User experience (UX) makes or breaks your website. You know this already? hopefully.
There are common scenarios where If people aren’t having a good time on your website and you’re the only one who thinks it’s awesome.
Here’s the deal… It’s not about you; it’s about them.
Most visitors aren’t on your site for a webby vacation. They want to know, read, or buy something. If they can’t find what they’re looking for quickly and easily, you’re done because there are a million other places they can try.
So, be honest with yourself. If your website isn’t giving you the outcomes you think it should be, it may be time to look a little bit deeper.
What’s the point of UX?
Contrary to popular belief, a good-looking website means nothing if it doesn’t work.
Your website can be narrated by Morgan Freeman and have a promotional YouTube clip featuring Ryan Reynolds, but if it doesn’t load properly, buttons don’t work, or there are one too many pop-ups with an impossibly small close button, it’s meh.
No one’s saying that pop-ups, ads, and good content is bad for UX, but it’s the moderation that makes the difference between UX-friendly and UX-sucky.
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5 signs of an epic fail
- Pushy vs effective calls to action
“BUY NOW” or “SUBSCRIBE NOW” calls to action are no way to speak to potential customers. If you wouldn’t use the language in person, don’t use it on your website.
For example, a one-liner followed by “buy now” is unacceptable at a physical store. Even worse is a salesperson popping up at the entrance, asking you to subscribe.
You can’t expect people to buy or subscribe before they know what you offer, and your CTA language and designs tell a lot about how pushy and eager you are to sell.
- Infinite loading
Visitors don’t have the time or patience to wait for a tab to turn into a webpage. In fact, they’ll get frustrated and disappear, long before attempting to refresh the page.
Let’s say they return to the search results and click on the next best thing. Relying on your competitors to have similarly slow loading speeds is not the best solution.
- The readability sucks
A website’s design and copy contribute collectively to its UX. Long-winded sentences, spelling mistakes, and jargon can confuse or annoy visitors. Similarly, busy, inconsistent and buffering graphics can make the website look shoddy.
A website isn’t a digital brochure, so try not to cram in as much information and graphics as possible. Remember, people are easily distracted and usually want to find what they’re looking for without too much text, ads, or pop-ups.
- Little to no functionality
Ever heard the saying “Looks aren’t everything”? Well, the same goes for website UX. There’s no point in having a sexy website without functionality.
Functionality errors instantly repel visitors, because if your website doesn’t work properly, what will you say your company does? In other words, you can have the most friendly, productive, and energetic sales team, but if your website isn’t functional enough to initiate contact, it’s simply not serving you. It’s eating your lunch.
- Un-responsive and non-mobile-friendly
If you think you can get away with a desktop-only website, you’re sorely mistaken. People scroll through websites on their smartphones in waiting rooms, at home, at work, in restaurants, in parking lots and in the toilet, which means you’re losing out on all that scrolling if your website isn’t mobile responsive.
Good UX equals better results
- Chill with the demands and shouty language. Rather use human, easy-to-follow CTAs.
- Continuously check and optimise your site’s loading speed to avoid losing frustrated visitors.
- Having empty spaces between sections allows the reader to notice the important bits and focus on one thing at a time.
- Ensure web actions are functional, practical, and consistent throughout your website.
- Make your website compatible with and responsive to mobile devices.
Over and above, you need the right expertise to set you up and help you achieve better website functionality and user experience. Contact the experts, InteractRDT knows all about optimising UX!
