Tech Talk: "The importance of web UX and how to optimize it" with Ivan Knukic

Tech Talk: "The importance of web UX and how to optimize it" with Ivan Knukic

Here you'll find out how to design UX optimally and how to overcome common obstacles.

Your website is the most important weapon in your digital marketing arsenal as an online business. It is THE anchor of all online activities as well as a virtual contact point for customers.

With this in mind, you should also design your website to get the most out of your online business. The cleaner and clearer the website, the greater the likelihood that desired business goals will be achieved.

The website - that is, the "tool" to achieve the business goals - be designed to act as an ideal interface for consumers. If you don't pay special attention to the user interface of the website, you neglect the underlying purpose for which the website exists in the first place.

With this article, we want to show you the main hurdles that can occur when designing a seamless user experience and how to overcome them.

User Experience

Generally speaking, user experience is about how a person perceives, handles, thinks about a product, etc. What is the person's relationship with the product.

A product, in turn, can be anything. For example, a mobile app, a website, or a service offered.

This guide focuses mainly on how visitors can better use and perceive your website, and therefore better achieve why they are on your website in the first place.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) vs. User Experience (UX)

Search engines are getting smarter, tracking how users interact with and use the website itself, not just how many clicks SEO strategies bring in. Besides optimizing your website for search engines, optimizing it for people is also essential. After all, it is people who will (hopefully) become paying customers.

If the website doesn't meet the unwritten requirements of visitors, they won't stick around until they're ready to shop or fill out forms. If visitors can't find their desired information or navigate the site easily, search engines may also detect this through a higher bounce rate.

With this in mind, the effectiveness of both SEO and user experience should be kept in mind equally.

Is it really important to pay attention to UX?

Your website, as described above, is an incredibly important component of your online business. Designing a good UX also means getting one step closer to your business goals at the same time.

Bad practice when building your website often leads to errors in navigation and subsequently also presents itself as a major hurdle in reaching your interests.

Imagine this: you visit a website to get something done and are greeted by a weird layout, seemingly randomly thrown together fonts in five different colors, unnecessary images, questionable buttons, popups and ads floating around.

You probably wouldn't last long and do something else, right?

The owner of this website loses visitors, sales and profit. And this is often merely because of the website's makeup, possibly even without the company owner's knowledge.

In short, poor architecture leads to poor user interface, which in turn wastes a lot of potential for the company.

Users are fast these days. Within seconds of arrival, they will have evaluated your site and determined if they want to stay. If the site is chaotic, frustrating, or difficult to navigate, they'll hit the back button and come to a competitor's site later.

You don't want your website to do that, do you? A good place to start is knowing the issues that trigger a poor user experience.

Reasons for poor UX

The following points should provide an overview of the reasons for undesirable user experience on websites.

  • Too many steps: Few mouse paths and intermediate steps always make it easier when it comes to achieving something on the web. In other words, clearly give short navigation options.
  • Poor organization: In order to do something quickly on the website, you are endlessly confronted with other unnecessary things. This is frustrating.
  • Too many clicks: The competitor's online store takes its users to checkout in one click and you expect your users to navigate endlessly through your website? How is that going to work for you?
  • Wrong information: Users now have certain expectations about how a company will present itself online in the age of digital connectivity. Confusion and inconsistencies not only affect your user interface, but also leave quite a bad impression on your customers.
  • Fonts: Fonts are one of the main components of web design. They should not be unreadably small, nor should they be overly large. If possible, do not use the first 08/15 font.
  • Too many questions: long forms with many required fields and on top of that maybe even unnecessary information cause bad UX. You'll probably realize yourself that you don't really need to know users' hair color.
  • Too much text: Why push people to read 3,000 more words. Endless blocks of text require a lot of attention, are distracting, and you'll lose your customers.
  • Navigation Difficulties: Navigation is very critical! So important, in fact, that later in the article an entire section is dedicated to this topic.
  • Insufficient information: The user should not be led to a dead end just because they don't know which button to click next. All necessary details about a process should be clearly visible, if applicable.

The above list is in no way exhaustive, but it is a good first overview to improve the user experience on your website.

How do you design the perfect user experience?

There are a few things you can do to create a beautiful, user-friendly website. Consider the following tips when working on your website's UX.

UX is not just design

It's not just visual design that leads to a beautiful, streamlined user experience. Things like CTA buttons, website load times, content, ease of accessibility, etc. It's the sum that makes the whole.

All of this plays together and leads to positive behavior from website visitors. Increased customer loyalty comes from - generally speaking - the joy of browsing the website.

In addition to visual design, UX designers also conduct many surveys about the impression of the website. In this way, customer expectations can be better assessed and implemented accordingly. With the background that the focus here is not only on visual design, but also on how the website "behaves", the appropriate actions can be taken towards a successful UX.

The website for the customer

An essential part of good UX is making it easy for the customer to use the website comfortably. In some ways, this could be seen as part of customer support. The website and the UX is the digital face of the company and of course you want people to feel happy and satisfied here.

A well-built website equals a helpful, professional employee who is always ready to help customers. A half-heartedly designed website, on the other hand, can be compared to a rude, terrible customer support employee. It's obvious which digital employee is more likely to ensure a positive company reputation and a good user experience. Who would be more likely to be trusted?

Usability and Site Navigation

Website navigation is one of the most important considerations for a successful user experience. The website stands or falls on its navigation. For example, if a lot of features and details are packed onto the website, it will all be for naught if the website users can't find all of it.

A good rule of thumb for estimating how effectively a website's user experience is designed is to look at how long it takes the average user to reach their destination. Search functions should be fast and make browsing the entire site easy and painless.

Website users don't want to spend a lot of their time trying to figure out how to navigate the site in the first place. They want it to be quick. If you have to search around for too long to find the shopping cart in the online store, potential customers can get lost. No one has too much time to waste, so make sure everyone navigates like fish through water,your website.

Patience and unity

One of the basic principles of UX architecture is to reduce clutter. If the different pages of your website all look different, this visual inconsistency is lost potential. The website needs to offer a consistent shape, the same fonts, consistent arrangement of components, etc. This gives the user some confidence in what to expect from the website.

Be patient for this and invest some extra time, a consistent form does not happen quickly overnight. It will take some time, but the effect will be seen quickly.

To summarize

The essential core of UX of a website is to make sure that users show great interest in what you deliver to them. Users should be encouraged to use the site by any means possible - so make it simple, consistent, navigable, "likeable".

Anything that gets in the way of a seamless flow, a pleasant customer experience, and ultimately trust in your website, needs to be eliminated.

Your business goals are important, of course, so remember that the website can't help you with them if the UX isn't designed accordingly.

There are many helpful UX and SEO tools that increase traffic and engagement on your website - use them!

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