Customer satisfaction is vital for driving business growth, and your website UX plays a massive role in that.
Despite that, many businesses overlook their user experience or just go with whatever they think works well or looks good.
But a great user experience isn’t universal, and while you might love how your website looks and feels, your users might think differently.
To show just how important your website UX is and why intensive research and testing are needed to build an online experience that your customers will love, I’ve broken down the key points below!
Increases customer loyalty
Providing a great online experience matters, and it can significantly affect customer loyalty.
If your website is clunky and hard to use, or the design isn’t appealing, your users can become frustrated and might actively avoid your website in the future.
If you want to create a great website experience, you’ve got to exceed your user’s expectations.
So, what do you need to look at?
- Visual Appearance – How your website looks is really important to user experience. Creating a great-looking website can improve user engagement and retention, but remember not to go overboard on your design.
- Ease of use – If your website is easy to use and navigate, it creates a great user experience. There’s nothing worse than using a complicated website with loads of pop-ups and slow loading times.
- Accessibility – Creating an inclusive website experience for all your users is a crucial part of nailing your UX – but we’ll touch on that later in this post.
When you create a truly remarkable online experience, your visitors will be far more likely to stay on your website for longer, convert into paying customers, recommend you to others, and come back to your website time and time again.
Increases conversions and engagement
Given user experience’s importance to customer loyalty, it’s no surprise that it can hugely impact your conversions.
Creating the proper structure for your web pages can help provide a much smoother and more enjoyable experience for your customers.
Websites with confusing messages or messy navigation structures leave too many roadblocks between users and the products or information they’re looking for. As a result, these users will often look for a solution somewhere else – usually your competitor’s websites!
Building a website that your customers love using will lead to more sales, and it’ll inspire real customer engagement.
Reduce long-term costs
Getting your user experience done right the first time means you won’t have to fork out for massive website changes in the future.
Take your website design as an example.
Implementing a great design from the start will save you the time and money of having to redesign or redevelop your website further down the line.
But what does a great design look like?
People often think it means creating something new that stands out and really slaps their customers in the face (not literally, of course).
But an overcomplicated design can have a worse impact than an oversimplified one.
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel with your website design. Just look at creating something sleek, smooth, and functional and ensure that the branding is consistent with your messaging.
Shows your customer behaviour
This point focuses more on tracking your users’ behaviour, but it’s still important to remember.
By tracking specific actions on your website, you can tell if your user experience is working and identify areas for optimisation.
Things like high bounce rate, low click-through rates, and low conversions could all be indicators that your user experience isn’t fulfilling their expectations – although there could be other causes of these issues.
To get off on the best foot with your website user experience, you need to spend some time researching your customer’s behaviour and how you can create an experience that retains their attention and drives action.
One changing trend in user behaviour that most industries have seen over the last decade is attention spans.
With information readily available across a load of platforms and new short-form content mediums becoming more popular, users can find the information they’re looking for in seconds.
If your website structure, design and content are a bit behind on the times and make finding information difficult or too time-consuming for your users, they’ll go elsewhere.
Research and identifying customer behaviours and trends through your website activity and external sources like online trends and studies will help you create a more tailored user experience for your customers.
Builds credibility and trust
User experience and design can significantly impact your credibility and the trust your website users place in your brand.
Such an impact that, according to studies, 94% of users who distrust a website do so because of the design.
To get your bounce rate down and conversions higher, you need to create a strong user experience and design that exemplifies trustworthiness, properly represents your brand, and makes users want to come back for more.
Makes your website more accessible
Accessibility is a big part of your website UX, and it’s the only part required by law here in the UK and some other countries worldwide.
The UK’s web accessibility standards ensure that all users can access information online regardless of disabilities.
There are four areas you need to look at, typically referred to as ‘POUR’, to ensure your website is accessible for all users and complies with the UK’s accessibility laws:
- PERCEIVABLE – All website users can see and read your website content accurately. Accommodating those with vision and hearing loss and other disabilities.
- OPERABLE – Website content is responsive and easy to navigate for all users. An example of this is ensuring your website can be navigated only by keyboard commands instead of a mouse.
- UNDERSTANDABLE – Your UI (User Interface) should be structured in a way that is easy to follow, predictable to navigate, and contains language that is understandable to all users.
- ROBUST – Your website should be compatible with a full range of technology, including assistive technology tools commonly used by users with disabilities.
So, remember that your user experience isn’t just crucial for upping your website sales or engagement rates; it’s about providing a consistent and inclusive experience for all of your users.
Giving your UX a tune-up
Creating a website experience that keeps users engaged and drives conversions can take a lot of time and trial and error.
But that’s time you might not be able to spare yourself, and if you don’t have a lot of experience creating strong user experiences, trial and error can become quite costly!
Our UX Specialists can conduct a comprehensive audit of your online experience to identify areas for improvement and carry out extensive research, testing, and competitive benchmarking to help you create a website experience that your customers love.
Book a 15-minute discovery call with one of our digital specialists to learn more about our UX packages!
