How Meaningful User Experience Impacts Website Potential

If you really want to maximize your website potential, understand how to provide a meaningful user experience for customers.

Photo by UX Indonesia on Unsplash

How To Maximize Website Potential with Exceptional User Experience

Businesses thrive when accommodating their users’ needs. Here, one of the fundamental aspects is including a smooth, aesthetic, and on-brand UX. 

 

A well-designed and meaningful UX eliminates friction and nudges your website visitor to take the desired action. It also allows you to define the buyer’s journey around your product in a way that supports your business growth. 

 

But designing a UX that suits your audience and maximizes your website’s potential is tricky. From powerful CTAs to chatbots and social proofs, it involves multiple intricate elements, techniques, and metrics to consider.

 

In today’s article, we will discuss designing an exceptionally meaningful user experience that elevates your website to its full potential. 

What is user experience design?

User experience design is the process businesses use to create digital products and provide a relevant, smooth, and meaningful experience to consumers. 

 

An appealing UX is important because it impacts a user’s interaction with a digital product. When your website’s UX is customer-centric, it invites repeat users and improves conversion rates. UX is also crucial to building customer loyalty and brand reputation. 

Understanding user experience

According to Jesse James Garrett’s book ‘The Elements of User Experience’, there are 5 key elements of user experience. These are: 

• Strategy: Strategizing a plan is the most abstract part of a UX design project. It builds the foundation through audience research and setting up long- and short-term goals.
• Scope: Involves detailing functional specifications to identify and describe the feature of the product. 
• Structure: A properly planned structure helps the team navigate the design process. 
• Skeleton: Involves creating wireframes and prototypes to arrange the product. 
• Surface: The team materializes the skeleton and finalizes the UX.

Areas to focus on for stellar user experience

Ensure that your website is easy to navigate and has a simple checkout process. Additionally, integrating an e-commerce platform like Shopify can greatly enhance the user experience, improve loyalty and increase customer satisfaction. Since 88% of online buyers wouldn’t go back to a website post having an unpleasant experience, consider these points: 

Understand Your Audience

The purpose of designing a stellar UX is to give your users an intuitive experience on your website.

Every segment of users is different. It is important to remember that although you designed the product, you can’t assume what your buyer needs or expects from your website. 

 

Here are some tips to understand your audience better:

 

• Evaluate target audience demographics through first-party and third-party data. 
• Talk to your users and ask for their suggestions and opinions.
• Every action they take on their purchase journey can give you valuable insights.

 

Here are some questions to help develop a user persona:

 

• Who are our users?
• Who is prioritized?
• What challenges are they facing?
• What actions should they take?
• What functions should we consider? 

 

To develop a buyer persona, consider:

 

• Preferences 
• Geographic location
• Gender
• Age
• Values

Navigation and Information Architecture

An effective UX design must have clean and intuitive navigation. An effortless navigation and information architecture eliminates frustration and enhances user satisfaction. 

Best practices 

• Determine the scope of the product and detail it. 
• For your website’s navigation items, use clear and consistent labels. 
• Avoid jargon and vague terms. 
• Make groups of related items and use clear headings and subheadings.  
• Decide the user’s interaction with the site and how the system will respond.
• Use visual design elements to help users navigate easily.

For example, Netflix’s navigation is clean, comprehensive, and aesthetically pleasing. Its website and app navigation links are above the main content area and are visible on every page. The labels are clear and descriptive, like “Home”, “Categories”, etc. Netflix also offers a search bar on top of every page to make navigation seamless. 

Content Strategy

Delivering effective UX design also involves developing a content strategy that applies to your users. Design and content should be perfectly aligned to serve the best experience.

For example, if you’re a FinTech company with college students or teenagers as your target audience, your content strategy should reflect their specific money issues and provide the answers on how to fix them. Such as listicles of the best bank accounts for teenagers, in-depth guides on how to write a financial aid appeal letter, or what to look for in a student debit card and find the best fit, etc. That’s one way your content strategy can add to a meaningful user experience. 

 

If you have an eCommerce store, your content strategy will focus on optimizing product descriptions and providing high-quality images or short videos of the products you’re selling. Again, the content you will produce should answer your target audience’s questions about your products and make it easy for them to buy simultaneously! And if your eCommerce business leverages a subscription business model, a proper content strategy can benefit your bottom line.

 

Here’s an example of a highly optimized product description page regarding content + user experience:

Image source: StudioSuits — Men’s Custom Suits

 

Tips for creating a UX-friendly content strategy

• Outline user objectives. It should reflect how users think and talk about the topic. 
• Align business goals and user preferences in your content strategy. 
• Use a consistent voice and tone. Use proper typography to make the content digestible.
• Make the content easily accessible. Users should easily be able to locate the content internally and through search engines. 
• Use simple words, value propositions, and strong CTA buttons to optimize visitor conversions.
• Offer relevant information architecture through visual weight and hierarchy. 
• Keep your content up-to-date.

