5 UX Elements That Can Significantly Improve Your Website’s User Experience
User experience (UX) is a term that describes how the end user of a product or service interacts with and perceives it. Most assume that UX mostly has to do with user-friendliness, but it actually extends beyond that. At its core, UX doesn’t just shape how users interact with your site but also how they feel about your brand overall.
Almost all customers today will seek out a business’s website first if they’d like to learn more about it or browse its offerings. These individuals will, without a doubt, be expecting a superior user experience. Good UX in the context of websites typically has to do with how easy it is for users to navigate through the site, find information, and complete any other tasks they seek to accomplish during their visit. Online environments that feel memorable, legitimate, and secure to users also indicate effective UX. This is especially true if the website contains an online store or otherwise requires visitors to share sensitive personal information with the company.
One of the best ways to optimise UX design for your business’s website is to invest in professional web design services from a reputable third-party organisation like us. Our team is not only highly skilled and attentive to the unique needs of every client we work with, but we also pride ourselves on our familiarity with current industry best practices. In this feature, we’ll walk you through some key elements that can enhance user experience on your website:
Optimised Loading Speed
Customers in the digital age have better things to do than wait around for a page to fully load. People expect instant access and will bounce without a second thought if your site takes too long. Lots of research backs this up—just a five-second delay can send your bounce rate skyrocketing by over 20%, according to Section.io.
Fortunately, there are many relatively simple ways to boost your page speed, such as using caching techniques and minimising the code and markup on your web pages—a process known as “minification.” Large images are one of the biggest culprits when it comes to a slow-loading web page, so make sure to compress all the images you intend to use on your site before loading them on.
Intuitive Navigation
Your website’s navigation system is one of the pillars of its overall user experience, so it needs to be easy to figure out. As a rule of thumb, you want to help users accomplish anything they set out to do on your website in as few clicks as possible. That might be looking up specific information, making a purchase, getting in touch with your support team, or anything else.
Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes and ask yourself what they’re here for. Once you know that, you can make it easy for them to get stuff done. Make sure that the vocabulary you use in your labels and headings especially is both appropriately descriptive and familiar to the user, so they don’t have a hard time understanding which options to choose to get where they need to go. Don’t hesitate to spend time trying out different navigation options and testing these with real users before committing to one particular scheme.
Appropriate White Space
Packing your pages with too much content is like shouting at your visitors. Give them some breathing room. It’s better to incorporate enough white space around your text and titles, as this actually makes it easier for users to focus. You’ll end up with fresh, modern-looking pages that your visitors will surely enjoy browsing.
Of course, it’s also possible to have too much of a good thing. Aim for a balanced approach where all the most important information your viewers need to know is above the fold—that is, in the upper part of the page that they can immediately see without scrolling. You can then surround that information with white space to highlight the text and any supplementary images.
Mobile-Responsive Design
Everyone’s glued to their phones these days, so your site needs to look and perform like a dream on every kind of screen–not just desktops. In fact, it’s safe to assume that a large chunk of the traffic your website gets will be coming from mobile users! Responsive layouts, big, easily clickable buttons, and text that users can easily read without zooming in are all must-have elements for a mobile-friendly site.
Properly Differentiated Hyperlinks
Besides your main menus and section headings, users will probably be finding their way around your website through hyperlinks—clickable links embedded within the written content on your webpages. Make sure to use visual cues that make these links easy to identify, such as underlined text or differently colored text. Most content management platforms, for instance, will readily default to the blue underlined text as a clickable link, so it may benefit you to stick to this convention. Just make sure not to cluster too many links together, as this makes it harder to click them, particularly for users on mobile.
Now that you know a little more about what goes into effective UX design for websites, it’s time to work on getting your own up to snuff. We help businesses of all sizes craft websites people actually enjoy using. Let’s chat about how we can do the same for you.
A note
Henry Blackwell
Henry Blackwell is a marketing professional. He has spent the last 10 years working in-house and within agencies, growing profitable businesses through brand and customer-centric digital marketing in New Zealand, Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Europe.
“My approach to marketing is a combination of heart and head. My heart brings an empathetic and intuitive approach to deeply understanding the qualitative requirements of marketing that many simply do not care to do. My head brings an analytical mindset that leverages data-driven insights to deliver profitable performance for the businesses I work with.
This skill set allows me to deliver systematic customer acquisition, conversion, and retention.”
– Director
