Whether you are shopping for your first web designer or a software developer as a company representative or work on your own online store or website, User Experience (UX) design can make or break your business. According to Top Tal, 88% of customers are not likely to return to a website after a bad browsing experience with 75% of them stating that a website’s credibility is mostly gauged by its visual appeal.

High-quality visuals and well-placed web design elements are only the surface of what UX can do for your brand. Let’s take a look at 10 simple yet effective steps to improve your UX and make it more engaging for your stakeholders.

Benefits of Engaging UX

Before we get into the steps to create an engaging UX environment, we should mention why the process is important in the first place. User Experience design revolves around ensuring that your stakeholders (B2C or B2B) have a consistent, reliable and professionally-designed relation with your brand and product.

As such, it leans on psychology and the literal experience of using your website or app more than anything. Well thought-out UX can transform the way you conduct business with your stakeholders in multiple ways, including but not limited to:

• Easier and Simpler Website Navigation
• Higher Engagement and Conversion Rates
• Better SEO and SERP Ranking
• Greater Industry and Brand Authority
• High RoI in terms of resources invested into UX

• Start with your Landing Page

Your user’s experience will typically start with the landing page you present them with. As such, your landing page should be representative of your brand, product portfolio, and corporate network, as well as contain any social media handles you might have.

Make sure that your landing page is free of unnecessary popups, chat boxes and auto-played content in order to achieve the best legibility and flow of information. Don’t push your visitors into certain actions – provide them with the tools to do so themselves (well-designed navigation bar) and your overall UX will soar as a result.

• Offer Original Content

The best way to differentiate your website or app from the competition is to offer original, relevant content to your consumers. That way, you will effectively build an original voice in the industry, adding to your UX design efforts.

Avoid posting content published on other websites or copying old content to republish as new pieces. Once your audience realizes that you are plagiarizing or recycling your content, the UX and any goodwill you built up will be washed away.

• Site-Wide Consistency

Consistent web design is an important element of user experience. Each page on your sitemap should share the same visual style, fonts, and content formatting, especially in terms of multimedia.

To that end, it’s good practice to create a style guide for your content creators and administrators to implement. Avoid mixing and matching content formatting styles to avoid coming off as unprofessional and inconsistent, particularly when it comes to writing styles.

• Make Conversion Straightforward

Whether you offer eCommerce products or subscription-based cloud services, you need to make sure that your conversion processes are easy to grasp and utilize. Ensure that your checkout process is as simple and intuitive as possible.

Avoid needless information gathering, multiple identity checks and similar elements which slow down the purchase process. Allow for as many currencies and payment methods to be used as possible and your UX reception will be more positive as a result.

• Work on your Load Speed

Load speeds are an essential element of well-planned user experience. As such, you need to ensure that your pages are easy to load and free of extra bandwidth requirements. Optimize your multimedia for smaller sizes and disable any unnecessary plugins or widgets.

Choose a lightweight theme for your website and abandon popups and auto-play content entirely. This will make your site usable for low bandwidth users and also improve your SEO and UX as a result of the optimization efforts.

• Mobile Optimization Matters

More and more customers use mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets to browse the web and purchase goods. Choosing to focus your UX efforts solely on desktop browsers is a grave mistake.

A great solution for your UX efforts is to opt for responsive web design which will scale according to the display that’s being used to access the site. This will ensure that every user, no matter the platform, has full and unfiltered access to your website’s content.

• Don’t be Afraid of White Space

Many website owners and web designers are afraid of white space. In short, white space represents the literal white-space between elements present on your website and its subsequent pages. Think of the white spaces in the article you are reading right now – imagine all the white spaces to disappear, leaving you with a wall of text.

The same feeling can be felt in websites without a good dose of white space in their web design solutions. Space out your design elements such as blog posts and products to ensure that your site can “breathe” and offer a more comfortable user experience to potential visitors.

• Work on Content Legibility

Speaking of legibility, your articles, blog posts, reviews, and discussion pieces should be treated as separate written documents. Elements such as paragraph formatting, headings, and subheadings, as well as bullet and numbered points, should be present throughout.

Platforms such as Grammarly and Hemingway offer a plethora of proofreading and formatting options for you to take advantage of. Focus on making sure that your content can be skimmed through and understood even by industry laymen.

• Check your Links Periodically

Internal website links exist to offer added value to visitors and recurring customers. However, if your links are broken or lead to malicious websites which can cause harm to your stakeholders, it will already be too late to do anything about your UX and reputation.

Make sure that your links are fully functional and strike a good balance between internal (your own) and external (links outside of your sitemap). This will allow your visitors to experience different aspects of the same topic and expand their knowledge on certain industry topics. Avoid using no links or solely relying on internal links – the user experience you provide is about networking with other content providers just as much as it is about creating original content.

• Be Available for Follow-Ups

Lastly, your customer support department should be ready and able to answer pressing customer issues, receive their feedback and reach out for follow-ups. Don’t adopt a one-way mentality by focusing on sales instead of customer relations.

After all, the difference between your products and those of your competitors is in your brand culture, long-term goals and company vision. Communicate with your customer base as much as possible to ensure that they receive the utmost UX care you can provide as a company.

In Summary

Making sure your website is user-friendly and up to the standards of User Experience in 2019 is all about testing. Don’t make rash decisions in terms of revamping your website without taking elements such as Search Engine Optimization(SEO) into account.

Collect customer feedback in terms of what they like and don’t like in terms of your overall UX. Once you find a system that works for your company, it will be much easier to focus on customer servicing and small but significant UX upgrades.

Author Bio :

Kristin Savage is interested in writing and planning to publish her own book in the nearest future. Also, she has been a reviewer at Pick Writers for a few years and is known for her thorough approach to accurately assess newcomer translation services. You can find her on Facebook.  

Image source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/black-pen-near-iphone-and-apple-magic-keyboard-934062/