How to improve the User Experience (UX) on your website

Why do you think users like or hate your website?

If your answer to this question is – “obviously attractive design.”

You aren’t even halfway to it.

We often give attention to huge details and forget to nurture our website with small and subtle changes. These small elements play a vital role in enhancing the central UX design of your digital product.

It’s crucial to understand how your customers will interact with your website. When your designer designs website UI, he must start by keeping himself in the place of end-users. This will help him to create a user-centric interface.

Sometimes, Instead of designer’s and your’s all attempts – you may notice your website is not engaging enough. Eventually, this bad UX results in the failure of your online business. Your website starts becoming deserted.

The digital world is moving soo rapidly that you can’t afford to sit quietly on your website doors and wave off your visitors leaving. Digital products do become outdated with time. Core Web vitals are now become a major ranking factor by Google. You need to keep up to date with google updates also. But you don’t want to spend the hefty cost of redesigning your site every now and then.

Not to worry!

The best thing is you can enhance the UX of your website with the least effort possible. Just small changes can go a long way.

1. Make use of whitespace

What could be easiest than this?

Provide your website elements space to breathe. The use of whitespace not only ends with fascinating your eyes. Adding sufficient whitespace to your website improves its readability and comprehension. The more quickly the audience grasps the idea, the more actionable the page is. Whitespace contributes to enhancing the visual hierarchy of your website.

Don’t take the word “white” too seriously. You don’t necessarily need to have a “white” background. Whitespace is anything that helps remove cluttering from your website.

Split long texts into small paragraphs.
Avoid wrapping images with text in column form.
Add enough line space between text lines.
Decouple sidebars from the main page content using enough margins.
Use different font sizes and styles to make your page more readable.

“Adequate use of whitespace and colors to make the company’s service page scannable.”

2. Create an effective CTA button

Even if I don’t mention it, you’ve already heard about your CTA button’s importance thousands of times. Your users must readily understand what you got with you to offer them. Provide a clear and persuasive call to action. This helps your visitors to get engaged and resonate better.

Your call must be crisp and visible.
Make it a button. It is not a hyperlink, text, or a black hole.
Personalized CTA – this improves users’ engagement and doubles the click rate.

Some best examples of personalized call to action
Another UX turn-off for CTA buttons is not telling users what’s happening next. See the example below.

Provide your users clear intimation of the loading state once they click the CTA button.

3. Easy navigation

Navigations are the core element of any website. It helps users to have a seamless walkthrough all over the website. Your navigations must not be confusing for your end users. I have encountered websites that get so serious about citing all details on the front page that they forget their customers.

Navigations are to remove barriers, not to create more.

If you have too many web pages and a variety of information to share, break it down into primary and subheads. Make a flowchart for all the pages of your site. Now provide only necessary data in your homepage navigation. Cover the other related topic and headings inside it.

Expandable and drop-down navigations are the best example of this. They are simple, organized, and cover all necessary spots of the website.

Source

What they did right –

Two navigations properly separated
Use of keywords – SEO-friendly labels
Simple, responsive, and usable design
Well-classified and organized
The navigation menu is fixed to a header (shown even when you scroll down)

Moreover, the layout and labeling of your navigation are essential. Use descriptive labels that users like to visit and get information. Users are interested in finding answers, get them to it effortlessly.

4. Neat and attractive design

We talk about UX, and we don’t mention quality web design. How come it’s possible?

These days, UX designers dive so deep to dwell designs and graphics that could provide an exceptional user experience. Not to mention how UI and UX are interconnected. Interface design is the first thing visitors see on any website – even before reading a single word. The design has a huge share in visitors’ decision to stay or leave. What makes a difference between two sites with totally identical content is their UI Design.

Now the use of design not just ends with looking good. As we said earlier, designers need to put themselves in the shoes of their end users. The keys to a great UX design are

– its striking appearance,
– scannable content,
– and usability.

UX design quote

Here are some ways you can create an aesthetic design look –

Use brand colors – never use more than 4 colors in a single web layout.
Use highlights and different fonts
Declutter and decouple your site objects
Use more visual elements
Custom design is highly recommended over templates.

5. Page Speed Optimization

When it’s about user experience, websites having slow load speed have high bounce rates and experience low conversion. With every extra second your site takes to load, your bounce rate increases by increasing rate.

Source – Google Analytics

Slow pages are a major UX fall. Visitors aren’t willing to wait for your site to load. Visitors promptly leave a website that doesn’t get loaded within 5 seconds. Your audience has so many options that they are unwilling to wait. Web searchers are becoming more and more impatient every single day. Because when you type search queries on search engines, you got soo many options to go with that you probably don’t want to waste your time.

