A business’s web site is an important tool, however, with constantly changing technology your site will eventually look outdated. Additionally, with intense competition between businesses, you will find that many companies are constantly working to improve their web site and the user experience it offers. You do not have to just wait until your site eventually looks dated to update it.
Your business has most likely redesigned its web site a few times over the years. Redesigns are fantastic as they allow you to address issues your customers have with your current site and improve the user experience. But you may not have the budget or time right now to hire a web site development company to do a full overhaul of your web site. Here are a few items you can do to adjust on your current site to create a more useful experience for your site’s visitors:
Utilize white space
White space is an essential element of good design. It will help your web site look clean and modern. Additionally it will enable visitors to focus on key elements and not be distracted by clutter. White space around your headlines, titles and text will improve retention of content by users by 20% (Crazy Egg).
Adding white space is a great way to touch up your site as it give it a more fresh and open feeling that is in-line with current trends. But be careful with how you utilize white space on your web site. If you add too much white space around your site’s content that is above the fold, it might push valuable information lower on the page than you would like. You will want to maintain a balance between what is most essential to convey and utilizing white space to highlight that information.
Improve calls to action
When a visitor arrives at your web site, what do you want them to do? Do you want to them to buy something? Contact you for a quote? Or subscribe to your newsletter? Your web site’s calls to action are important. A call to action is a button, text or graphic that is there to prompt a visitor to click it and perform a particular task. Calls to action should assist customers in their efforts to efficiently navigate your website and do what they want to do on your website.
Consider the psychology behind color when creating buttons or other calls to action. Different colors create different subtle messages to visitors, so it is important to first think about the message you want to convey and choose the color of your call to action accordingly. After you have made your choices for colors that go well with your corporate branding, you should test your calls to action to see what works best for your web site. You can easily do this with A/B testing. In testing you will find that certain colors will outperform others and increase click rates.
Improve page speed
Modern web site visitors are typically impatient and goal-oriented. No longer are visitors willing to sit and wait for information like they were in the 56k modem days. With millions of web sites available, if users have to wait for your page to load they will typically just hit the back arrow on their browser and look elsewhere for what they are looking for.
You want a web site that takes no more than 2 seconds to load. Web users will abandon a website that takes longer than that to load. One of the best ways to gain visitors to your web site and boost user engagement is by improving your web site’s loading speed. Users tend to abandon web sites that aren’t loaded within 3 seconds. To make matters worse, 79% of web shoppers who experience trouble with web site loading speeds say they won’t return to the site again (Akamai).
Make it responsive and mobile friendly
In the modern day your web site needs to be mobile friendly. It is now easy for users to access the internet on various devices and it is important that your web site is ready for these visitors. Responsive web design has been the predominate method of doing this but beyond that you will want to make sure all elements of your web site are mobile friendly.
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We can all think of businesses who have succeed with their mobile apps and, unfortunately, we can all think of businesses who struggled with their mobile app.
Looking at mobile apps there are certain things that seem common to poor performing mobile apps, before you start your next mobile app development project make sure that you are not making these same mistakes. One of the most common mistakes with lower performing applications is a poor user experience. Think about how your users will feel when engaged with your application. Will it create delight? Frustration? In fact, a poor user experience can extend beyond a user simply not using an app, with 54% stating that a poor user experience would make them less likely to use other products from that business (Oracle).
Key to creating a great user experience is an effort to align your app with customer needs. It definitely needs to be easy to use and intuitive, but does your app do what customers expect it to do when the download it? Think about what you need in your app to retain your users. What will keep them coming back? Successful apps are tuned into their users’ needs.
It is important that you analyze the mobile journey taken by of your customers, from there you can determine which actions are most frequently performed. Then you can determine how to streamline the user experience to best meet the needs of your customers.
Another issue with apps that fail are they focus too much on selling the customer. Does your app off little or no value to the customer? Do you see it just as a tool to sell customers? Apps like this are bound to fail as customers will have little reason to use them. Once again, this goes back to focusing on the needs of your customer.
When budgeting for your project make sure that you plan a proper amount for user research and user experience design. These items will make or break your mobile app.
Additionally, you will want to make sure you plan on reviewing and updating your app. Improve the execution of processes within your app to improve the user experience. Carefully review the capabilities your app offers and and look for ways to elevate the the performance of those activities.
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The days of design just for the sake of design seem to be long since gone when it comes to digital media.
Digital designers now days focus on human interaction. This change has designers looking at use rather than simply creating designs.
Usability is where advantage lies in today’s marketplace.
A UI | UX design company with top digital designers will bury themselves in the world of customers. They look at projects from the customer’s point of view and create user interfaces to meet their needs as intuitively as possible. These firms check ego at the door and concentrate on how things are used.
As Steve Jobs famously stated, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
Looking forward, mobile and digital design will be grounded in a customer centric approach, focusing on use in a way to empower consumers. More and more businesses will see the success of those focusing on the user experience and follow their lead.
But keep in mind it isn’t just a design trend that is propelling customer centric design. Consumers are becoming progressively less patient, if web sites and mobile apps are not immediately easy to use, a customer will not take the time to learn how to use it and a sales opportunity may be lost. It is essential in the modern marketplace to provide tools that are easy to use.
Companies that have taken the plunge and focus on design have outperformed the S&P 500 by 219 percent between 2004 and 2014 (Design Management Institute). Clearly a focus on design pays off.
One of the hottest trends within the world of user experience design is Contextual UX.
Contextual UX allows a system to adaptive to the needs of a user. Contextual UX also allows for a system to integrate situational context. A great example of contextual UX are the ‘Recommendations for you” sections on Amazon.com or the sections called “Inspired by your browsing history”. Amazon is delivering content based on the individual needs of each user.
By balancing effective customer centric design with personalized content delivery the needs of the customer are addressed to increase interaction and improve the experience for each user.
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