5 top UX tips for every business
1. Make usability a priority early in the process
It’s easy to get locked into a business mindset when it comes to designing a website, and creating one that suits your business goals but not your users. However, designing a site that suits your users is the key to ensuring successful transactions and the achievement of your business goals.
Early in the design process, start thinking like your users and ask yourself what they’ll be looking for when they visit your website. Design everything, from the sitemap to the font size, to make it easy for them to navigate your site and find the answers to the questions they have right up front.
2. Maximise your entry and conversion points
Whether you’re designing a website from scratch or re-designing an existing site, it’s important to keep a close eye on all the entry points into your website and conversion points, ie. the points along the site that you want your users to take action.
The major entry point into your website is usually always the home page, but you may also have landing pages or sub-pages that link through from marketing campaigns or banners that act as funnels into the main body of your website. At every entry point to your site, you want to make sure you can map out the journey your user will take, with calls to action (conversion points) that meet your business goals, whether it’s signing a petition or making a sale.
3. Use an analytics package to track data
Measuring analytics is crucial to gathering the data you need to improve your site. You can use something as simple as Google Analytics or a more advanced analytics package, depending on your needs, to capture the kind of data that will help you figure out which parts of your site are being visited most and where your users are getting stuck and leaving the site.
Analytics can help measure conversion points to show how effective a certain process is at leading your visitor down your intended path and ‘converting’ them – that is, causing them to take an intended call to action. Analytics can show the detailed process analysis to reveal any barriers that prevent action, so you can correct them and improve the user experience.
4. Test and observe
We discussed different methods of UX research in our last post, and once again we have to stress the importance of testing and observing how real people interact with your site in order to figure out how to improve their experience.
Watch them complete simple tasks that any visitor to your site would expect to accomplish and make sure their journey is an easy and enjoyable one. Also, don’t be afraid to simply ask them what they want and where your site could be improved.
5. Continually weak and improve
Too many businesses create a website and then simply leave it up in cyberspace expecting it to do what they want without any supervision.
Once you have a site on the Internet, it’s important to continue tweaking and improving it to suit your users and meet your business goals. Use the results of UX research, testing and observation to remove barriers, correct difficult patches and make it easy to convert a visitor to a customer.
Have you made the user experience an important aspect of your business website design? Do you think this has impacted the success of your site?
