UX stands for User Experience. It’s often spoken about in terms of product design. Think of how much energy you’ve put into creating the perfect product or service for your customers. Now you want to apply that same effort to creating the perfect website (or more broadly, “virtual environment”) so that those same customers can find you, interact with you, and ultimately load up that shopping cart.
With so many drag-and-drop website builders that offer thousands of pre-made website templates, the art of UX in web design and development isn’t as considered and valued as it should be.
UX sounds inaccessible and techy so we thought we’d add a bit of sauce to hold your attention and show you that it’s really not all that complicated.
UX is about the feel of the experience
We’ve all once had a frustrating experience on an eCommerce website. The pages take ages to load, you can’t find what you’re looking for, the buttons are ridiculously small on your phone, just an all-around bad time for everyone. How often have you proceeded through to checkout on a website like that?
That’s why it’s vital to put your users front and center of every design and development decision. It really matters.
Yes, there are some great templates out there, but do they cater to your exact audience? Your website can look professional, it can look beautiful, but unless it can serve your customers efficiently and with minimal confusion and fuss, it just won’t be valuable to you.
How to improve UX
Create buyer personas
Pop quiz test: what does the U stand for in UX? User. The people using your website, more precisely. Understanding who these people are and what they want is the cornerstone of every decision we make. Are they busy business people looking for a quick answer? Are they careful homeowners who need lots of information before they make a decision? Are they Gen Xers with a sardonic sense of humor?
Use a mixture of information from your Facebook business account, Google insights, and other social listening tools to harvest your information.
The chances are you have more than one buyer persona to cater to. But start by finding out who they are, and it will help with all future decisions.
Structure & navigation
Now you know the different profiles of your users, it’s time to apply that knowledge to plan out your virtual environment’s structure. Create the smoothest journey through to the shopping cart on your website, and don’t forget to lead them through the transaction process smoothly too.
Since people come to your website for various reasons, you will have to plan out different journeys. Can your users quickly access vital information within 10 seconds of landing on your website? What plan do you have in place for people who need more information?
Which are your landing pages? Where do you want to guide your users from there?
It’s a good idea to map out how the pages are linked and illustrate different journeys and how they interact with your sales funnel. Remember that the aim is to create a journey that leads customers to your website’s shopping cart in as few steps as possible. Save them mileage, and they’ll repay you with their business.
At jdp, we cover this in-depth during our analysis and diagnosis phase.
Develop a business language
Does your virtual environment’s look, feel, and content reflect your business, ethos, and how you communicate? If there is a big disconnect between who you are and what you portray to your customers, it’s a dead-end road.
Remember, communication is multifaceted. We’re not just talking about content. Just like body language, or what someone is wearing can portray a lot about who they are and what they’re feeling, design is also a language. Through your design, you need to create an honest and accurate impression of your business that sells your strengths while at all times connecting with your customers. We refer to this process as developing your “business language.”
Set up scenarios
Now it’s time to test out your website with some real-life scenarios. It’s useful at this point to bring in people who have never seen your website before. This is a real test of how intuitive your website is to use.
Make any necessary changes before publishing your website live.
Ask “is it good for you?” and then listen
Since UX is all about the feel of the experience for your customers, it’s important to listen to their feedback. Consider sending out a survey to your customers to ask if they had a positive experience on your website, listen to their feedback, and act on it. Any review, positive or negative, is gold dust to help you improve the user experience on your site.
Need help connecting with your customers?
Get in contact for a free 15-minute consultation and we will lift the hood on your business to see where your next investment will make the most impact, and create a solution to bridge the distance between you and your dream customers.
