5 ways to ensure your web visitors have a great experience
Your website is the anchor of your brand digital experience, being your full-time support and salesperson where the user can find, interact and engage with your services.
Having a great website implies having a great user experience, where customers and prospects find exactly what they need in a simple and valuable way.
Simply put user experience is designing wearing your users’ shoes, understanding needs and behaviours without losing your business aim. And there are quick and short improvements that can help you to increase your user satisfaction throughout your digital experience.
1. Call to actions
Call to actions, or CTA, are the buttons that help the user to navigate through the website. Not to be confused with links, that guide the user through content, and normally have the name of the page they are navigating to, the CTA have the active voice of the website. “Sign here”, “Submit”, “Pay” are some examples of CTA labels.
The number of CTA on a single page, can negatively impact the number of users that continue the journey. For each page think about what is the main action you want users to do, that will be your primary CTA – it needs to be compelling and look different from the other CTA.
Then you’ll have the other actions that “It’s ok for the user to do this too”, and those will be your secondary CTA – they look simpler than the primary, but still engaging.
2. Continuous journey
Getting to a page and not having a “next step” can lead the user to simply leave the website without a meaningful interaction. Guarantee that all the pages have a CTA or link that will help the user to continue his journey to conversion.
You might want to have other related articles if your page is about a specific topic, or a contact us button under a video demoing your services to continue the conversation with a salesperson. You’ll need these CTA to be clear and visible, so the user doesn’t miss it.
3. Keep it clean and simple
Simplicity of the website layout implies not having unnecessary components or distractive elements that don’t help the user to navigate or convert.
Having two or three-colour scheme and a maximum of two fonts is a good start for a clean user interface. Plenty of white space around content areas, guide user focus to that content.
4. Improve your forms
Forms can be long and tedious, so we should support the user with automated fields, good content and giving feedback as much as we can.
Making sure that we only ask what’s required and that we group those fields by type, allows the user to be quicker.
Finally, users generally don’t read the instructions at the top of a form, or even forget them in the middle of the process. The clearer the labels are (and marked as mandatory), the easiest it is for the user to fill the form.
5. Consistently consistent
Everyone’s unknown favourite! Nothing better than getting what you are expecting, or quickly finding what you’re looking for.
It’s pretty much the same in the digital world, where consistency helps reducing user confusion and increase conversion.
Use the same designations for the same elements and reuse visual elements (such as typography, colours or size). And finally, look at all the processes and forms on your website, make sure they’re displayed in the same way and, if they use the same type of information, that they are requested consistently across the website.
In conclusion
The aim is to build a great digital experience understanding who your users are, and focus on giving them a simple, valuable and remarkable experience that helps them reaching their goals and needs.
