How to Improve User Experience: Your Complete Guide
Are you looking to improve user experience for your customers? If so, check out this guide to learn how to improve user experience.
Today’s internet plays host to 1.7 billion websites and 4.5 billion internet users. By that standard, every website is entitled to about 2 visitors…
Unless you’re selling products that retail for hundreds of thousands of dollars, 2 visitors to your website aren’t going to cut it. To increase your “fair share” of web traffic, you have to optimize your website to make it more useful to online consumers than competing websites.
That optimization process is called improving user experience.
Companies invest thousands of dollars to improve user experience on their web products every year. Save yourself that money and instead, follow these simple tips to achieve the same result.
1. Understand the Power of Blank Space
In today’s media landscape, people are inundated with information. You’ve got hundreds of thousands of new web pages landing online every day and millions of hours of video content being published on YouTube and competing video platforms. This inundation of information has led to people wanting to scan content rather than going through it with a fine-tooth comb.
Blank space (or white space) on websites break up text enough that users can scan successfully. This is in contrast to websites that try to fill in any white space with information, images or ads.
Websites that fill in all available space come off as endless blocks of content and intimidate many to the point that they quickly hit the back button on their web browser.
2. Speed Your Site Up
Today’s consumer has very little patience for slow websites. There are just too many fast sites out there for people to waste their time with one that’s going to take 5+ seconds to load.
While you might not think that asking users to wait 5-seconds to access your content is a big deal, data says otherwise. On average, a website that takes 5-seconds or longer to load sees 20% higher bounce rates than sites that load up in under 4-seconds.
To improve user experience on this front, use speed checking tools like Google’s Page Speed analyzer.
3. Learn How to Write for the Web
If you’re using the research paper skills that you picked up in college to craft your web content, there’s no way that your site is getting traction right now. Writing for the web is an art and learning what that art embodies is paramount to making sure that you don’t negatively violate your online visitor’s expectations.
The subject of web-writing is too extensive to cover off in our post but a few things to make sure that your writing implements are:
- Headings that break up your text’s sections
- Short paragraphs (between 1 to 3 sentences)
- Use bullet points to break out lists of information
- Effective titles for headings and sub-headings within your content
The Yahoo! Style Guide is a fabulous resource to take your web writing savvy further.
4. Get Visual
People process images tens of thousands of times faster than they do text. Therefore, your improve user experience efforts should include taking the time to roll out images within your web content.
Be tasteful in your use of imagery online. While there’s no hard and fast rule, some usability experts have stated that using a photo every 300 to 400 words is a good benchmark to shoot for.
5. Double Check Your Copy
Nothing crushes consumer confidence quite like spelling and grammar errors. While online readers will forgive the occasional typo, if your work is absolutely filled with problems, consumers are not going to engage with you.
Doing simple things like reading your copy out loud before publishing and checking it with free tools like Grammarly can do wonders when it comes to reducing text errors. You can also spell/grammar check your website with site-wide scanning tools that you can find online.
6. Use Helpful 404 Pages
When people navigate to a page on your website that doesn’t exist, they get redirected to a 404-error page. By default, this page will simply tell people that the page they’re trying to access doesn’t exist. As a user, that’s a dead-end that almost always leads to clicking away from a website.
To improve that outcome, you could design a 404 page that’s entertaining and suggests alternative pages that your searcher might enjoy.
A 404-error page refresh could reduce the number of people that click away from your site after inputting the wrong link and only takes a few minutes.
7. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
It’s 2019. If your website doesn’t have a responsive infrastructure and isn’t prepared for mobile then it can’t survive.
There’s no excuse today to not implement a mobile-friendly design. Just build your website on any popular content management system (WordPress, Joomla!, Squarespace, etc.) and any of those system’s templates will come pre-built to scale to any screen size that users are tuning in from.
8. Learn More About Your Customer
Knowing why it is that your customers come to your website should drive all of your improve user experience endeavors.
Do you cater to business to business clients? If you do, you’re going to want to learn everything that you can about B2B user experience principals.
Do you operate in the business to consumer space? Then you’re going to want to understand what makes B2C sites successful.
The better you can narrow down who your customer is and what they want from you, the better you can optimize your website to get your customers what they need, quickly.
Wrapping Up How to Improve User Experience
If you take the time to improve user experience on your website, you’ll see upticks in web traffic, page retention and sales. If that sounds good to you, leverage the tips that we just hit you with and enjoy your increased online traction!
For more killer business tips, check out additional free and informative content right here on our blog!