For example, Hubspot has some of the best content on UX design. The pages on the brand deliver clear value propositions and strong CTAs. 

Website Performance and Speed

Page loading speed profoundly impact your user’s satisfaction. Pages with longer loading time experience higher bounce rates and poor conversion rates. Focus on ways to speed up your webpage so the audience engages with your site seamlessly. 

Techniques to improve website speed and performance

• Compress and optimize the images. 
• Cache every web page. This stores your site’s files and minimizes the loading speed. 
• Too many redirects can harm your website’s loading speed. When you create internal links and menus, avoid unnecessary redirects. 
• Make sure your website’s CSS and JavaScript files are asynchronous. This way, multiple files will load simultaneously, speeding up the loading process. 
• Compress your CSS, JavaScript, and HTML code. Add a free plugin. However, avoid using more than one plugin on your website. 

Tools to measure website speed and performance

Here are some tools you can use to measure your website’s speed and performance:

 

• GTmetrix
• WebPageTest
• Google PageSpeed Insight 
• SEO Site Checkup
• Uptrends

Mobile Optimization

Nowadays, most users interact with digital platforms through their mobile phones. So, designing a mobile-friendly UX is crucial to maximizing your website’s potential. A seamless mobile UX can:

 

• Captivate users
• Enhance customer experience with better accessibility, 
• Increase conversion rate and ROI. 

 

Responsive design vs. mobile-first design

Responsive web design	Mobile-first web design
Is flexible with the user’s needs and fits according to the user’s device.	Delivers an entire mobile user experience with an app-like user interface, larger fonts, etc.
Can accommodate heavy content seamlessly	Not suitable for content-heavy websites
Easily accommodates complex call-to-actions	CTAs need to be simpler and smaller

Techniques for optimizing websites for mobile devices

Remember these points while optimizing for mobile UX: 

 

• Ensure all your content is the same on mobile and desktop. A responsive web design can help with this. 
• To give the user a reason to scroll, include some text content above the fold.
• Customize WordPress for mobile view through plugins.
• Eliminate intrusive ads to enhance the experience. 
• Before finalizing the mobile UX design, check your website on different operating systems and devices. 

Accessibility

Website accessibility refers to designing a website usable across all visitors, including people with disabilities, impairments,  limitations, and sometimes even age restrictions. The aim is to serve the same or similar experience to people with disabilities and other impediments as other visitors and avoid tarnishing your website authority by serving inappropriate content to a younger audience

Image source: MediThrive

Importance of accessibility in UX

• Brings bigger audience
• Paints an inclusive image and enhances brand reputation
• Drives better SEO rankings

Techniques to improve website accessibility

• Consider people with impairments while creating the ideal buyer persona.
• Make careful color choices on your site so that colorblind people can engage easily. 
• Avoid using hover menus as it can make navigation difficult for people with impaired motor skills.
• Offer text alternatives, including images, videos, and audio content.
• Make your design patterns accessible with auto-fills.
• While designing forms for your website, use clear boundaries. This will accommodate people with cognitive disabilities. 

Testing and Optimization

Detecting issues in UX early on helps companies resolve them before it drives away potential customers. You can optimize your website’s full potential by usability testing and boosting customer acquisition and retention. Thorough testing also reduces troubleshooting, development costs, and time. 

Techniques to measure user experience

 

Measure the following KPIs to get insights into your website’s UX quality:

 

• Task success rate: This shows the percentage of tasks completed by visitors and helps designers detect areas that need improvement.
• Task completion time: The less time a user spends on a task, the better your website’s UX. 
• Error rates: This measures bad entries made by visitors. A high error rate shows usability problems in your UX.
• Retention rate: Measures the percentage of users interacting with your website repeatedly. Detected actions for this include logging in, downloading or uploading files, visiting the same product pages over time, etc.

Optimization techniques

 

• Use A/B testing to test the usability of your UX. It is a randomized experiment where a company shows two or more versions of a variable to different visitor segments and tracks, which leaves the maximum impact.
• Collect feedback and incorporate them into your optimization process.  
• Identify high-impact customer touchpoints and ensure an optimal experience for each.
• For social proof, embed reviews on your website. 
• Integrating chatbots into your website will improve usability. 
• To match prospects’ needs, use clear CTAs for product demos and trials. 
• Constantly evaluate your UX for best results. 

Conclusion

Designing UX is all about giving value to your users. To accomplish that, understand your audience, optimize navigation, boost speed, and improve accessibility. Take data-driven website design approaches, constantly test your UX on different devices and optimize usability.

 

The above tips will help you design a meaningful User Experience and maximize your website potential without the high cost.