User experience when it comes to websites revolves around how a visitor to a website behaves and interacts with the functionality of the website, according to a natural flow and their natural instincts. If a website visitor has to take more than a few seconds to figure out how to complete an action, or how to navigate to where they wish within the site, there’s a high chance that they may give up altogether and leave the site. This results in a bounce rate (or short visit) that can become alarming to search engines and this is believed to be one of the many factors taken into consideration when a website is ranked in the organic search results.
So how can you improve the entire user experience of your website? If you are building a new website or redeveloping your old one to be more modern and functional, user experience research and testing should be a prime focus in the planning stages, throughout the website build and before the big launch. Below are some of the most important points concerning the critical aspects of creating and improving a good website user experience.
1. Visual Aspects
The look and feel of a website design is what initially grabs your visitor’s attention. The colours, design ideas, fonts and all the other visual aspects of the website will create an initial emotion in your visitors; even if they don’t realize it. Whilst many businesses will want to keep their overall colour scheme in line with their branding and logo, much testing and research has been done over the years to determine which colours elicit which emotions in people, and these findings are well worth considering when coming up with your website’s colour palette.
2. Interactivity and Flow
Is the website easy to interact with, and importantly, are the actions you wish the user to take intuitive and obvious to them? What may initially seem like logical design and flow in the design process may not be the same way that a real user sees the website. This is why user experience testing is such a vital step in the pre-launch process.
3. User Flow
Is the flow of the user’s experience a smooth and seamless one? Having any obstacles or delays during the processes that you’d like the user to carry out results in opportunities for hesitation and creates opportunities for users to leave before they have completed the actions you’d like them to. Making the user flow a smooth one pays dividends.