User Experience — The Heart and Soul Of a Good Business Website

– Contributed content –

Every business should improve user experience. (Pixnio)

3 July 2018. Businesses from all corners of the globe will attempt to create websites that serve them in a positive way. When a website is functional and effective, it creates leads for your company and may help increase sales figures and expand your customer base. As a result, a lot of research is put into figuring out what makes a website great. As it happens, the hear and soul of every good business website is the user experience.

That’s right, the main focus of attention is just making sure users have a good experience on your site. If you manage this, then everything else will fall into place, and your site will provide your business with all the benefits mentioned above. So, how do you achieve a good user experience, and why is it important?

How to achieve a great user experience

Providing users with a great website experience is much easier than you think. Realistically, you just have to work on making your website easy for them to use, and limiting any frustrations they feel. Therefore, the best approach to take is to look at some common frustrations users have when they’re on websites:

The feeling of running into a brick wall

This refers to when you’re on a website and just can’t get where you need to go. You’re looking for a certain page, and it’s just impossible to get there because the site is set up so poorly. Eventually, you give up and never return. There are many things you can do to prevent this, and they focus on navigation. To start, it may be beneficial to create a flowchart that helps you plan a user’s path on your site. You can use a diagram maker to create this chart, and it will let you see how you can get someone from A to B with as little stress as possible. Another idea is to have clearly labeled menus that are easily visible, and headlines in your content so people know where they are.

Not getting the information required

Everyone visits a website for a purpose, usually to gain some form of information. As a result, it’s annoying when you don’t get what you’re looking for. This often happens when you label certain pages with titles, but don’t include information that reflects the title. For example, you have a services page that doesn’t include any info on your services. To counter this, make sure every page on your site provides the right info for users to access.

A good user experience helps create a profitable sales funnel. (Joe the Goat Farmer, Flickr)

Unable to load pages

Possibly the most frustrating thing for web users is when you just can’t load certain pages. They either take far too long to load, or you can’t connect to the server, and you’re faced with an error page. This is a surefire way to lose all your traffic and miss out on so many leads. The solution is two-fold; improve site performance and make your loading speeds as fast as possible, but also ensure you have a stable host server that people can connect to. Oh, and another problem could be that you have broken links on your site that people click to be taken to another page but the page no longer exists. So, make sure you remove any broken links too.

Getting a terrible mobile experience

Clearly, the world is now more mobile than ever before. It’s highly likely a lot of people will find your website when they’re on a mobile device. As such, people hate it when they get a terrible mobile experience. Your site needs to be optimized for mobile so you don’t give the mobile market an awful time.

Why is user experience so vital?

You can see what needs to be done to provide a better user experience, but why is it the heart and soul of every business website? Well, it all boils down to this idea that you need to keep people on your site for as long as possible. The more time someone spends on your site, the more chance you have of generating and converting leads. When you offer a poor user experience, people will leave right away and never return. So, you will lose out on so many leads, and struggle to be successful.

At the end of the day, web traffic is only useful when you can convert it. One site could get 1,000 visitors per day but offer a poor user experience that means only 10 leads are generated. On the other hand, a site with 100 visitors a day could provide a much better experience and generate 80 leads. Focus on improving the experience people have on your site, and you’ll see the benefits.

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