Building a new website for your business can be a challenging task. You need to consider many different factors; it can take a long time to get a new website live and functioning without issues. One crucial element of building a new website is user experience. Some companies fail to consider user experience during the website building process; this can lead to a website that is difficult to navigate for users. People may enter and be unable to find the product or service they need, so instead of purchasing, they leave and visit a competitor's website.
User experience (UX) is the process of analysing the full user journey. In this case, we are referring to user experience design when building a website. The role of a user experience designer is to map out the user journey to make sure it is logical and easy to navigate the website. UX designers also check there are no issues with colours or contrast ratios that may impact visually impaired users. A user experience designer works on new websites and within businesses or agencies to improve the existing website experience. Perfecting the user experience of a website is not a one-time job; it is an ongoing process to improve the website experience for the user continually.
Every audience is different, and every business needs a specific user journey that fits its company. One element of user experience is user testing. This is the process of proposing a website design or change and testing it out on real users. Online tools can be used to gather data from users when they’re interacting with the website. The tools can measure where the user is looking on the website, how much time they spend on each element and where their cursor naturally goes. This data, combined with actual conversational or written feedback from users, can help determine if the website is easy to use or if further changes need to be made to improve its usability.
Many designers start off by using best practice principles to create wireframes for the website design, which they can build upon. Best practice includes things such as mapping out all of your content up front and arranging it in a way that is logical to the user. Make sure you don’t have too many navigation items and create a positive journey that is clear and visible to the user. When it comes to ecommerce websites, one critical area for user experience is the checkout process. The checkout must be quick and easy to use to prevent users from moving away from their shopping journey. Using a well-established platform such as Magento can help with checkout optimisation. Many marketing agencies and stand-alone developers offer Magento development. Adobe, which owns Magento, has tested hundreds of checkout processes and developed its solution to help businesses who use their platform sell more products. There are several tests, also known as a heuristic evaluation; user experience designers use this framework to make sure websites meet the best practice guidelines for a good user experience. Heuristic evaluations include things such as consistency, error prevention, user control and freedom, flexibility and efficiency of use, among many others. A good UX designer will evaluate a website based on these criteria before beginning user testing or creating new hypotheses.
Investing in user experience is several key benefits when designing a new website. The main and most important benefits are to increase the sales from a website and decrease the bounce rate. Other benefits include reducing the number of customer service enquiries. If people can easily find what they need on your website, they’re less likely to contact the customer service team. User experience also helps with SEO; Google looks for signals such as quick loading times and a mobile-friendly website as part of the signals used to determine a website's rankings. If you’re designing a new website, you should get a user experience specialist to review your designs before you put them into development. It could help to save your business money in the future by fixing issues and will improve the overall success of your website.