Your website works 24/7 to promote your business and serve your customers. As a hardworking entrepreneur, you need to capitalize on your web presence’s powerful impact, and that means putting user experience first. Here are ten tips to make your website’s user experience (UX) the cornerstone of your marketing strategy and create a strong first impression and lasting user satisfaction.
1. Research Users
User-centered design places usability and the user’s needs at the core of the design process. Find out what your target audience needs and design your website to show how your business meets those needs to solve your customers’ pain points with easy-to-use features.
2. Keep It Simple
Optimize navigation with simple and responsive design. Avoid filler and confusion that make your website a busy, overstimulating muddle.
Pare down page content to single topics, lead with the strongest information, and stay tightly focused on the page’s intended function.
3. Cut Visual clutter
Take advantage of whitespace for a clean and polished look. No, your backgrounds don’t need to be white, but using spacing between lines and sections, wider margins, and generous borders around sections makes your content easy on the eyes and conveys a sense of unrushed professionalism.
4. Focus on Easy Navigation
Clear visual distinction is key to engaging users with user experience designs. Employ contrast, color, top-weighted organization, and simple calls to action (CTAs) to make navigating your website natural and intuitive.
Use well-placed and visibly distinct buttons and hyperlinks to provoke action and incentivize navigation throughout the site.
5. Protect Flow
Organize information using headings, subheadings, and bullet points that lay out a logical roadmap to users, keeping them reading while optimizing scanability.
Additionally, stay mindful of your website’s load time. Lagging page speed and 404 errors hurt usability and cause your users to lose interest.
6. Build Quality Content
In the field of user experience, website relevance lives and dies on content. Make sure you publish quality articles, videos, and infographics that inform, delight, and empower your users.
7. Boost Accessibility
Over half of web traffic comes from mobile devices! Ensure that your website’s user interface is mobile-friendly: that it loads, looks, and navigates properly on both computers and mobile devices.
8. Employ Consistent Formatting
Stay interesting and visually consistent in text formatting. Be sensitive to font changes, size, style, and usage.
9. Utilize Images
Strong visual design and well-chosen pictures attract and inform users. Avoid competing images that distract, and be sure to adjust images into compact files—lightweight images and compressed images—that load quickly and smoothly.
10. Get Feedback
Perform user experience (UX) reviews to gauge your website’s effectiveness and usability, and include feedback in design revision.
Final Thoughts
Maximizing user experience takes your website from rudimentary to advanced. See your views increase and build your user base with enhanced stats, improved functionality, and satisfied users that share your site and return time and time again.
Put these ten user experience (UX) tips to work for your small business website! Contact Randy Speckman Design to learn more about how to apply tools and trends to improve your website.
