Guidelines for improving your website’s user experience

by eCommerceTechnologyUser Experience

Your website is the most powerful tool for online marketing. It is your salesman 24/7 at your disposal. A business website can leave a lasting impression on a customer, whether good or bad depends on a lot of factors.

       When you open and see Google Analytics, you see that people are visiting your website, but they aren’t doing what they are supposed to. Your website didn’t create much of an impact on their minds. If you put consistent effort into improving the users experience [UX] of your website than everything will flow smoothly and can enhance conversion ratio. 

What is UX ?

Digital trends are rapidly changing and can make your website feel old and outdated. To overcome this challenge, there are some ways and tips to improve your UX, to make it more helpful and useful. UX is the process of increasing user satisfaction, by improving the usability, accessibility and efficiency of user with the website. A good UX means :  * The user visited your website.

  • Scrolled through different pages.
  • Understood what the website is all about and
  • Finally got what they wanted.

Tactics to improve your website’s user experience

      A visitor is always on your website with a mission. Now it is up to you- how easy you make it for them to accomplish that mission. So here are the tactics that will improve your website UX and help users find the products more easily.

#1. Have a plan :

Now that you know that your site needs some improvements, it’s time to work to tackle them. Start research your customers journey from the time they visited your website to the moment they became a customer. While doing research, think about which pages they are going to view, what content they would like to read, what offers will convert them into customers. Understanding these things will help you to design your website accordingly. Knowing the needs of the customer, will help you know the key points of your website and can make changes accordingly.

#2. Simplify your design :

To have best UX, your website should be clean, in proper order and clutter free. Visually your website should be simple, as it will be easily understood by the user. Web visitor usually visit website to seek answers and not for creativity. So avoid complicating the website with designs. When you want a particular action to be taken by a visitor coming to your site, make your site hassle free with less clutter. Every page should have a single goal. The check out page for instance, contains only what is needed for the process of checkout.   

#3. Interactive content :

Using interactive content will make your site design fun and drive engagement. Keep churning out the new content. Nobody wants to visit a stale website. So keep producing a steady stream of content to keep the site relevant and current. High quality and informative content boosts the UX and in driving massive traffic to the site. So it is well said “content is king”. To enhance the UX try adding videos, games, quizzes. Make your content simple and clear. It should be accessible to a wider audience. Visitors should be able to engage with content after a quick glance.

#4. Optimize website speed :

If your website isn’t fast enough, most people will leave it almost immediately. Almost half of web users tend to leave if a website doesn’t load in three seconds and this will definitely have a big impact on your conversion rate. Site speed is one of the main factors for ranking websites in search engines. There are many tools available to make your site lightning fast, like web page test, Google page speed, yslow and others. 

#5. Mobile friendly design :

More than 50% of all internet traffic is from mobile devices. Google also has shifted its algorithm towards mobile users. The websites that perform best on mobile will enhance your website user experience. We live in a multi screen world. This is great. But when it comes to websites, we have to make sure that our website looks great on all of these screen sizes. That’s why it is important to make your website responsive. Responsive design helps solve many problems:

  • It adapts to screen size.
  • Improves user experience.
  • It is cost effective.
  • It is easier to manage

You can check whether your website is responsive by resizing your browser size. Your website should automatically adapt itself.

#6. Easily navigable :

website’s navigation is tied in with the user experience and your conversion rate. Bad navigation will lead to people leaving your website and not coming back- while good website navigation will not only keep people engaged on your website but also help convert more users. Best example for easy navigation is Amazon home page, everything is easy to find. At first glance you can see offers that are relevant to you, as well as any deals of the day or last minute deals. All you have to do is to click on them to see the offers. The easier you make it for them to navigate through your website, the better and better the chance they will convert.

#7. Use of white space :

white space is any empty space: on the sides, between paragraphs and around product images. White space has a significant impact on both user experience and your conversion rate. For instance use of white space can

  • Help you highlight a specific message that you want your visitors to see.
  • Draws people attention to something if you want people to notice something specific on your website [like an offer/discount],use white space around it.
  • It helps you to better organize your content and elements.

#9. Customers review :

when people search for products on platforms like Amazon or Flipkart, they tend to see the product reviews that contains mostly four or five stars. These reviews are from people who wrote out their experience with a product. Adding such reviews to your website helps the customer to gain trust in the product, which in turn pushes the customer to purchase it. As long as the reviews/testimonials are genuine, your website will surely enhance users experience and help in conversion too.

Conclusion:

To have a strong and positive impact of your website on visitors, your website should be speedy, mobile friendly, easily navigable, and a clean and clear website design, easy to understand. If your website is efficient and effective with your customers need, you will definitely be high. Year by year , you have to apply new strategies of improving your website. Improvement of website is necessary as expectations and technology keeps on changing from time to time.

