How To Improve Website User Experience (UX)
14 April 2023
Introduction
Your website’s success depends largely on how your users perceive it. Does it give them value? Is your website easy to navigate while being pleasant to the eyes?
Essentially, UX design enhances the satisfaction of users by improving your website’s usability, accessibility, and efficiency of user interactions. It is important to be mindful that visitors make quick decisions based on the various design elements on your website.
Now that you are familiar with the basics of user experience, let’s get into the nitty-gritty of top ways to enhance website user experience.
1. Use Appealing Call-to-Action (CTA) Buttons
Users navigate your site through the visual cues that take them from one content to another. Calls to action (CTA) use bold buttons and active words such as “start here”, or “find out more” to help users navigate your website. CTAs are also used to encourage users to take the next step.
Colour choice makes a significant impact on how your users interact with your website. Sitepoint saw a 35 percent increase in their conversion rates when they switched up the colour of their CTA buttons.
The More time-sensitive, emotive, and actionable your CTAs are, the greater your conversion rate.
2. Use Hyperlink Differentiation
It is best practice to ensure that links on your site are easily identifiable through visual cues. These cues come in forms of being differently coloured, underlined, or both. Having them visible this way also effectively draws attention from your users.
Consider the length of your hyperlink. Longer text link titles will be easier to identify, thus resulting in more users clicking into the link you provided.
3. Create Targeted Headlines
Your headlines must be aligned with what your users are looking for. These headlines show up on the search results and are the factor which determines if users click into your website. It is ideal that you use keywords that you are targeting in your headers and titles. This facilitates browsing, attracting the right audience, and encourages further consumption.
Besides improving user experience significantly, this strategy also improves your website’s search engine optimization (SEO). Google gives headings and titles more weight compared to regular content. Optimised titles improves your searchability on search engines.
4. Keep Your Pages Consistent
A whole range of features must be kept consistent in order to deliver a good user experience. Some vital features include:
- Font choices
- Button styles
- Design elements
- Heading sizes
- Photo choices
- Illustration styles
Everything should match. In other words, you should ensure that your design is coherent and consistent across all pages of your website.
5. Be Mindful of Your 404s
While search engines such as Google will not penalise you for soft 404s, your site visitors are not as forgiving. When a visitor clicks on your image or link, they expect to be directed to the place they should go.
A 404 error page will not only frustrate your visitors, but it might also annoy them. Worse, it might make them rethink spending time on your website when they can always go elsewhere to find out what they are looking for faster.
Conclusion
In summary, good user experience design relies on appealing call-to-action, hyperlink differentiation, targeted headlines, consistent pages, and avoiding 404s.
