You’ve built an incredible digital product and website for your business—but it just isn’t increasing sales. What’s wrong?
If your website, or even your new products, just aren’t taking off, this is probably due to something called UX. You’ve heard of UX, but you don’t quite understand it?
If so, you’re not alone. UX design is a massive buzzword at the moment, but few people realize exactly what it is and how it can improve your website.
To learn more, keep reading to find the answer to ‘What is UX design?’, plus, how it can help your business website.
What Is UX Design and Why Does It Matter?
If your business hasn’t yet focused on UX, get ready—it’s about to change your life. UX design stands for user experience design and it’s a tool companies of any size can use to make life easier for their customers.
Simply, UX is the process by which users (your customers) interact with a website, product, service, or system. You want your customer to have an easy, smooth, and efficient experience with your product, which you can create through UX.
User experience incorporates things such as web design, product packaging, tech support, and the time it takes a user to learn how to use a new product. As you can see, UX is a really broad term that can include just about any interaction a customer has with your company.
UX matters because there is so much competition out there, and if your company’s website or product is confusing, difficult to figure out, or doesn’t work properly, then customers are going to look elsewhere.
With poor UX, your business might lose customers that never come back—leading to lower website traffic, poor sales, and a bad reputation. If your company is serious about growth, you need to take UX seriously.
How Can My Business Improve UX?
If your business website isn’t up to scratch, working with a UX designer can help. However, there are many things you can do, with or without a designer, that can improve user experience for your customers.
Here are a few of our top recommendations.
Conduct a UX Audit
Before you can make improvements, you need to first know what’s wrong. Your initial step should be to conduct a UX audit of your website, helping you find problem areas—check out the tips on decibel.com to learn more.
Put yourself in the shoes of a customer, visiting your website for the first time. Is it easy to navigate, does it load fast, and can you quickly find what you’re looking for?
Make a list of what your website is doing well, from a user perspective, and what needs to be improved. This will help you work out what to focus on as a priority.
Improve Your Layout
Often, your website audit will show that your website design and layout is the problem. If your website is busy, cluttered, or poorly organized, this makes it really tough for customers to find what they need.
A simple, minimalist website design often works best, because it makes it easier for your customers to read and use. You also want to look at your website’s navigation—be sure to have clear categories of products or services, along with a contact page.
No matter what page a customer is visiting, they should be able to navigate back to your homepage with only one click—if they can’t, your website navigation needs to be simplified.
Boost Website Speed
Another effective way to improve your website UX is by improving website speed SEO optimization. If a customer clicks on your website after they’ve found it on a Google search, they want information quickly.
If your website is slow to load, the user is going to become frustrated and click back, selecting another website instead. This is poor UX and means you’ve probably lost a potential customer.
Don’t let this happen—instead, make improvements to increase the load time of your website.
You can increase website speed by compressing your images, so they load faster, switching website hosts, and using browser caching. However, if you’re not web-savvy, you might want to hire a web designer to help, as page speed can be complex.
Utilize User Experience Testing Before Going Live
Once you’ve made plenty of updates to your website, don’t go live yet! Instead, you want to spend some time doing user testing.
Ask some of your customers, or those within your demographic, to spend some time browsing your website. There are plenty of market research groups that can help you organize this.
A focus group will give you valuable feedback from customers about what they like about your site. However, if there are still problems that your testers notice, fix these issues before going live.
Taking the time to do UX user testing ensures your website will look and work perfectly before going live, which is sure to help your business.
Improve Your Business Website With UX Design
So, what is UX design? After reading the above, we hope you know more about UX now, why it matters, and how you can use it to your advantage.
To learn more, you might want to hire a UX designer who can work with your business to make targeted improvements. It’s worth the investment, as improved UX can lead to business growth, more repeat clients, and a higher customer satisfaction rate.
Get started today and watch your business thrive!
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