Best UX practices to ensure a pleasant experience for your customers

by contenteCommerceblog

What is UX ?

The way your visitor feels about your website determines whether he/she will use it again is all about user experience{UX}. While navigating your website, if the visitor finds it difficult what the website is all about, than Conversions are too far- in fact your visitor will not return to your site again. Hence it is necessary that you pay attention to the UX on your website and strive to improve it. 

Keep your website simple and easily understandable. Your content should be to the point. The same goes for advertisements. 72% of the users get annoyed when seeing irrelevant ad’s and promotions on a site. Users now expect more functionality and better usability. Your website should be rich with relevant content and designed to provide them with everything needed to purchase and use your service or product.

To transform your website into an effective marketing tool, you have to create an effective small business website with a dynamic user experience.

The following practices will ensure a pleasant experience for your customer :

#1. Clean website design :

A clean and simple web design makes it easy for the user to find what they are looking for. Remove the unnecessary clutter on your website. Most website visitors will spend fewer than 15 seconds on your website. Grab your users attention above this and impress them to increase the time they spend on your site.

#2. Choose colors and fonts appropriately :

we want the layout to look attractive. If the visitor feels hard, to make out what your page says, the more likely they are to back out of it. The website back ground should be simple clean and always easy to read. So look carefully while choosing color. Make sure that there is a healthy contrast between back grounds and font colors. Make your font size unique- so that your users can actually read it without squinting or zooming in.

#3. Keep it simple :

Readability and accessibility play an important role in creating great user experience. Just because the text in your app is error free, doesn’t mean it is easy to read. Low readability will create navigation problems and your user might feel lost. Instructions should be straight forward and easy to follow. You can achieve simplicity of your website, if you use simple language, which all users can understand it.

#4. Speed up the loading time :

Your website should fully load in a few seconds, even if you are using a secure website format. Study shows that 53% of visitors will abandon a web page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Many times slow speed affects user experience because people treat surfing the web is like talking to people. If your webpage is slow than users will look for something else that says more in less time. Google page speed helps to know about your website loading speed.

#5. Regular updates :

Your website is the first impression a customer or client will have of your business. Make sure the information they see is current and updated on your website, if the customer see stale information, they may not visit your site again. Keep your website updated, by uploading new content, product related videos and photos. This type of changes attract the visitors to your website.

#6. Mobile device compatibility :

We live in multi -screen world. This is great. Now-a-days customers find it handy and easy to search through mobile. Make sure your website is mobile friendly or you may lose many customers. mobile friendly websites are responsive. Responsive design helps solve many problems.

  • It adapts to screen size.
  • Improves users experience.
  • It is cost effective.
  • It is easier to manage.

#7. Easy to navigate :

Navigation is a huge factor when it comes to SEO, and this is because it directly affects the customer experience. Customers should move swiftly and easily around your site without confusion. Easy navigation will make customers and clients want to return to site over and over. When your website offers a rewarding experience, users will be more likely to return to it.

#8. Know your target audience :

You design products for specific users, this means you will have to get to know them inside out. Find out what their problems and pains are? What their needs are? Only by providing solutions to these queries the customers will get what they want with ease. This will give users a pleasant experience while shopping on your website.

#9. Clear call to action :

For eCommerce sites, your purchase call-to-action [CTA] will generally be an add to cart or a buy now button. Having a clear CTA is essential to convert traffic into sales. Tests have shown that CTA button performs best at the point in the page where the visitor finds information they need. Use a more strategic approach and place the button at the point where the visitor is prepared to make a decision. The button should look different on your page. Phrases like Buy now, Check out and Add to cart work really well. They are tested, tried and true.

#10. Functionality :

Functionality is what UX is all about. For a great functionality, remove stocky images and difficult terms. Use right images that work for your audience. For instance website like Amazon doesn’t have the most beautiful design, but it has excellent functionality. 

#11. Include reviews on product pages :

Including customer reviews on your product pages can be a very powerful tool in converting visitors into buyers. Visitors look for reviews as this will help them to learn about the service customers received when ordering products. Showing customer reviews on product page will show new visitors that you are a trust worthy seller. 

#12. Offer different payment methods :

Offering different payment methods on your e-commerce store has lots of advantages including

  • Customer convenience 
  • Payment customization
  • More security

If people don’t see their preferred methods of payment they’re much more likely to abandon their cart. There are more than 200 different ways to take payment online. Use those payment methods which are more popular with your customer. Some popular methods are PayPal, Alipay and credit cards.

Conclusion :

The primary purpose of UX design is to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through utility, ease of use and pleasure provided in the interaction with a product. Users experience gives your business the ability to increase repeatable traffic. It also provides an excellent return on investment. Increases digital sales, saves labor and time.