7 Things that will significantly improve the user experience on your website
Spread the loveTake a few minutes to understand how to improve the user experience on your website – the reward will be in creating stronger trust with your audience and also the conversion rate… Dreamy, isn’t it? So let’s get to work! Just in the last week (and we’re on holiday!), two people approached me […]
Take a few minutes to understand how to improve the user experience on your website – the reward will be in creating stronger trust with your audience and also the conversion rate… Dreamy, isn’t it? So let’s get to work!
Just in the last week (and we’re on holiday!), two people approached me to write content for their website.
I politely explained that I don’t write content for websites, but rather I create a strategic outline and then translate everything into a functional outline with great user experience, and only then do I pour in content. They can improve their writing themselves, which is even preferable as business owners.
This left people confused because from their perspective, they just want a website.
They expect their potential customers to be interested in what they have to offer, to visit their website, and bam… make a purchase from them or at least establish contact with them.
In the real world, it doesn’t happen that way.
The thought behind our website is critical.
Understanding how our audience likes to consume their information and what matters to them is the guiding line in creating a proper flow, drive to action, and interactivity within our digital asset.
I believe that everyone, even with limited resources, can create a good user experience on their website. You just need to know what to look for.
Therefore, I decided to gather a few points for you that you can improve on your own (most of them anyway) starting today.
Visual Anchor – Start with the headlines
Most of the time when I talk about important user experience on websites, people think I’m only talking about how easy it is to navigate within the site or how clear it will be for the end user where to click.
But in essence, user experience, at its core, considers the experience of the user.
If I know that most people like to scan the text to get to what they’re looking for, I can use subheadings to provide them with what they’re searching for and improve the user experience on my site.
Clearly, content is important, but in user experience, we also talk about the visibility of the headline, and that’s something important to emphasize.
In writing articles on a blog, for example, subheadings should be clear and aligned, similar in length, fit well into the structure, and also directly related to the topic of the article or content we are writing.
From the content itself, the words in the headlines will help us promote the site. When creating a site, we don’t just consider keyword searches or just user experience or just design. In the end, everything should integrate organically and well to help us promote the content and also provide a comfortable user experience.
Breaking text into subheadings serves a dual purpose: addressing users’ search queries and facilitating effective text scanning. Additionally, it aids in organizing the hierarchy, enabling our audience to discern the relative importance of various sections.
Goodbye stock photos
What evokes more emotion in you?
Recently, I worked with a strategic consultant whose website’s first thing visitors see is a picture of a chessboard. Besides the fact that the picture is cliché, it is perceived by most surfers as impersonal and therefore does not inspire trust.
Our pictures, pictures we took ourselves or even professionally taken pictures that convey a message, have character and show human faces that generate better business results.
I read recently (and couldn’t find the source again – my apologies) that authentic human photos, not stock photos, increase conversion rates by 45%.
Yes, it’s super easy to go to a stock photo site and buy a photo. But consumers have long identified “fake” and are looking for authenticity.
Part of the user experience is that the audience on the other side of the screen feels that they invested thought in the digital asset.
Visuals that support the content
Visuals that support the content.
When I did my second degree in organizational consulting, I read a lot of articles. It was terribly frustrating because sometimes there were dozens of pages of text without visual arrangement.
In the end, I struggled to finish them and was really exhausted.
When I started dealing with marketing and user experience, I analyzed my experience with all sorts of digital assets to understand what would be pleasant for my customers.
One of the things I noticed is that sometimes there’s no limit between how much the content interests me and how much I’m fed up with it. Yes, read it again. Interesting content that people simply don’t read.
Long blocks of text terribly tire the eyes, and patience with them runs out. In practice, it means you can write fascinating and valuable content, but your audience will abandon it midway. The solution is to create a pleasant eye layout, with clear hierarchy in texts and comfortable reading space.
Yes, it means avoiding long sentences. Yes, it means paying attention to punctuation and paragraph division.
When white space enters my life
One of the strong trends of 2022 in website design was Dark Mode. I was looking at dark websites and wanted one myself.
When I worked with the designer on the new website (coming soon), the background was a dark purple with minor color changes and a play of my color palette.
I was really excited about the design, which was beautiful and very different from my current website.
But the more I delved into the design and the pages themselves, the more I felt suffocated. When I talked to a colleague, he told me that the new design felt a bit “claustrophobic” to him.
Which is exactly the opposite of what my business, Digital Nomad, is supposed to convey.
So I did a bit more research and discovered that white space is something that can change lives, even in darker designs, and I added white elements to the design.
And then I realized how important these white spaces are even in the texts we write. They are like the importance of silence in a dramatic dialogue. It has meaning.
So even texts need their white spaces – space between images, between paragraphs, and between images and paragraphs are super important.
Turning Users into Active Participants
Your digital asset can be interactive.
The more user actions influence, the more they feel part of the digital asset and develop (and then you) trust relationships with it.
Interactivity can range from a smooth mouse-over of an image to a layover with explanatory text to creating a wizard (interactive questionnaire with questions).
On the one hand, we don’t want to overwhelm the user too much and tire them out, on the other hand, we do want users to do something on our site, not just browse, but have an impact.
That they search, watch, click… and of course, also receive the information in the best way possible.
- Responsiveness, Because Most Users View from Their Mobiles
Consider screens your audience views from.
Google started indexing mobile-first. This means that if your site isn’t mobile-friendly, its ranking and exposure will decrease.
But in general, we build our digital assets to support our business growth, and just understanding that over 54% of users (on average) come from mobile is reason enough to invest in responsive design.
There’s nothing more annoying, as a user, than entering a site from a mobile and finding that the pages aren’t adapted to the small screen and it’s very difficult to navigate.
This frustration experience makes me give up doing business with the same site from the start. I feel there is a minimum standard for those who want to be relevant, and those who don’t meet it shouldn’t be surprised if site visits don’t generate business results.
When I profile my clients’ websites, I adapt the digital asset to large screens, laptop screens, tablet screens, and mobiles.
That’s how I ensure that the experience of anyone entering the site is always good, regardless of screen size.
Thinking about the layout of elements and content is strategic, not just visual.
Many times I condense content in the mobile version compared to the desktop, understanding that it will look too crowded or have endless scrolling on a small screen.
We must consider all these things.
Lightning Speed
I assume that if I ask you to think about the time it took for a website to load and in frustration you closed it, you can think of an example from the past two weeks.
When we talk about a website, it’s not just about how it looks, what its content is, and how interactive it is, considering the hierarchy that is important to me as a customer, but also how fast it is.
We need to understand that people today have no patience.
And if they’re annoyed that it takes your site 3 seconds to load and it’s not immediate, it already affects your brand and the trust-building with your audience.
If you’re not sure, you can check your site’s speed with PageSpeed Insights. This tool will give you recommendations on how to improve your site and specific areas within it.
In today’s era, speed is everything.
The central word that should accompany you is – experience.
We are no longer selling services, but a shared work experience.
We’re not just providing information, but a learning experience and an opportunity to connect and build trust with our audience.
Improving the user experience of our customers allows us to create for them a pleasant, fascinating learning experience that says a lot about who we are and what it’s like to work with us.
As most interactions today are online, we must meet the basic criteria for creating a pleasant asset to be in.