You can improve your page loading speed by following the below steps –

Use Optimized imagery
Remove heavy plugins and widgets from pages
Get better server hosting
Reduce the use of javascript files
Write rich quality code

6. Appealing headlines

Another critical factor for positive user experience is well-curated headlines. Whether it’s your blogs or white pages, users don’t just directly dive into reading texts. It’s headlines that decide whether they’re going to stay or leave. Headlines may not be directly a part of UX design, but an integral element of site content marketers use to indulge their visitors. Marketers and content writers spend 80% of their time creating good headlines. Your users spent more time on headlines compared to on main body text. Only an excellent actionable tagline on your homepage can enhance your page conversion.

Importance of headline quote

Headline texts are part of UX writings. With the right words, designers need to remember how headings look. Design and text must not seem to be unlinked. The use of correct fonts, placement, and backgrounds make headings more scannable and digestible.

Using descriptive headlines for each chunk of text saves users the time they spend getting the correct information. Users readily get an idea of whether they should read a whole block or not just from a headline.

7. Informative texts and images

Your website is the digital face of your business. To establish brand identity, thought leadership and fresh information are crucial. When any web-searcher clicks on your website from SERPs, they are here to get some information. They’ll promptly leave if they struggle to get answers on your site. Add quality content to your site. Website text and media must convey messages to the end users in the least time possible.

Add descriptive images about your brand and products. For a better user experience, you need to interact and engage with your audience. If they feel that you’ve answers to their problems, they’ll love to spend more and more time with you.

Text content must resonate with your business services and product
Add quality blogs, news, etc. on related topics of your industry
Add FAQ pages
Add educational videos, product demos, sample images, etc.
Do not sound salesy; provide free stuff first.

8. Remove unnecessary pop-ups

Pop-ups are overlays or lightboxes that suddenly come up on the ground interface of a website. Pop-ups are good if they are not frustrating your visitors. But sometimes, too many overlays – most of them are unnecessary – get the users to run away from your website. The work of pop-ups is to make users stay for a bit longer and engage them in your conversion process. But often, website pop-ups interrupt users in their website experience and critical tasks.

Moreover, the timing of the pop-up depends. Pop-ups that appear the next second you visit any website are the worst of a kind (Consent overlays are an exception)

Let your users interact with your site first, then only show them your deals and ask them to think and stay. Also, no need to create additional screens when you think your user is just about to click a download button.

What can you do?

Reduce the overuse of overlays from your web pages.
Pop-ups that appear for lead capturing at the end of the visitors’ journey reduce bounce rate and are most convertible.
Give your users a chance to decide – provide a cancel option.
Reduce the overuse of overlays from your web pages.
Pop-ups that appear for lead capturing at the end of the visitors’ journey reduce bounce rate and are most convertible.
Give your users a chance to decide – provide a cancel option.
Source “Before you go” is a way of asking visitors to stay for some more time. A popup just appears when visitors intend to exit (exit intend popup).
Avoid showing the same pop-ups repeatedly on multiple pages in a single visit of the user.
Personalize the overlays according to the gestures of your end users.
Optimonster nailed the way they related site bouncers with his own visitors – “do exactly what you just did.”
Use non-modal overlays at the bottom when it’s not imperative – e.g., for cookies allowance, etc.

9. Use responsive layout

We are living in a world of mobile phones. Users prefer to surf the internet while resting on their couch leisurely. This fact is so pervasive that we often mention the need for responsiveness. Whatever your digital product is, you can’t ignore more than half of your audience. The web interface that fails to look good on mobile phones is indeed of no use. If you provide a negative user experience on small screens, you won’t be able to build long-term relations with your audience.

Responsive UX design helps your reach more audiences, and you can quickly hook them for the future.

How? A website that is easy to navigate and operates on different screens positively impacts your page retention time. Users spend more time exploring your website.

HB Websol – Desktop view

HB Websol – Mobile view

Optimize image and media size for different screens
Use fluid grids
Use a responsive and modern framework to build your interface
Optimize visibility of plugins and other large elements for small screens.
Use HTML5 based website designs.

Closure

Enhancing the UX of your website is not rocket science. Until your site actually got any real issues (like broken pages and elements). You can keep small things in mind and redesign your website accordingly to improve your customers’ experience.

Planning to redesign your website? Gift the best user experience to your customers with us.

Schedule a free call today!