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Design
September 2022
Understand the Importance of User Experience in Web Design
Understanding the importance of user experience when designing a website is crucial. Developing something that looks beautiful, works with ease and provides all the features your users might need all help to create exceptional UX.
What is user experience?
User experience is how a user interacts with and experiences, in our case, a digital product – this might be a website, app or piece of software. It includes a users percpetion of utility, ease of use, and efficiency.
User experience is vital to determine an organisation's online reputation, so building a site that puts experience design at the forefront will encourage visitors to return. Your site will be more successful if it's interactive and provides engaging content giving customers the very best experience.
The importance of user experience in web design
Giving a user a great user experience is a huge factor in developing a strong online reputation and designing in a user-centric manner will always help encourage your visitors to return and recommend your business.
Giving your customers a great user experience can have a multitude of benefits for your business from increased conversion rates and better customer satisfaction to lower development costs in the long run and improved SEO performance.
With all considered, UX should be a priority consideration in web design, not an afterthought.
What makes a good user experience?
Designing a great site that considers the needs and goals of your visitors will help you grow online. When you understand what your customers want and their behaviour, you can design a website that will be more successful.
Good user experience comes from a balance of creating utility, whilst keeping the website simple to use and looking great.
Here we'll dive into the above a little more.
Utility
Utility translates to the functionality of the website. When building a site, it's crucial to consider what tools the user needs to achieve their goals. For example, if users land on your site and you want them to reach out then a contact page is imperative to the user journey.
Understanding your end user's journey and the functions they might need from a website can help you to better understand how to build a site around their motivation and one where they have a great user experience.
Ease of use
Ease of use is one of the greatest factors of user experience as it influences how long users will spend on your site. If your site isn't easy to use, then it's guaranteed they won't stay for long. Consider the layout of your website and make sure all the functions are easy to navigate, access and use.
One other important factor to consider is your page speed. How fast your website loads is a crucial factor for delivering great online experiences and ranking better in SEO. A slow site could damage your user experience and reputation however, there are some ways to fix this including changing your web hosting, optimising your images for the web and ensuring you're not including too many redirects.
Appearance
We refer to appearance as the impression your visitors have when landing on your site. Having a stunning and contemporary website design will show off your brand and services at their very best.
We're seeing more brands turn away from corporate identities and use more creativity and interactivity to show off their businesses.
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See our workHow to improve user experience?
Keep it simple
Sometimes it’s the most simple websites that are the most effective at converting your services and values. Cutting out loud colours and unnecessary pages can help better sell your company online.
Ensure your site works on all devices
More of us are browsing online using mobile phones, so ensure it works well on every device including all web browsers! According to a recent study by Google, 72% of consumers expect brands to have mobile-friendly sites. But it was discovered that 96% of all websites are reported to not work well on mobile.
Mobile-friendliness is one of the most important factors when it comes to user experience on websites. A good website is one that works on all devices and has great navigation.
Be authentic
We’ve mentioned customers valuing authenticity over corporate identities. Brands that value helping people and generally trying to improve people’s lives through one means or another will go further. Sharing authentic and engaging web content brings a genuine touch to your website, encouraging customers to reach out to your services.
One way to achieve this is to share ‘the face behind the brand’ as faces help visitors relate to your brand. Try to identify quality images and create worthwhile content that shows your brand's values.
Share good content
It's important to update your overall site at least every two years. But keeping your content up-to-date should be more frequent when growing online.
Sharing blogs to daily news about your company tends to drive more traffic online. However, basic changes can be made yearly to landing and service pages depending on how your site ranks.
Need any further help?
We hope our guide has offered some insight into creating the best possible user experience for your web design.
If you're looking for more guidance feel free to our web design agency. We've worked with businesses of all budgets and sizes when it comes to their web development and we are more than happy to have a no-obligation chat when deciding the best option for you. Even if it's to point you in the right direction.