What is website user experience?
Website user experience overs all manner of things on your site from how easy it is to find information to how obvious it is how users get in touch. Essentially the premise is making sure users find your site useful and can easily get what they want from it. It’s often easier to test user experience with someone outside of your business who had no involvement with the design process. That way, they can give you an independent audit, explaining what they liked and didn’t like about the way it worked.
Enhancing website experience
Some things to consider with enhancing website user experience include making sure the visuals are on brand, checking your content is easy to navigate and that calls to action are prominent. Consider how the user journey is around the site; a good UX designer will be able to make the transition between pages smooth. Design and function should work together to provide a pleasant, fast and efficient experience.
Bad user experience
At the very best, users will find your site frustrating wasting valuable time searching around for what they need. At worst, users will leave the site and not return losing business and leaving the customer with a bad experience with your brand. A bad user experience could prevent customers from being able to get in touch or checkout on an e-commerce site. It’s tempting to start with what you want to achieve when assessing your UX, but it’s worth considering what customers want to achieve. Take a look at your best and worst performing pages and see what differences they have.
UX and SEO
User experience can also have an impact on your SEO. Factors like how fast your site loads, how good your internal linking structure is and whether your site works on mobiles can all affect your ranking. Search engines want users to keep using them; websites want users to keep finding them so making sure visitors find your site easy to navigate and information simple to locate. With SEO crucial to your site’s success in a crowded market, it’s worth trying to enhance your position.
Customer experience
Ultimately user experience is all about enhancing a customer’s journey when using your site. Regular testing and creating prototypes based on available data is important to ensure you’re consistently meeting customer needs – design should be accessible. A good website will be optimised to ensure users convert into enquiries or sales – and make it as hassle free as possible!
