User experience design is a style of website design that positively influences the emotions and attitudes of your website visitors. It focuses on the important relationship aspect between your website visitors and your website. Creating a website with a great user experience design entails taking several things into account. First of all, you want to create an efficient website that is easy to use. You also want to have a website that appeals to an individual’s emotions and preferences.
The experts at Portside Marketing are highly trained and experienced in developing websites with a superior user experience design. They can help you create a website that keeps your users coming back for more.
Aspects of User Experience Design
User experience encompasses all the users’ emotions, preferences, perceptions, beliefs, behaviors, responses, and accomplishments before, during, and after visiting your website. There are three primary factors that influence the user experience and those are the system, the user, and usability. You want your website designed in a way that maximizes usability, but poor usability always negatively affects the user experience. But user experience is more than just usability.
On average, a first time visitor to your website will make a judgement about your site in about eight seconds. This is a very small window to make a positive impression and convince visitors to stay. Not only do you want to create a great first impression, but you want to set your website apart from the thousands like it. You want to quickly draw your visitors in and show them that your website is worth their full attention. Imagine trying to pitch your business in just eight seconds. Think about the most important things you have to offer your customers. This information is called a value proposition. It helps visitors understand how your products or services can solve their problems and why they should spend their money with your company.
In order for users to quickly understand what your company has to offer, you want to put these important elements in places where they’ll be seen first. Studies have shown that the upper left side of the page is where most people start visually inspecting a website. Their eyes then move towards the right side and further down the page, similar to reading a book. This is why many web designers insist on putting the most important information above the fold. However, it’s also important that you don’t cram too much information in that limited space and overwhelm your website visitors.
A Deeper Look into User Experience Design
Earning and keeping the attention of your website visitors is largely dependent on the location of your information within your website. Make sure everything above the fold is clear and well-defined. It should also consist of information that’s important to your ideal customers. Small tidbits of information can go a long way. These snippets are easy for website visitors to digest. If the information catches their eye then they’ll look further into your website.
Visual information is also extremely important for your website. This is because our brains process images much faster than text. An image can quickly provide the viewer with important information. It can also encourage certain feelings about your website and company. These images can be photographs, infographics, graphs, screen shots, and even video clips. They help break up big blocks of text and help your message come across more clearly. You can’t just put up any images though, they need to support the key points of your value proposition and strengthen your audience’s expectations.
Text content is also extremely important. If your visitors have chosen to stay on your website long enough to read the content then you need to make sure you’ve provided them with high quality information. The content should be engaging and easy to read while serving its purpose and teaching the audience something.
The white space around the content is equally important. Too much text and information seems chaotic and crowded. It’s hard to read and hard on the eyes. However, if you incorporate white space between your paragraphs and in the margins of the page then your website becomes much easier on the eyes. In fact, allowing your readers a place to rest increases comprehension by 20%.
Other Factors that Influence User Experience
There are some basic things that can affect user experience. It’s important to make sure that all the links throughout your website work properly. A broken link or an incorrect link can easily irritate website visitors and cause them to go elsewhere for information.
You also want to make sure that your pages load quickly. Quick loading pages get your website visitors the information they want and quickly. If your entire eight second first impression window is taken up by your website loading then many people will turn elsewhere before even seeing your page. Approximately 40% of individuals will abandon a web page if it takes longer than three seconds to load.
Every page on your website should also feature a call to action. This encourages the website visitors to take action. After all, that is the main purpose of your website, right? The call to action, or CTA should be attractive and fit in with the overall design of your web site. These CTAs should be placed below the fold, in the middle or bottom of the page. When placed above the fold they can sometimes be viewed as aggressive. It’s best to ask for the action after you’ve told them what you have to offer. A CTA should clearly advise what you want the website visitor to do. If you’re unclear then you won’t see the results you want.
Portside Marketing can help you create a streamlined website for the ultimate user experience. Our experts have been successfully helping businesses just like yours for years. We succeed when you succeed.