UX directly relates to your conversion rate and customer satisfaction.
If you don't create a high-quality experience for your mobile users, you risk missing out on nearly 50% of consumers.
Your content hierarchy should only be three or four levels.
Customer feedback is a useful tool to improve UX.
User experience, or UX, is one of the most crucial factors you should keep in mind if you're a business owner. UX encompasses how your website both looks and functions from a consumer perspective. A poor UX could decrease your web traffic, sales and customer engagement, having a negative impact on your business.
There are plenty of ways to improve the experience users have on your site. We are going to look at four tips you can use to master UX so that your customers have a smooth, enjoyable visit to your website.
These tips work for virtually every niche and industry. E-commerce storefronts, blogs and SaaS companies can all benefit from a better UX. If you're struggling with lead generation, traffic numbers or sales, this piece is for you. Let's dive in!
1. Master mobile design.
Research from We Are Social and Hootsuite shows there are 5.11 billion mobile users today. The average market penetration rate is a staggering 67%. In other words, mobile users are essential to your success.
It's no longer enough to create a mobile-friendly version of your website. When smartphones first became popular, business owners would allow consumers to look at their websites on phones, but there were severe limitations. In most cases, consumers had trouble purchasing items, browsing forums and reading blog posts from their devices. The only way you can honestly deliver a high-quality UX to your mobile users is if you create a website with a responsive design.
Instead of using the same design for all mobile users, your website should adapt to the user's device based on size and speed. This is a great tactic if you have an unusually high bounce rate. If people are quickly leaving your site, there's a good chance they are mobile users and your website is not delivering the experience they were expecting. You can add Google Analytics to your WordPress site to see what percentage of your users are mobile and how many are bouncing from your site.
You can use this information to start crafting a mobile experience that works for users, regardless of their device. Because UX includes the functionality of your website, you must make sure that up to half of your users can access your site from their smartphone or tablet.
Editor's note: Looking for help with your website design? Fill out the below questionnaire to have our vendor partners contact you with free information.
2. Ask for customer feedback.
We all know the importance of listening to customer feedback from a marketing standpoint, but if you're not using what consumers say to improve their experience, you're missing out on a massive opportunity. You could feature a simple customer survey on your website that asks consumers to rate their experience.
Ask questions such as these:
What can we do to improve your experience?
What features would you like to see in the future?
Did we meet your expectations?
These questions allow people to tell you directly what they want to see on your website. You can compile and analyze the results, looking for patterns. For example, if 70% of respondents say they had an issue finding specific posts on your site, this should clue you in that it's time to add a search function. Listening to customer feedback and making gradual changes help you vastly improve your UX.
You can also gain valuable information about your target audience. If you've noticed that your sales numbers are falling and can't figure out why, you might be distancing yourself from your target audience. The more you learn about your customers, the better chance you'll have to create a website that meets their expectations and answers their questions.
Consumers are more than happy to voice their opinions on social media channels, and this is all prime material for designing and improving your UX. Feedback can come from many different channels, all of which are valuable for learning what your customers expect from your website.
3. Simplify your blog hierarchy.
Blog page hierarchy can have a considerable impact on how consumers feel about your website. Blogs are generally jampacked with content, but if there's no common flow between articles, confusion can quickly set in.
Let's say you have a website that's all about marketing and lead generation; your blog would likely feature multiple categories, such as email, social media and content strategies. In this example, each post on the blog would go under one of these categories, excluding one pillar article that covers the topic broadly.
The content you create should only go three or four levels deep when you're internally linking. Here's an example of a natural progression of blog hierarchy:
Pillar post: "Email Marketing 101"
Level 2: "Mastering Drip Campaigns"
Level 3: "Boosting Email Engagement"
By stage three or four, consumers can follow the flow of the topics. If your hierarchy is sporadic and complex, readers could get frustrated and leave your website.
We are not suggesting you limit the number of pieces you write under each topic. Instead, we recommend that you keep the internal linking of articles to three or four levels deep.
4. Redesign your forms.
We all use forms as a way to gather feedback, take payments, activate blog comments and much more. If your form design is clunky and doesn't reflect the rest of your website, consumers may feel cautious about entering their personal data on your site.
Imagine going to a website to buy something, and everything looks great ... except for the payment form. It looks messy and pixelated, and words go beyond the barrier and show through the background of the website. Would you feel comfortable putting your credit card information in that box? We didn't think so.
Consumers have the same expectation when they visit your business's website. They want to see responsive forms that accurately collect data and look visually appealing. As we mentioned earlier, design and functionality are the major factors in determining UX.
You can make other design decisions when creating forms for improved UX. The placement of your error message is crucial if you want consumers to engage with your form. We have all experienced websites that ask us to fill out a form, only to hide an error message at the top or bottom of the page and make us search for the field we didn't fill out correctly. Design your forms so that error messages appear alongside the field where the error occurred.
As tech moguls create programs that allow business owners to customize their websites, you can expect to see an increased push for improved UX. If you can slowly improve the experience users have on your website, you will gain traction. Consumers love engaging with brands that listen to feedback and make changes for the better. Over time, business owners around the world will continue to fine-tune UX with scholarly research and analytic data. Keep an open line between your brand and audience on social media if you want to discover even more opportunities to impress your target audience with a stellar UX.