These are nine user experience principles for creating a user-friendly website. Imagine you walk into your favorite department store. You love this place, you have visited it many times before. But this time is different. They have rearranged and redecorated.
But they did not make it better. Instead, the store made it worse. You can not find anything. The new decorations are obtrusive and clutter up the floor.
You head to where the men's shoes used to be only to find women's dresses. Next to the men's shoes, you find their kitchen and kid's toys sections.
You cannot find anything. You came to buy from this store. Yet, you leave empty-handed.
What happened? A poor user experience, that's what happened. The customer couldn't find what they needed, and the store's layout did not accommodate them.
Do not let your company be like that department store. Instead, provide a robust user experience for everyone who lands on your website. Read on to learn about the top 9 user experience principles for ensuring your visitors become loyal customers.
Nine User Experience Principles to Ensure Your Customers Love Your Website
As a business owner, you need to establish uniform UX best practices that you will use throughout your website. Regardless of who designs and optimizes your website, they need to know what you expect from them.
Use these user experience principles to set your expectations for your website. With these UX design principles, you will ensure that your future customers will stick around and become loyal customers instead of bouncing off right away.
1. Ensure Easy Navigation
Like our department store example, if your visitors can't find their way around your website, they will not stay around. Instead, they will return to their Google or Bing search and visit the following competing website. So please don't lose your customers before they even get a chance to visit your business.
Provide easy-to-use navigation bars, always have a search bar at the top of every page, and include a second menu in your footer.
2. Increase Site Speed
Nothing makes users bounce off your website like a slow-loading page. If you do nothing else to improve your user experience practices for your company, improve your site speed. Improving speed will give you the most significant ROI for your digital dollar.
3. Improve Mobile Responsiveness
I was not sure if this even needed to be included. It's 2020, and your website absolutely must be optimized for mobile users. The entire world is accessing the internet via their mobile phones. Get your website mobile responsive today.
4. Use Natural Links
Keep your audience on your website by naturally linking to other articles or your landing page. Build curiosity and then offer more information and further reading on an additional article. If your article lends itself to a natural upgrade, link to a landing page and offer a freebie in exchange for their email address.
These natural links improve your user experience without annoying pop-ups that cause readers to leave your website.
5. Offer Amazing Value
It does not matter how much traffic you get if no one stays around. Include incredible value, and visitors will stick around to learn more, sign up for email lists, and return.
Offer valuable content to your visitors, answer their most burning questions, and you will naturally improve your website UX exponentially.
6. Utilize Graphics
The age-old cliché still holds true because a picture is worth a thousand words. People scan articles. Infographics are good to grab attention and give readers everything they need to know quickly consumed graphically. Use images throughout your articles to keep your reader scrolling through your website.
7. Embrace Minimalism
Like our department store example, you do not want to decorate your website with obnoxious colors or fonts. Your website should be clean and minimal, with plenty of white space. Limit the background colors and pop-ups, do not drive away your traffic with a clutter-filled screen.
8. Understand Your Customer Journey
Each page on your website will serve a different purpose. And each page will meet your customers at another place in their customer journey. Your home page and the About Me page will offer additional information to your customers than your product landing pages or sales pages.
Understand the customer journey and target each page to reach your customers in the buying process.
9. Establish Authority
Since the EAT update in Google's algorithm, your website's authority matters more than ever before. But, first, you need to establish yourself as an expert in your industry. A weekly blog or vlog is an excellent option for establishing this authority.
These nine user experience principles will change your website for the better. They will ensure a seamless and enjoyable experience for all your customers. Fee free to use these tips to establish your user experience practices.
Keep Your Website User Friendly
User experience boils down to providing value to your customers in an enjoyable and accessible format. So whether you run a department store, neighborhood coffee shop, or an e-commerce website, you need to ensure your customers experience the best UX possible.
These nine user experience principles stand the test of time. Regardless of what Google tells you they are looking for in their next update, you will always want to provide valuable content that establishes your authority and moves your future customer along the customer journey.
With your quick loading, mobile responsive, easy-to-navigate, and minimalist website, you will entice your customer to stick around and enjoy your business. And at the end of the day, that is the number one goal of every business owner.
Contact us today for a free quote to redesign your website to establish or improve your customer's experience. We do web development Raleigh NC, nationally and worldwide.
