Guide To Improving Your Site's User Experience

User experience is a term that describes the overall experience a person has when they are using your website. How easy and pleasing is your site to use?

 

For any business, user experience is critical. If people do not enjoy your website or they find it too difficult to use, chances are they will simply hit the back button and go elsewhere. 

 

With that being said, we have put together this helpful guide, which is packed with tips on how to improve your website’s user experience. So, let’s take a look.

 

 

Difference between User Experience (EX) and User Interface (UI) design

 

Before we go any further, it is vital to establish the difference between user experience and user interface design, as a lot of people get confused regarding these two concepts. 

 

User interface design (UI)

 

User interface design is the process of transforming wireframes into a graphical user interface that is polished and stylish. 

 

UI design is all about visual design elements, like images and typography, which turn a basic interface into something usable and digestible. A UI designer thinks about how images, typography, and colors of a design connect to the brand of a product. 

 

User experience (UX)

 

User experience design is about understanding the overall journey your users go on and turning it into a product. 

 

UX begins with a problem and ends with a prototype or wireframe. The UX designer wants to understand the journey the customer takes on your website. This begins with defining the target audience, and also includes interviewing consumers, defining user flows, and conducting user testing. 

 

In basic terms, if you were designing a house, UX would be the foundation whereas UI would be the furniture and paint. 

 

(Must read: How Starbucks improves user experience) 

 

 

How can you improve the UX of your website?

 

Now that you have a good understanding of the difference between UI and UX, we are going to take a look at some of the different things that you can do to improve the user experience of your website. 

 

1. Start by removing anything that is going to annoy website visitors

 

Rather than focusing on what you should do, we are going to start off by taking a look at what you should not do, and this is annoying your website viewers. Yes, a lot of your websites are causing irritation right now and you may not even realize it.

 

So, what sort of things are annoying to website viewers today? Examples include:

 

• Information overload

• Autoplay

• Pop-ups

• Background music

• Walls of text

• Website clutter

 

These factors will not make your site visitors feel at home. Remember, the Internet is all about ease and convenience, and the examples that we have mentioned above work against this, which is only going to cause frustration. 

 

2. Focus on optimizing your website

 

When it comes to providing a user experience, optimizing your website by working on the backbone of it is key. 

 

There are a lot of different factors that are at play here, with two of the most critical being speed and mobile responsiveness. 

 

• Website loading speed

 

You can use tools like PageSpeed Insights to discover how quickly your web pages load so that you know where to make improvements.

---

Homepage of PageSpeed Insights

---

According to Trinity, 70 percent of consumers say that their purchasing decisions are impacted by site speed. At the same time, only 15 percent of sites operate at what is considered an acceptable page speed, so there are clearly improvements to be made.

 

Some of the different ways that you can boost the speed of your website are as follows:

 

• Optimize images

• Use a content distribution network

• Change your website server

• Leverage browser caching

• Remove render-blocking JavaScript

• Reduce redirects

• Minify HTML, JavaScript, and CSS

• Enable compression

 

• Mobile optimization

 

Another key area of your website is how it performs on a mobile device. When you consider the fact that smartphones represent the device that people use the most to access the Internet, you see why it is so important that your site works effectively on a small device. 

 

In fact, for the first quarter of 2021, mobile devices, which do not include tablets, generated 54.8 percent of the web traffic from around the world. This is a trend that has pretty much been consistent since the start of 2017.

 

We are sure you have experienced it yourself where you have checked out a site on your mobile phone only to be frustrated because you have to scroll for hours on end, some of the features don’t work, and the images are way too big for the screen size. In most cases, you simply give up, right?

 

You do not want people to have the same encounter when they access your website via their mobile device. 

 

(Related blog: What is Mobile Computing?)

 

So, here are some different tips and ideas to assist you when it comes to optimizing your website for mobile use:

 

• Never user Flash

• Pick a web design that is 100 percent responsive

• Add videos

• Test pop-up usage

• Add AMP

• Identify features that are not mobile-friendly so that they can be removed or amended

• Compress your images

• Use structured data

 

Luckily, things like mobile responsiveness and site speed optimization aren’t too expensive or challenging to implement thanks to the huge assortment of tools and web services available today.

 

3. Provide information efficiently and concisely

 

When someone visits a website, they do so with the aim of extracting some sort of information. 

 

This may seem like a very obvious statement to make! However, a lot of companies do not seem to understand this when you look at their website design.

 

By providing information in a structured and elegant way, you can make sure that the user gets what they were looking for.

 

A lot of web designers today seem to be moving toward designs that are simpler. Many are implementing bullet-point lists to convey information, and this is proving to provide excellent results. 

 

Statistics show that 70 percent of people will look at lists with bullet points whereas only 55 percent of users will look at a list that does not have bullet points. 

 

It is also profitable to provide information in a clear and concise manner. This is because you can make sure your intended message is conveyed successfully, as well as drawing attention to appropriate elements. 

 

(Must read: Using Data Handling and Digital Marketing to maximise customer experience)

 

4. Layout your website in a strategic manner

 

The layout of your website dictates how easy it is to use. There are many different approaches you can take in this regard. It is certainly not a case of one-size-fits-all when it comes to getting the layout of your website right.

 

• Have you considered brutalism?

 

In 2021, brutalism continues to be on the rise when it comes to website styles. For those who are unaware, this is a minimalist and ray approach to website layout, which focuses heavily on user experience. 

 

A good example of this is the PART Architects website:

---

A view of PART Architect

---

• Beautiful, artistic websites

 

You do not need to keep things as minimal as possible. Instead, you could opt for something artistic and elegant. 

 

Putting beauty and creativity first can help to establish your brand as a true risk-taker and a leader in your market.

 

Of course, you still need to make sure that your website is intuitive to use and provides an excellent experience. 

 

• Seeking something more conservative?

 

If so, thinking in regards to how the layout can enable your visitor to understand the information you are presenting is the way to go. Simply applying logic to your layout will never fail to be effective. 

 

• Other layout trends to consider

 

Other trends that we have noticed in recent times include broken-grid layouts and minimalism. 

 

These trends both highlight how important it is to reduce website clutter, which is a common theme when it comes to website experience.

 

5. Provide engaging content

 

Last but not least, another way to enhance the user experience your website provides is by offering engaging content. 

 

Effective content strategies concentrate on telling the story of a brand with the purpose of establishing a connection between the client and the business.

 

With the correct strategy, content can come in many different formats, from videos to blog posts.

---

 

Example of content marketing strategy

---

Using content to help establish the identity of your brand will help with making sure that possible customers know more about the business they are buying from.

 

This is critical because familiarity increases trust. In fact, 82 per cent of consumers are more likely to trust a company after reading custom content that they have produced.

 

(Recommended blog: How big data used content marketing?)

 

 

Final words on improving the user experience of your website

 

So there you have it: some of the different approaches that you can use to improve the experience your website provides. 

 

The importance of this should not be overestimated. If your site has a poor user experience, your bounce rate is likely to be high, which means your online viewers are dissatisfied and your search engine visibility will also reduce as a consequence. 

 

Make sure you continue to test and monitor your website so that you can pick up on any areas that need some tweaks and amendments.