UX : From Facebook pages, to apps, to formal business websites, companies use online portals frequently as their first line of interaction between their brands and their customer.
When it comes to web page design and optimization, many entities primarily focus on increasing customer visits. The thought behind this is that more visits will equal more interactions with customers, which will drive more opportunities to close deals.
But, what actually happens when potential customers view the landing page?
Have you ever been to a store where everything is in chaos?
Maybe it was on Black Friday, the grocery store before a big storm, or maybe it was an unorganized second hand store. We’ve all experienced frustration with not being able to easily find what we’re looking for.
Unpleasant user experiences (UX) can lead to higher visitor drop-off rates and less time spent checking out your business. It can be expensive to get people to come to your page. A poor user experience is not only a waste of marketing and content creation hours and dollars; it can translate to real bottom-line losses from missed sales opportunities and lower customer happiness.
Fortunately, the clothes can’t fall off the hangers and no one can leave a frozen pizza in the canned food aisle when it comes to your business online.
You have the power to create an exceptional customer experience each and every time someone visits your business online. So, how do you keep visitors to your online business happy? And what can companies do to make sure they get as much mileage as possible from casual users and consistent customers? Here are a few recommendations.
Remove the clutter
People are generally online to find something. With a million sources of information competing for customers attention, keep it simple.
Don’t make people search through a haystack of unneeded information and content. Extra headings, superfluous text, unnecessary buttons, and rarely used links can be removed for a cleaner, crisper, and more functional page.
Have all relevant information and buttons easily visible
Standardize your site according to generally accepted usage flows. Have you ever had to search for the settings or logout button on a page that didn’t have it easily visible and highlighted? The same applies to buttons, links, team contact information, and pricing/comparison tables. Put things in areas people will expect to see them. If you use icons, make them recognizable. Unorganized web pages push customers into the hands of other companies.
Look at What Users Are Doing
If you don’t know what the user experience is like, you won’t know what to change. To get a behind the scenes look at exactly what users are doing on your site, use a tools to help you out. There are dozens of great tools to help you test your site’s UX. Use analytics, session recording, and click-mapping tools so you won’t be in the dark on where to make changes.
UX: Optimize for mobile
It’s important to ensure you have a responsive site that fits various mobile screen sizes and resolutions. Site navigation should be as easy as it would be on your desktop version. Your customers will appreciate the uniformity of both sites and will thank you for it by spending more time and interacting more meaningfully across your various pages.
Increase your site speed
Even response times that are as low as a few milliseconds too slow can lead to customer drop-offs. Invest in a fast host, a quick-to-load site, steer clear of heavy animations or content, and optimize fonts and images for quick loading.
Social Sharing
People frequently (and even habitually) post to social sites, so make the process of doing so easier for them by integrating social buttons on your page. This not only helps to improve engagement, it also allows you to target the wider circles of influence of your visitors. This is likely the easiest tip in this article since it takes just seconds to add a widget to your page. Gain new customers from of an article, a review, or a share posted by someone else on a social platform.
Good UX is not hard, but it does require getting things right with regards to what you want your site to be able to do, and how well you want it to do it. If you’re not sure what works best, get feedback from your peers or even your audience base by welcoming suggestions.
Find more tips in this article: How to Build Strong Online Presence to Achieve Business Success
About the author:
Nabeena Mali is a marketing manager at AppInstitute. She is passionate about design, user experience, and digital growth, and she helps businesses leverage emerging mobile trends through actionable strategies that allow, among other things, companies to stay connected with their customers, the promotion of their services, the improvement of brand perception, along with enhanced communications and increased sales and bookings. She writes about all things design and digital, and you can follow her on Twitter and on LinkedIn.
