The user experience (UX) on a website is everything, but most people know that already. One study found that 88% of shoppers wouldn’t return to a website if they had a bad experience and that 70% of businesses that fail do so because of bad user experiences and interactions. The figures speak for themselves. Even a free website builder now makes the process much more intuitive. Below, we’ll look at all of that in more detail and how you can enhance the UX on your own website.
UX Starts With Web Design
75% of people judge a website’s credibility on the aesthetics alone – this is something most people can relate to. We are hard-wired to air caution towards websites that look like they were designed in the early 2000s. Aesthetics demands crisp, fluid, and captivating web designs that draw a user in.
Then there’s the fact that 94% of people don’t trust a website with a poor design, and that goes back to that suspicious feeling mentioned earlier. What’s one way of ensuring your web design works? Test it! Putting yourself in the user’s shoes allows you to analyze everything, from design to navigation, and understand ways you think you might want to enhance the experience. Interestingly, only 55% of businesses test their UX.
Responsive Web Designs
Responsive web designs take UX enhancement to the next level, combining convenience with practicality for the ultimate experience. Responsive web design basically means a website can render perfectly across a range of devices or screen sizes. Whether someone is browsing on a mobile or tablet, the experience should be pretty much the same.
73.1% of web developers believe most visitors disengage with a website because of a lack of responsiveness, and it’s true.
If you visit a website from your model phone and have to scroll from left to right because the text doesn’t fit on the screen – it’s frustrating. Yet, responsive web design is so easy to get right. That’s another thing free website builders make easy. According to one study by Search Engine England, only 52% of websites are actually responsive. That’s a low figure considering the high impact it has on traffics engagement with a website.
Checkout Usability
The end goal you have for all the traffic flowing through your website should hopefully be the checkout. Yet, Sleeknote calculated data from 41 different shopping cart abandonment studies and found just under 70% of shopping carts are abandoned. Now, that’s for several reasons. Some people get to the final payment step and second-guess their decision. Some don’t even make it to that point because the checkout experience is frustrating.
In comes saving details, call to action, and guest checkouts to make life easier. Of course, that list isn’t exhaustive – this article explains what more you can do to enhance the checkout experience.
In terms of saving personal details, that improves future checkout experiences, and offering the option to create a customer account is advisable. Call to action sounds simple, but ensuring you have a call to action button that’s visible kickstarts the checkout experience in a good way. Guest checkouts cut out all of the messing around creating accounts for customers who aren’t interested in that.
Use Enticing Call To Actions
Back to call to action again – they’re a great way to ensure your customers have the visible cues they need to reach the pages they need to. It’s simple psychology. In fact, much of what you can do with a call to action button is psychology – down to the colors. Colors evoke emotions. Knowing which colors will suit the needs of your customers — both shopping and emotional needs — can make a difference in their experience.
Keeping it psychological, you must also think about the words you’re using and what you want them to instruct people to do. Think about action-orientated words, like get started or start your journey here. Again, consumers emotionally connect to words as they do with colors. The language you choose to use should stand out, be time-sensitive (like join now), and have an action tied to them.
Look At Optimizing The Page Speeds
One study that looked at 5 million desktop and mobile web pages found the average loading speed was 10.3 seconds. And, another study concluded that 1 in 4 people leave a website if it doesn’t load within 4 seconds. Poor loading speeds are a sign of poor design and, in turn, poor usability. To optimize your page loading speeds, consider doing the following:
- Picking a high-quality hosting
- Compressing images and video content
- Minimize HTTP requests
- Put your Javascript and CSS into external files
- Cache all your web pages
Website loading speeds are often easy to fix – you can run a simple test to find out the loading speed of your website by using Google’s Page Speed tool.
Building a website with the UX in mind is essential – and no matter how old a website is, it’s easy to enhance the UX without scrapping the website and starting again. Focus on the user’s movement and experience from point to point through your website, and look to improve every step of the journey.
