool providers because they autosave the contents of a customer’s cart. Using an outdated online store design layout can cause an undesirable user experience for customers. Big ecommerce giants like Amazon and eBay noticed the importance of this and now save the contents of a customer’s cart.
Personalize Content Wisely
Content personalization is very important because it lets you market items that the target audience really wants to see. That improves the user experience because you go ahead of the customers and look for potential items they might need. Although that is true, you should be wise when implementing this strategy because it can repel customers away.
This is important because sometimes businesses ruin the user experience by over-personalizing their content. Over-personalizing the content can wind up to detrimental results because you can end up spamming your website visitors.
When does this happen? Businesses usually get carried away after a customer makes a purchase and then market the same product repeatedly.
Remember that customers might not need the same products the next time they are visiting your business’ website. Instead, use the preferences of customers to provide alternative products that are related but not the same as the last purchase. For example, when a customer bought a DSLR camera, you can market camera lenses or other accessories but not the exact same thing repeatedly.
Wayfair has set an excellent example in this by analyzing the categories users like and then using them for marketing purposes. The website does not market the same product over again but rather diversifies throughout the category.
Use Caching on Forms
When filling out a form, customers can make wrong entries and need to retrieve the latest data they filled. A lot of businesses still make their forms non-user friendly because of not having any caching system whatsoever. Caching the data customers fill, stores the entry temporarily just in case the client needs to correct some of the information entered.
This is essential because customers can be frustrated when they fill out a form and lose their data when pressing back to edit an incorrect entry. Therefore, ensure that you use forms that cache the data so customers can pick up where they left off.
You can use pop-up error messages on forms to ensure that users can’t go to the next phase if an entry is incorrect. Alternatively, you can disable the submit button if there is an incorrect entry made on the form. All of these features can be implemented using advanced form templates that offer these functionalities.
Salesforce forms instantly notify you if there is any discrepancy detected. In the email field, the company has certain expectations of how it should be more or less structured. If the structure you have entered does not match, it flags out the issue before moving forward with the form.
Conduct Routine Maintenance on the Website
Routine maintenance on the website can save you a lot of trouble with getting an increasing bounce rate because of poor user experience. When you audit the site periodically, you will pick up on issues earlier on and have the ability to resolve them immediately.
The routine audits and maintenance can help you pick up on broken links and other errors that may irritate customers. You can use website auditing software to ensure that there are no technical issues and then comb through the site page-by-page for a thorough analysis. The page-by-page audit can help you identify issues regarding the appearance of the website.
You can get a realistic view of the site and resolve any matters that need your attention. In most cases, the code of a website can get a bug, and that might impact some functionalities of the site. Therefore, test each function individually to ensure that you are still providing a great user experience.
Dropbox surely does conduct routine maintenance on the website, and that makes the service provided by this online platform reliable. It also helps developers identify sections where the website can improve and be simplified further for customers.
Gather and Analyze Data on Customers
To know what users want intending to provide them with a great experience, you must gather information about them. Knowing what customers prefer to do and search for on a website can help to develop or redeveloping it. You can monitor user preferences or keep up with them through the competition analysis.
Doing competitor analysis regarding their site’s user experience and design can give you an idea of what customers expect. To do this, you can choose the best five competitors that are doing well online with a lot of traffic and identifying what they are doing to retain customers. You might identify that their website has a better layout, or it loads faster, and that data can then be used to improve your business’ website. The improvements on the website can be made to supersede what you observed from the competition. That will give you an upper hand from the customers, so do not be afraid to do some spying.
The UX/UI of websites like Medium, Forbes, and Entrepreneur seem similar to each other. That might suggest these companies did competitor analysis to give consumers exactly what they want. The technique is working exceedingly well for these companies and can also improve the user experience of your own website.
Bottom Line
User experience is not a once-off task: you should constantly update and upgrade the website’s layout and design according to the latest industry trends and data you get about customers’ behavior and preferences. Use various methods outlined herein to improve the user experience of your business website.
About the Author: Tobias Foster is a writer and editor working with My assignment help Australia for over five years. He loves writing on business management, technology, finance, and organizational development.
Title image from the vector collages collection on Ouch
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