With increasing competition and businesses making substantial investments to make their digital presence stand out, you need to provide a valuable user experience to stay competitive.

The user experience of your site reflects in any and every element of your web design and development. 

There are some best industry practices to improve user experience, and other times UX is subjective depending on your target audience. Hence, it is crucial to have the right team that helps you not just understand your audiences but also guide adopt the best UX design for your brand.

What is user experience based design (UX design)?

UX design is a complete process that helps increase your users’ satisfaction by improving how they use and access your mobile app or website and making user interaction more efficient and user-centric. UX design involves looking at your web design from the lens of how the user interacts with it and making modifications to improve their experience.

Being a brand, you aim to cater to the needs of your audience through your website. Well, UX design helps you ensure your users find the experience of engaging with your site pleasing. A lot of times, businesses opt for custom web development services because it gives them more control over how their website looks, operates, and navigates.

Tips to improve your UX design

Website navigation

An effective website is supposed to enable visitors to move from one section of the site to another seamlessly. This means that you need to design your website navigation system keeping in mind your target audience’s’ goals and needs in mind. You want to make it easy for the visitors to quickly find the information they are looking for and navigate across the site comfortably. 

An essential aspect of your UX design is website navigation. It makes sense to incorporate your website menu of the top of the homepage, as visitors can quickly locate it and select the webpages based on what they are looking for. You should also provide a consistent and intuitive user interface, and use common patterns across the site to help visitors collect information without putting in extra work.

Scrolling

When people are visiting your website for the first time, it can be overwhelming to find the information they are looking for in a very long webpage. It sometimes helps to make it clear that additional information is available below, with a strong visual direction.

But, make sure your website is not overly long. It is crucial to make the right decision regarding when a topic needs its separate webpage. Typically, users prefer scrolling to the bottom of the webpage, as scrolling down is faster and feels more natural than clicking.

Responsiveness

Did you know? 

• More than three-quarters of buyers use their mobile devices in the purchasing process, along with visiting the stores. 
• Around 80% of people used their mobile devices to search for something over the internet in 2019. 
• About 50% of mobile users turn to your competitor’s site after having a bad experience with your website, responsiveness. 

With people around the world switching to their mobile devices to browse the internet, mobile responsiveness has become an essential aspect of user experience. You want your site to provide seamlessly, intuitive user experience across all screen sizes. Your development team can help you design custom mobile layouts and user interface for mobile visitors.  

Besides, having a website that’s not optimized for a smaller screen ultimately eliminates the primary purpose of your website. It not only leaves a bad impression on your visitors, but it also negatively affects your bottom line and wastes all your efforts on web design and content.

Page loading

Nothing takes away from your users’ experience than a slow website. Slow-loading websites reflect negatively on your brand, and they frustrate your users.

According to a study, mobile sites that load within 5 seconds make twice in mobile ad revenue, and they get 70% longer average session time than the website that load in 19 seconds.

To improve your user experience, you have to optimize the website’s performance and loading speed. Along with creating a strong first impression, it boosts your conversions and improves your search engine ranking as well.

To improve your user experience, you want to make sure your loading speed is good enough to enable users to complete their primary aim of coming to your website easily and quickly. The load time, behavior, and how smoothly the animations and images load can influence visitors’ perception of the brand. Hence, make sure you have a reliable support and maintenance team that regularly works on-site optimization.

Readability

Most of the time, the primary reason why people come to your website is to find information. But, what is the point of all these efforts on improving your user experience when your visitors can’t read or find it difficult to understand your web content? 

To improve your user experience, in this time and age, you want to provide a visual variety and meaningful content. In terms of text, you must ensure the font style, size, and the color is pleasing on the eyes, along with being relevant and valuable for your audience. However, with an exponential increase in popularity and consumption of video content, it helps improve your user experience. 

According to research, video content attracts 300% more traffic and help nurture business leads. Besides, a study also shows that videos increase the organic visibility of a website by 157%, which improves your user experience as it becomes easy for your audience to find you and consume content through their choice of medium. Hence, Make sure you incorporate video into your web design to improve user experience.

Contrast and color

The color scheme you use across your site affects the user experience you deliver. Make sure you use color and contrast option that makes it possible for color blind visitors to read the content. Don’t use the blue color for website text except for the links. It also helps to reserve a single color for all CTAs throughout the site. It is also recommended to use your brand colors in a pleasing way that is also easy on the eyes.

Additional tips

• Include a search option in your website design. It helps visitors easily and quickly look for information on a specific topic. 
• Make your contact information easily visible for your visitors, in case they want to reach out. 
• Integrate clear, clickable call-to-action buttons according to the next stage in the marketing funnel. It helps people find a purpose to their efforts. 
• Avoid unnecessary elements into your web design. Conduct a site audit on a regular basis and eliminate redundant content, images, and other design elements.  
• Allow users to interact on their mobile devices using a single tab and avoid using double-taps. 
• Make sure the CTA buttons and other clickable elements are big enough for mobile users to interact with them easily. 
• Divide sections into separate pages for any long web forms to make them more user-friendly. 
• Make sure all the internal and external links on your site stand out by using a different using font color or making other formatting choices like underlining.  

Wrap up

Your website makes a big part of your overall online presence. A lot of your users perceive your brand based on what they see on your website and how much they like browsing through it. Hence, to fulfill the purpose and goals of your website and business, you must provide an appealing user experience that makes your visitors come back.

All of the tips mentioned above and best practices will guide you through collaborating better with your development team and building a website that your users love as much as you do. Hence, a lot of businesses prefer hiring custom web development services that empower them to create a website that reflects their vision for the brand and what the audiences want.