Guiding Your User’s Experience

By now you probably know the importance of good user experience. From the relevance of your content to how long it takes for a web page to load, internet users and shoppers are an impatient and unforgiving bunch and have made it clear that even the slightest inconvenience will make them leave your site, probably never to return.

The Makings of a Bad User Experience

There are a few things that can create a bad user experience, from bad design choices to poor optimization.

Think about it like going to a brick and mortar store. Chances are you have a good idea of why you went in and what you’re looking for. You probably have a reasonable expectation to find what you need, or at least to figure out whether they carry the product without wasting too much time walking down the aisles or picking through the shelves.

If the store is cluttered, messy, and disorganized, most people would probably just walk out and leave in frustration after a few minutes.

On a website, you actually only have a few SECONDS before your users give up and go somewhere else. And if that person is a first time user, there’s a good chance that they won’t go back to the same website to be disappointed a second time.

As Google points out, with factors like speed (how quickly it takes a page to load on desktop and especially mobile), time is money.

Some things that can ruin your website’s user experience include:

• Pages take too long to load
• Not optimized for mobile
• Cluttered or confusing design
• Irrelevant or outdated content
• No clear call to action
• Spam
• Confusing navigation

As your biggest sales and marketing tool, your website’s goal is to make every visitor feel you’re speaking directly to them.

The question is: how?

Creating a Good User Experience

Good user experience design creates a seamless and satisfying experience for users on every device they use to access your site.

Every element of your website has one ultimate goal: to get the user to feel, do, learn, and or buy something. To guide them through that process, you first have to start by knowing who your users are and what motivates them.

User personas

How do you design a website that speaks directly to thousands or millions of people? Well you don’t. You want to focus on your target customer or audience and creating user personas is the most effective way to do that.

Start with some research to identify the characteristics you’ll use to create your user personas:

• Where do they live?
• Where do they work?
• Relevant demographic information such as age, gender, income, hobbies, etc
• What are their pain points and how can your product or service address them?
• What motivates them to buy or invest their time in using a particular product or app?

User interviews and online tools like surveys are the most common ways to conduct user research, but you can also engage your target audience on social media with relevant content, quizzes, and polls.

Tailor your research and outreach to your target audience and reach them where they “live” online.

Get creative!

Prototyping

Improving your prototyping will save you a lot of time and money in the long run and help to lock in an efficient user experience at the start of every project. Your typical users may have similar characteristics and personality traits that you can use to help anticipate their needs and behavior, but everyone ultimately behaves and interacts with a website in different ways.

Architects don’t construct buildings without blueprints, and web developers and designers can’t create dynamic and interactive websites without prototyping tools. Besides creating a sample of your website before it goes live, the prototyping process helps to test functionality, identify technical and design flaws, get feedback, and make corrections before the site goes live. Fixing usability issues early on is much more cost effective, and will save you from losing customers – possibly for good – once your website or app goes live.

Usability testing

Once you’ve assembled all the nuts and bolts and put everything together, you want to conduct some user testing to make sure that everything is working and flowing how it’s supposed to.

Unlike code and some design elements, user experience is not a fixed entity. It’s fluid and constantly changing according to many factors including technology updates, industry changes and best practices, customer needs and behavior, market demands, and your business goals.

Since user needs, behavior, and standards are fluid and constantly evolving, the best way to ensure ongoing good user experiences is to conduct informal usability testing regularly:

• Optimize your content and update frequently according to best practices (SEO rules get stale and out of date so stay on top of them)
• Conduct regular audits to make sure that all of your website’s features are still working
• Regularly check for page speed and loading times
• Conduct ongoing user research and ask for feedback

Use your data to improve user experience, but remember to take a people-first approach that keeps your content human and approachable.