Principles That Will Make A Difference To Your User Experience
User experience is vital to just about everything. It makes the latest technology accessible to the public and makes websites favorable to use. An excellent user experience can thus make a significant impact today by enhancing the user experience and spreading the word about the great value of a perfect website design.
So, how do you improve the user experience on your website? In this article, you will learn about some of the best UX best practices that will drastically impact your website UX.
1: Website Security
Website security is one of the most critical factors that influence user experience. Security impacts user confidence which in turn impacts user experience. One perfect way of ensuring user confidence is by installing online security certificates.
Online security certificates act as official proof that websites meet the thresholds and guarantee data security and privacy. Users can quickly identify whether or not a website is well-equipped with the appropriate level of protection. For instance, users will check the HTTPS status of your website.
HTTPS websites have SSL certificates which are small cryptographic tools that ensure that all data transferred between site servers and users’ browsers are encrypted. A website without an SSL will expose sensitive user data to malicious intruders. Therefore, users will avoid non-HTTPS websites.
When user experience is your key priority (and it should), you should buy an SSL certificate and install it on your website. Today, there are so many cheap SSL certificate options that will give your website HTTPS status and instill confidence in your users. For example, you can buy a Rapidssl certificate, GeoTrust SSL certificate, or Comodo SSL certificate for instilling user confidence and data encryption. The three are some of the best certificates that will be perfect for your websites.
2: Content Prioritization
Captivating content is a perfect way of attracting users to your website. You have less than 8 seconds to grab a users’ attention. The question is, how can you utilize the eight seconds to your advantage and grab the user’s attention?
With website content, the concept of less is more must always apply. It would help if you avoided clutter when designing interface elements. Simple designs are what users love and what they need to get engaged. If you run a blog site, then ensure that you endeavor to provide nothing but quality content. It would be best if you considered hiring a freelancer to do the content creation on your behalf.
3: Search Box
A search box is yet another vital element to website owners who prioritize UX. A site with more search engine capabilities will be more likely to attract higher conversion rates than a website with a lower search engine capability. Having a custom search bar is one of the ways of giving search engine capabilities to your website.
Providing a search box will enable users who know what they want to quickly search the item instead of navigating through your website to search for the item. A search box thus saves users’ time, which has a positive impact on the user experience.
4: Optimize your site speed
Page load time has a direct impact on bounce rates. From the graph below, you notice that the longer a website takes to load, the higher the bounce rate.
Users usually get frustrated when a web page takes too long to load. An average internet user is impatient and will exit a site that takes too long to load. A slow website is a great hindrance to a positive user experience. Therefore, you must strive to ensure that you optimize your website load speeds. You can start by minimizing the image sizes, reducing the number of redirects, and leveraging browser caching.
5: Use Clear Calls To Action
Another critical aspect of the factors that influence user experience is “calls to action.” Your customers, prospects, and other web visitors are used to following visual cues to navigate through your site and determine which product or content might be helpful to them. As such, you need to use calls to actions that are visibly marked with an action word to provide your web visitors an easy time when navigating through your website.
On creating calls to action tabs, you should check on color variations. This is because different colors tend to evoke different messages, and this is why you must choose the colors wisely.
6: Minimize Data Input
If you have used smartphones for a long time like I have, you might have realized that at times, in the course of typing on your mobile phones, you will find extra characters that have nothing to do with what you are trying to say.
Let’s face it, typing on mobile devices can be challenging, and there is no natural remedy to it (other than autocorrect, whose accuracy is always in question). However, you can minimize the associated challenges by reducing data input.
As you know, most users prefer shortcuts to have things done quickly. You can help them reduce typing hurdles by providing them with short forms, next-word suggestions, and using a remember-me option for future uses. In addition, it would be best to relieve your users by providing autocompletes, recent search history, among other things, to accelerate their experience.
7: Catch your 404s
Search engines will not give severe punishment for the 404 error (page not found error). However, a website will punish you by turning away from your website. The 404 error irritates your users and makes them turn away from your site. Soon, you will start witnessing a surge in bounce rates, reduced conversion rates reduction in revenues. All these are because of a 404 error.
You must ensure that your website is free from such errors to make the customers’ journey as seamless as possible. To check whether your website has the 404 error, you can set up Google’s webmaster tool on your site to check for any crawl errors.
8: Perfect Contact Information
Contact information is one of the most critical elements that your web visitors expect to see on your website. It comes second after products and services, as illustrated in the figure below.
Visitors will sometimes run into issues and need to contact you directly to resolve the issues or make more inquiries about your products. There is no way they will reach out to you if you have not provided them with working contact details.
You need to have a contact page on your website. The contact page should be situated at a place where users will quickly locate it. Contact details should include things like phone contacts, email addresses, and physical addresses.
9: Be responsive & mobile-friendly
Mobile usage has been increasing recently, and we expect it to continue increasing even more. From the pie chart below, you notice that mobile usage has exceeded desktop usages. It means that most people now prefer using mobile devices to browse the internet.
A Statista report reveals that a whopping 3.2 billion people now own and use smartphones. Seeing a large number of smartphone usages should spark an idea of how important having a mobile-friendly website is. The idea is to give users what they prefer most, and in this case, they prefer mobile-friendly websites.
The first step to creating a mobile-friendly website is by starting with a mobile responsive web design. Although it is a fairly simple idea, a mobile-friendly web design could be a bit challenging task to bring to fruition.
10: Navigation Menu
Navigation usability is one of the best user-friendly best practices. However, one of the most irritating features of a website is inappropriate navigation. Improper navigation could potentially leave your website visitors lost and unsure of the next step to take. If you are the lucky one, some web visitors will scour through the navigation hurdles to accomplish their objectives. However, in most cases, most users will turn away from your website, thereby increasing the website bounce rates.
Here are a few tips that you can follow to create easy and simple navigation:
- Embrace predictability over uniqueness.
- Do not make your navigation challenging to comprehend. Always keep it simple.
- Be keen not to overdo minimalism.
- Be consistent with your theme and structure.
- Let your navigation tell users where they have come from, where they are headed and where they can go.
Conclusion
Ensure that you keep all the points mentioned above in mind when creating a website. You should understand that website visitors are an essential aspect of your website, and anything you do should aim at improving their experience. Additionally, ensure that you implement all these factors. Having one factor or just a few will not work perfectly for you. However, all these principles working in collaboration will help you improve the user experience on your website.
Mustafa Al Mahmud is the Founder of Gizmo Concept and also a professional Blogger, SEO Professional as well as Entrepreneur. He loves to travel and enjoy his free moment with family members and friends.