Your Complete Guide to Improving User Experience

What is UX and why is it so important?

UX or User Experience is the practical application of empathy used to observe, analyze, and evaluate a user’s engagement with a digital product. It is a process of increasing user satisfaction by improving- the usability, accessibility, and efficiency of user interaction and observing the set of behaviors that users display when interacting with the website or apps.

With the rising competition and frequent changes in the digital market, product managers and business owners are steadily investing more time and resources in honing User Experience for the products and services they offer. And unlike some common misconceptions, UX is not just about aesthetics or making the digital products look nice. 

Rather it’s more focused on developing a blueprint for a product’s experience, outlining its ecosystem, information architecture, content strategy, and recognizing how it’s creating value for end users. 

The importance of User Experience (UX) cannot be overstated. And there are 3 key factors –

1. Brand reputation 
2. Customer loyalty 
3. Sales – that are on the line if you fail to prioritize your website’s UX.

The UX of your business website defines your brand. A website (or application) that is unappealing, hard to use, is slow or poorly laid out – will cause visitors to leave, at the same time, degrade the standing of your brand credibility and recognition. 

And more importantly, UX is vital to perfectly fulfil the customer’s needs, aiming to provide constant positive experiences that in turn keep a user loyal to the brand, retain and generate repeat customers, and drive online sales. Also, User Experience is important because it provides insights into what customers want and expect from your website.

A happy end-user is the key to success, and in today’s era of web/app economy, without well-crafted UX design, this would be impossible to achieve. Whether you’re a blogger, developer, graphic designer or someone in an entirely different field, good UX can help you and your company grow.

Great UX means higher conversions

Now if you’re wondering what UX has got to do with conversions,well, the answer is- everything.

Great User Experience is a means to an end. You don’t create awesome user experiences just to make it look beautiful. You want it to lead to something—be it roaming around on your website or buying your stuff.

So, how do you create a good user experience?

As per Ryan Singer, you need to cut it down to three steps:

1. Know what’s common to all people. Understand how their brain works, how people view websites, what makes people tick, keep attention, come across as credible, and so on.
2. Know what’s special about your users. How is your target group different from everybody else? Understand their purpose for using your product, how they talk about it, their points of reference, and so on. 
3. Be empathetic to your users. See it from the user’s perspective. If you know the job they want to get done, you can put yourself in their shoes and make the right decisions.

Some more ways of ensuring that the User Experience is a good one are-

1. To write copy that is simple to read and understand, includes clear instructions, is written by someone that truly understands the topic
2. Bears FAQs in mind, and
3. Always address the user, by using ‘you’ and not ‘we’ in the text.

List of ways in which you can improve UX

People are different so user experience has many subjective elements, because UX evolves from a user’s perceptions as they interact with a website or app to perform a specific use case, such as buying a product or service.

And once again, when we talk about designing or improving UX, we first need to be on the same page that design is problem-solving, not just “making things pretty.”

Here are a few tips to enhance your site User Experience-

1. Research

Start with some thorough user research on your target audience. Who are going to use your site, their demographic, interests etc. 

2. Simplicity & Consistency

Keep it simple and practice responsive design. Use whitespace and headings 

to enhance your design and make different elements visually distinct. Maintain consistency of the user and seamless flow from one aspect to another throughout the journey.

3. Responsiveness

Make your website mobile optimized. Make sure the page loading time doesn’t exceed 3 seconds.

4. Separate CTAs

Putting more than one call-to-action button right next to or on top of another can confuse readers and reduce clicks for both. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t include multiple CTAs on a page. If you have a long-form blog, landing page, or sales page, adding intermittent CTAs can help boost conversions. So you may consider placing a variety of CTAs at different levels of engagement to have the opportunity to convert the user at different points. 

5. User Behavior

Gain a deep understanding of how people are clicking and navigating through your website. Personas, user scenarios, and empathy maps. Run some User Testing like A/B testing, eye tracking, heatmaps, observations and interviews etc to have in-depth insights on the website preferences and activity of your audience. 

Use Design Thinking for understanding customer’s needs, rapid prototyping, and generating creative ideas—that will transform the way you develop products, services and processes.

6. Customer Journey Maps

That’s the touch points within a scenario where an end user is interacting with a digital system. Check those for identifying usability issues across omnichannel experiences. 

Also, use tools for heatmaps indicating areas of user activity, where on a long-form page people stop scrolling, the hot spots and strategic areas to place sales content and CTA’s. 

See how many clicks you’re getting on a particular section.Say, if the graphic at the top of the form was getting more clicks than most other things, we would want to make sure the image was hyperlinked to an important page — such as a landing page.

7. Optimize the Most Important Pages

It’s imperative to prioritize to improve the user experience. Often, the most important pages are your homepage, landing pages, sales pages, about page, and contact page. Run some user behavior reports, and start A/B testing. Focus on one area at a time and follow the priority list.  

8. Improve Your Customer Service

Experience with customer service is part of the overall user journey. So when/if the situation demands the customer service needs to maintain consistency and standards. They should speak customer’s language and understand their stories and pain points. Update them of the system status. 

9. Get Feedback

Ask customers how you can improve. User feedback through customer service, be it questions or complaints, is a gold mine of user expectations. 

10. Conduct a UX Audit

Conduct the review to find weaknesses and discrepancies in the system to resolve the issues for better performance and improved UX.

How to tell if your company’s UX is effective?

In order to achieve a high-quality User Experience in a company’s offerings, there must be a seamless merging of the services of multiple disciplines including user research, engineering, marketing, graphical and industrial design, and interface design. 

The simplest and most objective measure is the conversion rate (purchase, signup, quote request, repeat logins, etc.). You can use these key UX measurement tools to get quantifiable, measurable, and reliable data points that evaluate the effectiveness of your UX strategy.-

1. Abandonment Rate
2. AOV: Average Order Value
3. CSAT: Customer Satisfaction Score
4. NPS: Net Promoter Score
5. SUPR-Q: Standardized User Experience Percentile Rank Questionnaire
6. SUS: System Usability Scale
7. TPI: Task Performance Indicator

After you start tracking particular UX metrics in correlation to your business KPIs, make sure that you repeat calculations over a period of time to observe trends and get a better idea of what’s working and what is erroneous.

Conclusion 

A well-designed user experience is about leading a user to the data or resources they need, while cutting off everything that might stand in their path. If your UX strategy clicks with your target audience, your product prospers and grows.

Finding great UX design experts that know how to reach your marketing goal can bring life to stifled customer conversion rates. 

Contact us to engage in a free consultation on your UX strategy.