How User Experience (UX) Can Make or Break Your Website
In a crowded digital marketplace, user experience (UX) has emerged as a critical differentiator in increasing customer satisfaction, boosting conversions, and driving business growth. So how does your website measure up? Learn about good UX design and why it really matters for your website’s success.
Think like the customer and make every interaction easy, intuitive, and enjoyable. To us at Tuna Traffic, that’s what user experience (UX) is all about. Analyzing, appreciating, and anticipating every customer interaction with a website, application, or other digital product, is the driving force behind our web design and development. And ensuring all aspects, from visual design to accessibility to content and functionality, are seamless? That’s the secret sauce of good UX.
What are the Key Elements of Good UX?
Simply put, good UX design makes it easy for users to accomplish their goals and navigate a website. If a website is challenging to use or frustrating to navigate, users will quickly become frustrated and may abandon the site altogether. With competition for your customer’s attention growing daily, the UX factor may make or break your website’s success.
Customers who say the experience of a company provides is as important as its product or services
Source: Sales Force
Let’s dig deeper into the key elements of good UX design.
Functionality
A website with good functionality is easy to navigate, with clear and concise menus, buttons, and links. It presents information in a way that is easy to understand, with relevant content that meets the user's needs. In other words, don’t make the user work hard to get to where they want to go. And, it goes without saying, with nearly 6.8 million smartphone users in the US (Statistica), good usability is a responsive website that’s optimized for use on smartphones and tablets.
Good functionality also makes it easy for users to accomplish their goals, whether their goal is gathering information, submitting a form, downloading a pdf, or purchasing a product. In fact, a study by Forrester Research found that a better UX design could yield conversion rates of up to 400%. That’s a metric too big to ignore. Using clear and concise forms, highlighting valuable information, avoiding complex jargon and burdensome steps, streamlining the shopping cart experience, and ensuring a secure checkout process could significantly impact your website’s success.
This UX example is one of our non-profit clients, Milwaukee Public Library Foundation. As an organization that provides essential support through private contributions, making it easy for users to complete a form and donate was critical to their fundraising success. We improved their donation form UX by making the donation amounts large clickable buttons instead of small radio buttons, grouping related fields under enlarged section headers, and removing CAPS capitalization, among other improvements.
Visual Design
94% of first impressions are related to your website’s design. (Zippia) Meaning, a website that is visually appealing and consistent in its design and layout will hands-down be more engaging to users. Never take for granted how creating a cohesive, consistent visual experience through the use of color, typography, and imagery can impact that first impression and build positive brand recognition.
89% of people have switched to a competitor’s website after a poor user experience.
Source: zippia.com
Accessibility
A website accessible to all users, regardless of ability, is not only the right thing to do, but it can also help you reach a wider audience and improve your overall website performance. For example, ensuring that visually impaired users can easily navigate and use a website may involve using appropriate color contrast to make it easier to read content and view images. Including alternative text (Alt text), image descriptions read aloud by screen readers is another essential design element to creating an accessible and engaging website.
So, How’s Your Site’s UX?
Put yourself in the shoes of your customer. Is your site giving the user experience your customers deserve? We can help get you there.
We know great UX.
Let's Chat.
Written By
Lori Weisberg
Lori lives by the mantra, “It’s not what you say; it’s how you say it.” As Director of Content and Client Strategy, Lori is the wordsmithing wind beneath many of our clients’ wings. Known for capturing our clients’ brand voices with compelling clarity and consistency, she also is a frequent Tuna blog contributor. When not perusing a thesaurus, Lori can be found adding more zing to her arrabbiata sauce or searching for an easier way to pill a cat.