A positive use experience(UX) can increase your business significantly. ‘I don’t get enough leads from my website’ , ‘ Why customers are not filling contact form’ , ‘I don’t get quality leads from my website’ these are common complains by small and medium business about their website.
Thankfully there are some ways which you can follow to ensure that customer’s expectation are met when they visit your website.
Why should we care about User Experience?
Confusing user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) is common. Both these elements are very close to each other. User Interface is the part of User experience , UX defines the way use interact with the website. Interacting includes element placement, color combination, link placement, CTA (Call to Action ) buttons and many more things. You can also carry out usability testing for ensuring overall experience is good enough for site visitors.
Asking Too Much Information from Visitor
Website visitor’s attention span is very low. If your website has too many fields in the form that are required by the user to contact you then “Bounce Rate” will be high. Meaning visitor is more likely to leave the website without interacting with the website and exploring the website.
Various studies have already claimed that making lengthy contact / signup forms discourage the users. On the other hand, a short and precise sign-up form will increase the engagement and conversion of the website.
Not Optimizing for Different Screen size
There are so many smart phone and tablets in the market. Each has different screen size and resolution. It is really important to optimize the website for different mobile devices. In case your website is not mobile friendly you might be missing mobile traffic. Mobile friendly website also has advantage on SEO. Search Engines like Google and Bing tend to list the website higher if your website is mobile friendly.
Plain text, no graphics and Interactive Element
Including text in the webpage is pretty common. However it should be just plain vanilla text. You should present it in a intuitive way. Remember site visitor’s attention span is very less. They are not interested in reading long texts and paragraphs. Including Images and videos will convey the message effectively. Checklist and bulleted points will catch user’s attention quickly. You can consider converting the message you want to convey to checklist and bulleted points.
Navigation Issues
Navigation is the one of the most important element on the website. Navigation should be short and crisp. You don’t want navigation with too much navigation bar for the user to navigate. User can become confusing at a time if there are many options on the navigation bar. Your first objective is to capture the lead from the website and a smooth navigation will offer unique user experience that will aid in website’s conversion.
Ignoring Mobile Intent
Another common mistake that often assuming that responsive web design is going to fix mobile design issues. But it is not as easy as it seems. Responsive web design address many mobile UX issue, it doesn’t necessarily take user’s intent into consideration. Rather than just re-formatting the website into mobile you need to consider mobile website visitor have different behaviors and expectations. Unlike website user smartphone users expect immediate indulgence. They might have a minute available traveling on a train or on the work desk, so they need to get out quickly. Mobile user also have different priorities i.e. they quickly want to find maps and phone number in website. You need to design mobile website keeping in mind how user wants to use it instead of just including everything from the desktop site.
Slow Page Loading Time
If your website is loading very slow there are the chances that visitor just leaves the website very quickly. Page load time should be less than 5 seconds. The quicker the site load time the better. The user tends to get frustrated if they have to wait too long for a content to load.
You can use Pingdom tool to see what’s your website’s loading time.
Not Communicating Value Proposition Clearly
Your website is your virtual catalog . It is very important to start the conversation right in any form. If you don’t capture attention on website visitor you’ve lost it. Therefore it is really important to communicate the value proposition clearly as soon as visitor lands on the website. When crafting value proposition think from the user’s prospective, that user will benefit if you use your product or services. The main objective of creating a value proposition is to make visitor aware about your offerings.
High Bounce Rate
Bounce rate of the website shows if visitor is exploring the other website pages after landing on a specific page. If a bounce rate of the website is 60% means 60% of the visitor is leaving the website without navigating to other pages of the website. It has more to do with UX. You need to design User experience in such a way that users wants to learn more about your company and product.
Unclear Call to Action (CTA)
Call to Action is very important element of web design. You need to place CTA button effectively so that you get more conversion from the visitors. CTA buttons inspire website visitors to reach out to you. Well place CTA button on your website can improve conversion rate by 30%. You might want to do A/B test to see how different CTA button impact the conversion. CTA action could be sign up forms for newsletters, contact form, product purchase etc.
Conclusion
Try to design a page that is more intuitive and engaging for the website user. It is not easy to keep the interest of the user intact on the website, but you can do trial and error method to see what exactly is working for you. You can also do A/B testing on the website to see how users are behaving to web pages. A/B test can validate or reject the improvement that you plan to do on the website.
While designing and testing for the UX you need to think like a user and let your users get an excellent browsing experience.
I hope you will get inspirited by it and improve UX on your website and see how things shape up.
Let me know any questions if you have in comment. I will reply ASAP.
