We all know how sketchy UX is a nightmare for your website. Pretty obvious, isn’t it? If your potential customer is having a hard time getting a hang of what is practically your storefront on the internet, then they’ll start thinking your company is crude and incompetent. But so many web designers still leave UX as an afterthought, instead focusing on putting in the bells and whistles on what might very well be a broken website. If you’re new to the concept of UX design, check out this recent post on our blog outlining the general idea of the practice. Otherwise, read on for some awesome-sauce you can pour on your web UX design to make it way slicker than it is.
Performance
First things first, nobody wants to be on a slow website. Web analytics firm KISSmetrics found that the median amount of time that a visitor waits for a website to load is six seconds. So if your website is heavy with lots of large images and animations, you’re shooting yourself in the foot from the get go. Try out Pingdom’s free performance tool to see if your website is under-performing, and get tips on how to fix them.
Analysis Paralysis
Your visitor’s attention is precious. When you’ve got too many things happening on your webpages, it’s hard for them to find what they actually want.
It’s a natural tendency in humans to become more unsure the more our choices increase. This is why you should minimize not only the number of choices your user has to make while navigating your website, but also the number of things they have to focus on in general, down to the absolute essentials. The number of links in your menu bars, the number of buttons on a webpage, the number of slides in your carousel (which you should completely chuck anyway… more on that later). You get the idea.
Navigability
What’s the best way to lose your website visitors? Turn your website into a meandering maze that has people gasping for the ‘X’ on their tabs in under a minute. The web browsing population of today will have a dozen tabs open aside from yours, so you need to make sure that getting around your website is as intuitive as possible.
The number of websites that have a hard to reach login page is staggering. Adding a header navbar for important links is great. If you’ve got long pages of copy or blog posts, add links to the top of the page jump to the relevant subheading.
Reminding your user where they are on your website with trackers and breadcrumbs, or finding other innovative ways to help them get back to what they were doing increases engagement greatly.
Better Copy
No matter how prevalent image and video has become for good online content, the UX backbone of all websites is still text. Providing your website visitors in depth written content and guides on topics relevant to your business, is one of the best ways to capture their attention and endear them to your brand. Not only will you start being recognized as an industry leader when you start putting out quality posts, but people will start seeing you as very pro-audience.
Good copy and lots of it also provides a lot of opportunity to push your website up in the search rankings. Search engine bots actively look for websites with high-quality content, and analyzing web copy is the best way for them to determine that.
Death to the Slider
Sliders (or carousels) were an experiment trying to fit in a lot of visual content in a small space on a webpage. But not all experiments bear fruit. Large, homepage carousels are often poorly executed, are difficult for search engines to index and are ignored by the most visitors altogether.
With the growing prevalence of online video content and increasing internet speeds, you’re much better off having a video on your homepage that introduces your business to the visitor. If not a video, then a single large image with a user tested call to action, is a much better alternative than a slider that nobody will care about.
These are all great solutions to some of the most common website user experience issues that lead to frustration and cause visitors to bounce. However, every website has unique UX problems that can’t possibly be covered in a short blog post. Your website will probably have one or more of the issues mentioned above, but the best way to identify what’s holding you back from getting the conversions you want, is to do an audit of your website’s overall user experience. Follow our blog for an update on the key things to look for when auditing your site’s UX.