If you have landed on this blog post, it’s probably for one of two reasons. The first is that you are unsure whether or not your website is providing a good user experience. The second is because you know your website is failing and you need to know how to rectify it. No matter what category you fall into, we have got you covered.
Common characteristics of poor user experience
You only care about sales. Yes, your website has been designed for marketing and sales purposes. However, the idea is to create a site that provides information, as opposed to merely being a sales pitch. You need to provide value if you are to create a loyal viewership.
Content updated infrequently. You need to keep things fresh for your users. If your content is old, your website won’t proposer. Regular changes are the only way forward.
Lack of contact information. A lack of contact information creates a lack of trust. When viewers go to your website, if they head to the contact page and there is only an online form and nothing else, it creates skepticism. It is even worse if there is no contact page or information at all.
Lack of engagement. People head to your website for a purpose. This purpose is to engage and interact with your brand on a one-on-one level. Engagement is one of the main SEO performance metrics. You are going wrong if communication is one-way traffic.
Your website is unnecessarily complex. If you were driving somewhere, you would not take a detour that would simply add more time to your trip, would you? Your website is the same.
You only use stock photographs. If you use stock photos on your website, you do need to be careful. While stock photographs aren’t all bad, there are many photos that are incredibly generic and used across so many websites. Instead, try to use original photos whenever you can.
Your website is slow to load. This is one of the main problems in terms of user experience for websites today. If your website is slow, UX suffers, and so does your search engine ranking.
How can you turn this around?
Describe your primary user. Quick, now, describe the main user of your website! The demographic description you have just come up with may be useful in marketing, but what does it offer in terms of designing and evaluating your website? The answer is: not a lot! Instead, you need to be able to describe the behaviors, needs, and goals of your users.
Optimize language capabilities. You can improve user experience by adding SaaS language translation, as well as interactive visual chat and audio features.
Interview users. You may think your website is great, but it’s not your opinion that matters. Interviewing website users is the only way to find out what is working and what isn’t.
Change web host. Change your web host provider. Look for companies like HostGator and iPage are known for providing impressive response times and 99.9% uptime, ensuring your site speed does not suffer.
Educate consumers. Earlier, we spoke about the need to bring value to your consumers in terms of your content. You need to create content that is designed to educate and inform your users. If you do this well, you will educate them to make the right choices, i.e. pick your business, rather than going for the hard sell, which does not work.
Implement responsive web design. If your website cannot be viewed optimally across all devices, from mobile phones to desktop computers, you know where you are going wrong. The vast majority of Internet users today utilize their mobile phones to browse the web. If you do not provide a website that can be viewed effectively on small devices, offering ease of navigation and minimal scrolling, panning, and resizing, you will only frustrate your viewers, resulting in a high bounce rate.
Evaluate your error messages. Nobody likes an error message, do they? When reviewing your error messages, ask yourself some key questions. Do they avoid blame? Are they precise? Are they constructive? Do they help the user? While users are never going to love receiving an error message, if they are constructed properly, they can help to ease some of your viewers’ pain.
Run a usability test. Last but not least, we cannot mention user experience without talking about the most powerful weapon in your arsenal. Running a usability test is of paramount importance. All you need is a few participants, and then you should give them different tasks to do on your website. Then, watch (and don’t say anything!). Of course, there are more complex versions!
