What is user experience?
User experience or the input of the end user matter the most with your website. If your website is not resulting in clicks and conversions into leads, you are surely lacking in user experience in some form or another. User experience is the process of designing your website content in a manner which is not only appealing to your visitors, but also results in them converting your leads. However, there are a few common issues of website experience, which novice website owners seem to make.
Why is user experience important?
Your website is undoubtedly the most important aspect of your business. The way your users experience your website can make or break your brand. There are a few rules of thumb that you should follow, in order to ensure that your customers are satisfied with their experience, and your websites becomes the centerpiece of your brand.
3 Common User Experience Problems & Solutions
There is one major difference between great companies and failing business- their 24/7 salesman, websites. All major companies know what their visitors are looking for, and will surely cater to their demands from the get-go. On the other hand, businesses which do not understand what their visitors are looking for, will surely fall behind in this race. There are a few ways you can understand if your website suffers from bad user experience, and how you can solve it.
Problem 1: Not catering to mobile users
Your business website looks great on a desktop and laptop monitors. However, when you look at your site on a mobile or a tablet device, you notice a few issues. The text is too big and runs off the page, an image does not resize properly, the navigation is difficult to understand, etc,. Why is this happening? On a mobile or tablet device, there is less real estate. Different design principles and rules are in play. With more of than 55% of website traffic coming from mobile devices, it’s important to ensure the mobile browsing experience is satisfactory. In a study published by Impact, 48% of users say they feel frustrated and annoyed when on sites that are poorly optimized for mobile. What is the solution to minimize user frustration?
Solution 1: Design a responsive, mobile-friendly website
To avoid frustrating a visitor browsing your website on a mobile device, it’s important to build a responsive website from the beginning of the web development project. While on a desktop monitor, a 3 section layout looks well, each of those sections must shrink into their own column vertically on a mobile device. This is often done automatically in most modern websites. There is, however, another level to improving the user experience on a mobile device. There are specific situations where a complete realignment of content must take place. One example is changing the order in which an image appears. On a mobile device, it’s recommended to show a headline, few sentences, and then a supporting image. This order will make the most sense.
Problem 2: Confusing visitors about your intended actions
A website home page typically presents information about the company and the services or products that are offered. There are numerous sections that describe the amazing features of a service. That’s fantastic for informing and educating your visitor, but what is the next step? Would you like your visitor to take an action? You described a particular problem the visitor may be facing and how your service/product can solve their concern. Did you provide a way to purchase your product or a button to go to the contact page? Most businesses fail to implement a call to action on their website.
Solution 2: Direct visitors to take an action
When building website sections, we must keep the sales funnel in mind. The goal of many websites should be to first introduce a visitor to your business and then guide the visitor towards taking the ultimate action. That action may be to buy a product/service, sign up for a newsletter or share your blog article. The options are limitless. From a business perspective, it all depends on your goal, which is typically to increase the user base and drive revenue. When the Optimal Pursuits team creates your website, you will notice that at every section of the page, we implement a strategic call-to-action to guide your visitor towards becoming your client via a purchase, subscription or email sign-up.
Problem 3: Lack of website user testing and feedback
Your web design agency has finished your website and is ready to release it to the public. While we imagine a website as being one entity or a “product”, it is a structure comprised of numerous pieces. A website is a collection of pages. Each page is a collection of sections. Each section can have more than 2 visual elements. Each element can have many properties such as having a red color, being bold, large text, etc,. Then there is another dimension to all of this. A visitor may be looking at your website from various devices (desktop, laptop, tablet, mobile, etc,.) as well as different browsers (Chrome, Mozilla, Safari, etc,.). Notice how one website may turn out to have a million components–the amount of permutations is insane. Any of those components can break down based on how the visitor is interacting with your website. Without proper testing of the most popular configurations, your web design agency released a website that is unprofessional without you knowing. Your visitors, however, do know and may think poorly of your company or brand. This is a problem you need to avoid.
Solution 3: Employ 3rd party user experience testing
Before releasing a website to the public, it is important to have a user experience and quality assurance testing strategy. The testing strategy must cover all the popular scenarios on each device (desktop, laptop, tablet, mobile) configuration as well as each browser (Chrome, Mozilla, Safari). For example, if your home page looks great on a laptop, it should also look reasonably well on a mobile device. If the same text is too small on a mobile device, the user experience will suffer. A professional user experience tester will be able to pinpoint the issue and request for the web developer to fix and optimize that particular section. This all must happen before a website is open to the public. Optimal Pursuits employs a team of professional user testers, quality assurance experts and 3rd party user testing companies to ensure your visitor experience is top-notch.
Next steps
If you are unsure whether your website offers an optimal user experience, request a complimentary user experience audit, and we will send you suggestions on how to ensure a fantastic web browsing experience!
