User experience (UX) is an essential element when it comes to website designing. Your website design must focus on elevating accessibility, usability, and user interface interaction efficiency on your site. The purpose of creating an excellent improving user experience is to encourage your users or visitors to explore your site or take action.
The experience begins as soon as a visitor lands on your site. Whether they like it or not or should they talk about it, it’s all based on their experience on your website.
Hence, it is essential to ensure user research that your website performs well, provides information, and doesn’t take too long to load.
If you think getting a responsive website is a hassle, here are some terrific tips that help in boosting user experience on your site!
1. Choose the Right Platform
You can find plenty of options when it comes to finding the platform for your website. The right platform looks good and performs optimally. According to 99designs.com, around 46% of web users determine a website’s credibility by evaluating its design. Since there are many options available, it isn’t easy to choose the one for your site. You can think about what features you would need and how often you want to make changes.
WordPress
WordPress is one of the hybrid platforms that are a combination of DIY and extra help. It is a massively popular content management system and open-source website development tool. The platform is the best if you are building a content-focused website.
Moreover, it comes with plenty of plugins that optimize your site for the search engines and create a customized contact form. It doesn’t have an eCommerce option, but its multiple plugins allow you to incorporate or pair it well with Shopify.
Customization
WordPress enables you to build a highly functional and attractive WordPress site if you are a tech-savvy individual. You can choose from multiple template designs, get a customized design, or purchase a template from another source. Moreover, you can change the design elements and features on the platform without coding.
2. Go for Intuitive Navigation
Your website’s navigation can either make or break the user experience. A good design enables users to find their answers, whereas a lousy design annoys visitors, making them leave the page.
Following the rule of thumb, your site’s navigation structure should allow visitors to land on any page and access required information within three seconds. Moreover, you want users to spend more time on the site and explore it.
Therefore, incorporate links and encourage them to click on them by sparking their curiosity and offering great deals. Website navigation is crucial for many reasons. It mainly enables your visitors to move from one page to another without any hindrances. When the website’s navigation is on-point, your visitors might return, place an order or subscribe to your newsletter.
3. Never Ignore Visual Factors
You can focus and work on your site’s visual factors to ensure your visitors’ better user experience. Here’s how you can improve those factors.
Website Layout
Focusing on your site’s layout not only improves user experience but also helps generate conversions. Your layout needs to be simple in scope, easy to navigate, and offer a great user experience.
For example, you can keep the navigation simple and use sufficient white space to drive all attention to the headline and call to action. This way, you can keep the critical information at the forefront to make it accessible.
Color Palette
It would help if you chose the color palette for your site wisely. Colors have whole psychology associated with them, and using them appropriately can facilitate user experience. For example, if you want to appear as a trustworthy brand, you can consider using the blue color. If you want to add a touch of sophistication to your site, black color can become a decent option.
Imagery and Visual Content
Videos and images promote engagement on your site. However, it would be best if you didn’t overdo it. Because visual content increases website loading time affecting your user experience. It’s best to optimize images and videos that you plan to upload on your site, not to impact the speed.
Fonts
Researching about fonts can help you find the best ones for your website’s design. You can find the best font for your site’s design by researching. Because each font family has different characters and variations, take Tisa, for example. It can become the best substitute for Arial or Helvetica fonts. Tisa works well when there’s a need for more character to the design while maintaining readability.
Many website owners want to maintain a friendly appearance with free fonts without compromising readability. In that case, you can consider Open Sans as it offers excellent legibility. The Open Sans font has stronger letterforms making it an excellent alternative for default sans serif fonts.
Content Structure
To improve your site’s user experience, it’s essential to focus on your content structure. Longer paragraphs stuffed with information fail to grab the attention of the visitors. That’s why it’s imperative to structure your content accurately.
For example, there must be subheadings, shorter paragraphs, bullet points, etc. If you have a blog category on your site, ensure that each blog follows a proper blog writing format to make it easy-to-scan and read.
Maintain Spacing
You need to maintain spacing while placing the elements on your site. Ignoring spacing between those elements can affect your site’s visual appeal and overwhelm your visitors as well.
4. Keep an Eye on the Latest Trends
When it comes to improving your website’s user experience, it’s wise to follow current trends. Outdated layouts often fail to engage visitors. Hence, before you start designing your site, understand what is trending with the demographic you will be targeting.
Some of the website design elements such as fast load time or user-friendly navigation are essential to follow. What if we tell you that keeping your site at the forefront of search engines and design using innovative features and elements is also essential?
Use Technologies for Better User Experience
A modern website design helps incorporate elements that engage your audience and improve their experience on the site. For example, you can develop your site using technologies such as “Lazy Loading” and “Infinite Scroll” that help in loading specific content that your audience wants to see. The infinite scroll works well with long-one-page websites.
5. Go for a Responsive Design
Most website traffic generates from mobile devices. According to a2hosting.com, around 51.92% of online activities were performed on mobile phones only in the first quarter of 2020.
Hence, it’s essential to opt for a responsive website design that functions well and facilitates mobile users. You can scale up or down a responsive website to suit any screen size.
Moreover, you can optimize your site by opting for specific techniques such as using optimized fonts or incorporating a mobile menu, etc.
6. Double-Check Website’s Usability
To improve your site’s user experience, you need to evaluate its usability before making it live. The evaluation will help detect whether or not your site is usable for visitors. In the process, you can also double-check if the site works well for those with vision impairments. Here’s how you can evaluate your website’s usability.
A/B Split Testing
Split testing identifies if a feature is user-friendly or not. The procedure includes testing different versions of your page by changing colors, content, and placement of elements to see which one performs better.
Heuristic Evaluation
Heuristic evaluation is a process that involves a specialist that examines the interface of your website for usability. The procedure detects problems in the user interface to fix them and improve the user experience.
Questionnaire
You can design surveys and ask your visitors if they face any problems while exploring your site.
7. Call to Action on Every Page
Call to action (CTAs) are essential elements for any website. These CTAs encourage visitors to take action and navigate your website easily. Therefore, think about CTAs critically and add at least one compelling call to action on each page of your site.
Websites such as WUFOO did a great job by making their entire page action-oriented. They encourage users to take the next step using time-sensitive language such as “Sign Up Now.” If you observe closely, you will find action-oriented language such as “Get Started” available at the end of the page.
Some ideas for a call to action you can follow.
- Provide a link to your contact page featuring a form.
- Provide subscribing options to your newsletter.
- Provide links to other pages containing in-depth knowledge on a topic.
- Ask them to download helpful guides or product catalogs.
Summing it Up
You can explore types of website and choose one for you. But, ensure that your website design is responsive and takes your users to the data or information they need while cutting off distractions that might come in the way.
You can also work on navigation, layout, your site’s responsiveness, visual optimization, loading time, typography, or color scheme to improve your site’s functionality dramatically.
Also read about: What Are Website Heatmaps? The Ultimate Guide
