How to UX your website

Cotswold Web • 18 January 2021

The UX of your website is the user experience. It is how a visitor sees your website, how they use it and how they remember it later.

With every website, you want to be sure that the UX is as good as it can possibly be – because that’s what will encourage people to spend time there, get to know your brand and ultimately become customers.

A landing page that works

Many of your visitors will arrive at your site through a landing page. So that landing page has to instantly sell your business and keep their interest. It should be neither boring nor complicated and overwhelming.

So make sure you give them a great first impression, which should meet with their expectations of your brand. And don’t give them too much information without helping them to take the next steps.

Depending how it fits with your brand, a good landing page should be a large and striking image (or a video running in the background), with minimalist design and a clear call to action.

As an added bonus, if your landing page is good enough to keep people hanging round for longer, that’s good news for your Google ranking too.

Keep words to a minimum

‘A picture says a thousand words’, so do you really need all of those words on your site? Give your images space to breathe and make sure your visitors’ attention is drawn to the words that really matter.

Images and videos go a long way in helping establish your brand identity and building your relationship with your visitors. For most businesses, the best UX will come from a 70% visual (pictures, video), 30% content (words, links etc) rule.

Too many words risks visitors reading the less important words on your site. There is also a big risk of visitors getting bored and leaving quickly.

So keep your words and sentences precise and concise. And don’t restrict yourself to overly formal language in a bid to sound professional. Use a friendly and chatty style to make your brand appear approachable.

Where you do have sections which are more text heavy (eg testimonials), break up the words with lots of white space (remember ‘white space’ doesn’t have to be white – it can be any colour!) and the use of headings and sub-headings.

Subtle differences

If your website has a number of pages, you don’t want them all to look exactly the same. That makes it very hard to differentiate between them and can quickly become monotonous and boring. On the other hand, they have to be similar enough to make it clear that your website is all for the same brand.

So the key is subtle difference and finding the right balance between having enough variation and everything being identical.

One way of striking the balance is to vary the layout of your pages. Some layouts will lend themselves more readily to your blog, while others will work well for your product pages.

Ways to keep the consistency and ensure your brand identity stays strong include sticking with the same colour palette and fonts and the same navigation eg menu bar/ header throughout.

Use micro animations

They might not seem significant, as they are very small and subtle, but micro animations can discreetly encourage visitors to take the actions you want them to take.

When the user needs to act on something important, animating the actions will attract their attention. Start with a subtle animation and increase the intensity (change of size, colour or speed) depending on how important the action is.

A good animation uses transitions like push left or slide up to show the content on a detail screen. Other ideas include lists which ‘fall’ into place one item at a time or animations which push other content out of the way, perhaps when a reader scrolls through your page.

Animation on a call to action (CTA) button can show in a more visual way that the action has been completed – maybe by colours moving along or darkening or even a ‘success’ message appearing on the button.

Use micros animations sparingly and only for the most important actions. If you use too many, they lose their impact.

Use live chat

If a visitor is confused and not sure where to go or what to do next, there is no better way to help them than through live chat. Live chat addresses and deals with these problems there and then.

A good chatbot will make your website lively and interactive and also shows that you are responsive to your customers’ needs. What better way to UX your website?

There are also some hidden bonuses of live chat, which will help you as much as they help your visitors. Live chat has a good lead capture rate and can also give you useful user feedback and even opportunities for new work and projects.

Be careful with the pop-ups

There is a place for pop-up forms on a website, but too many of them, or having them appear at the wrong time, is definitely not good for UX.

In fact, badly designed pop-ups will block a visitor’s view of your page and interrupt what they are doing. This is often even worse on mobile sites, where it can completely obliterate the view.

So think carefully before using a pop-up on your site. Is it really relevant? Can you use an alternative?

If a pop-up still seems like the right option, make sure:

It offers something valuable and relevant to the visitor
It doesn’t ruin the mobile experience
It is a good fit with the way people already engage with your site
It uses language which is specific, actionable and easy to relate to

If you haven’t yet taken these actions on your website, spend a little time on it to update and improve your UX. It will definitely be time well spent, which your visitors and customers will appreciate, and could lead to an improved impact on your bottom line.

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