Six ways you can provide a better online user experience
Want to ensure your business website converts as many customers as possible? Here are six ways you can provide a better online user experience.
It’s not enough to simply have a website today. If you want to impress visitors (and hopefully convert them into customers) you need to give them an online experience that they’ll remember for all the right reasons.
There’s a good reason that UX Agencies and independent professionals are in high demand right now. They ensure that websites work properly; that they’re easy for people to use and deliver the promised service for users – from first click to confirming payment.
Six ways you can provide a better online user experience
But what happens if you can’t afford a UX expert for your own website? To help ensure you impress and convert as many customers as possible, here are six ways you can provide a better online user experience.
1) Invest in a professional
One of the easiest ways to make a mess of the user experience on your website is to try to put it all together yourself, especially if you have no previous experience of website design.
Because, although you can find tools that make creating your own website easy enough, you won’t usually be able to achieve a fully customisable and unique design. Instead, you’ll use pre-made templates that put you at risk of having a seriously similar website to somebody else.
Investing in a professional UX designer or freelancer will ensure that your business site is one-of-a-kind. A good web design service will also focus on the user experience during every step of the process, to ensure your website is as user-friendly as possible.
2) Consider your visual branding
Everything on your website will add to or subtract from a good user experience. So consider carefully what your visitors see when they land on your site, and how pleasing it is to the eye.
Do you have an eye-catching, attractive logo, for example? Or is it looking a little dull and boring? Do colours and graphic design on your website flow easily? Or do they clash a little bit? Is it too bright? Are the fonts easy to read, with large enough text? Is your visual branding consistent throughout?
Consider investing in a graphic designer or even a branding agency that provides web design services as well as printing services, to ensure your online presence to be easily matched to your offline business. The whole point of visual branding is to make your business more recognisable, after all.
3) Check your navigation and logistics
It doesn’t matter how amazing your website looks; if it’s difficult for your customers to find what they are looking for, then they’re going to leave disappointed (and without buying from you).
So check your website is laid out in a user-friendly way, with a simple navigation system, and search bar allowing your visitors to easily find what they need. The easier it is for your visitors to find their way around your website, the more likely they are to buy, recommend and return. (You can see examples of how to improve your navigation here.)
4) Make your information easy to find
Whether your site is an online shop, or you simply use it as an online base for your business, it’s important to ensure your visitors can easily find the information they need.
Make sure that every page has information like your company contact details, your brand, what you do, and any other information that you think your customers will need – including information on buying online, payment security, postage, and returns.
And don’t forget to include links to your social media profiles too, so people can find and follow you there.
5) Provide valuable content
If you want to stand apart from your competition and establish your brand as an authority in your niche, then make an effort to provide valuable content on your site.
Don’t just focus on selling products and services to your visitors – think about the kind of content your customers would love to see and share it in a blog on your site.
Posting informative, useful content that answer your customers’ questions, expand their knowledge, and enable them to solve problems will help to build the trust of your audience and set your brand apart from the rest.
6) Get descriptive
Lastly, if you are selling products or services online, make sure your descriptions are as detailed as possible. When it comes to showing off what you have to offer, more is definitely better.
Research shows that products with detailed descriptions, several photographs and videos, tend to sell faster and in greater quantities than those which only have a basic description.
So, take the time to include as much as possible on product pages – from product videos to customer reviews – it will make the experience better for your customer, and hopefully boost your profits, too.