The experience a user has on your site determines if they buy from you, bounce away, or return one day. Ensuring your website creates a positive, memorable experience isn’t an easy task. UX design is an ongoing duty. You must check your site frequently, poll your customers and make adjustments as different web design trends and technologies change.
If the day is new, then there is likely a UX design feature you can add to your site to make the experience better for site visitors. However, there are some tweaks you can make today to improve your overall user-friendliness and keep people on your page.
1. Create Detailed Descriptions
About 33 percent of people abandon a purchase when they can’t find the correct information. Take the time to update your product descriptions and make sure they contain every detail a consumer needs to decide whether or not to buy the product. Detailed descriptions include text, but also should have photos that highlight the product from various angles.
2. Include Reviews
The average consumer has no reason whatsoever to trust you. They’ve likely landed on your page via social media or a Google search. If you’re lucky, one of your other customers referred them. Put yourself in the mindset of the average consumer. They want to make sure you aren’t ripping them off and will deliver promptly.
One way to combat the automatic distrust your site visitor might feel is to include reviews from other customers. About 92 percent of consumers read online reviews before deciding to buy.
Rover is an app that matches dog owners with available walkers and sitters in their area. Users must entrust these people with something precious to them — their pets. So, Rover adds in-depth reviews of the people who pull up in your area and does some additional vetting to make sure anyone who signs up as a caretaker is safe, friendly and qualified.
3. Simplify Your Page
Over time, it’s easy for a website to become cluttered. Decluttering is another situation where you need to put yourself in the mindset of your average site visitor. When you land on the home page, is it clear what step you should take next? If there are too many options, you risk losing the site visitor instead of converting them into a lead. Declutter landing pages and streamline information, so the user goes through the sales funnel logically.
4. Add a Survey
Do you want to get to know your customers better and customize your website to meet their needs? One way to gather intel is to include a customer survey on your page. Sure, digging into analytics tells you a lot about the behaviour of your site visitors, but a survey takes it one step further and allows you to gather the information you otherwise wouldn’t have.
NTS is a test, inspection and certification company serving other businesses in a variety of industries. They’ve added a customer survey in their footer to make sure they’re filling the needs of their customers and gather information on how to improve. The survey offers valuable insights to NTS to help them improve the overall user experience. It also shows the customer that NTS cares about their experience.
5. Tell a Story With Images
Experts estimate that people read only about 60 percent of an article. If you want to make a real impression on site visitors, take the time to add images that tell the story for you. This gives you two chances to reach site visitors with the information you’d like them to have. Images must be highly relevant to the topic at hand.
6. Tweak Your Call to Action (CTA)
Your CTA is what invites visitors to take action and go from visitor to lead, and you have many factors to consider when editing it. Test each possibility with A/B testing to see which tweaks work better with your particular audience. You can try changing the position of your CTA, the color of the button and the wording on the button itself.
Graze is a subscription-based box that contains healthy treats. The minute you land on the page, you see a bright green CTA that invites you to “get started.” The same invitation appears in the upper righthand corner of the screen, just above the fold and below the fold.
7. Refine Your Menu
Has your menu grown to so many options that it takes up multiple lines? Simplifying your menu reduces the number of choices available to site visitors and funnels them in the directions you’d like them to go.
Can you combine any buttons into a single category that is still descriptive? Are there any tabs you don’t need in the navigation bar?
8. Add Alt Tags to Images
Alt tags are more important than in the past. Not only does it make a difference in search engine ranking at times, but users who have turned off images or are visually impaired utilize the alt tags to figure out the layout and features of your site. If you’ve uploaded images over time and not added alt tags, spend an afternoon going through your media library and figure out what needs tags and better descriptions.
9. Optimize for Mobile
More and more people are using their mobile devices to access the Internet. About 52 percent of people said if they had a bad experience when visiting via a mobile device that they were less likely to do business with the company.
Easy Fixes
You can fix most UX design mistakes with minor tweaks. Other add-ons simply make the site even better than it was before. Anything you can do to improve the overall user experience helps your business grow.
