For modern businesses, their websites play a key role in basic operations. From customers checking your hours and address to making purchases online, your website is essential to securing sales and cultivating an audience. You can improve the odds that users navigate from your homepage to checkout by creating a positive user experience (UX).
UX is an assessment of what it’s like to use your website. A negative UX experience can result in visitors bouncing off of your website and even thinking poorly of your organization’s professionalism. On the other hand, a positive UX can help businesses secure sales, reinforce brand recognition, and expand their audiences.
In this guide, we’ll walk through several ways your business can improve its UX.
1. Technical Performance
UX can generally be sorted into two main categories: website design and website performance. Let’s take a look at technical performance first since it’s easier to assess objectively.
Websites that are fast, work correctly, and have no broken links or content are professional and easy to use, meaning visitors are likely to continue using them to complete their goals. You can improve your website’s technical performance by:
- Being mindful of loading times. Double the Donation’s digital marketing guide reports that the bounce rate increases by as much as 32% for websites that take three seconds to load. Make your website run as fast as possible by optimizing page elements that might otherwise slow down loading times, such as reducing image file sizes and implementing lazy loading.
- Using responsive design. Over half of website traffic comes from smartphones, and these users are unlikely to engage with sites that are not optimized for their devices. Use a CMS like Drupal or WordPress that automatically converts your website’s content based on visitors’ screen sizes.
- Implementing redirects where needed. If you take down or combine pages, ensure the original content redirects to a live page. This step ensures visitors find the content they are looking for or at least land on an active page rather than a broken one.
To improve your website’s technical performance, consider turning to a web design consultant. These experts can take a look at your website’s back-end to identify issues that might impact the front-end user experience.
2. Categorization
Navigation is one of the most important aspects of UX, and it consists of two elements: categorization and page layout. Let’s first assess categorization, which is how you group and organize content on your website.
The most important place to consider your categorization strategy is your main navigation menu. What pages and topics are crucial enough to be featured in this menu? If you have sub-menus, what labels does each page appear under?
For instance, many websites feature an “About” label on their navigation. A few sub-menu items that might appear under this label include:
- Company history and mission statement
- An overview of your team
- Locations, contact information, and hours of operation
- Corporate social responsibility and environmental, social, and governance policies
- Careers and job information
For one company, it might make sense to group all of these menu items under the “About” label. However, another organization, such as a hospital, might separate this content into two labels, “About” and “Get Involved,” and include additional page links about donating and volunteering under “Get Involved.”
Ultimately, your categorization strategy depends on two factors: What pages do you want to drive visitors to and what labels do you assume visitors will associate with what pages? For example, your business might have a high-priority eCommerce store, so you include a link to it in your main navigation. A menu label for this store like “Explore” might sound engaging but visitors might be unsure what that means and not associate it with making a purchase. In contrast, a menu label like “Buy” makes it clear that you’re directing users to purchase something.
3. Page Layout
Once you sort out your navigation menu, you can consider your navigation strategy for individual pages. Page layout dictates how visitors will engage with your content, and a strong page layout should properly direct their attention to the content they clicked on the page to find.
Often, the best page layout is simple and straightforward. Minimalist designs limit distractions, enabling visitors to find what they need quickly.
For example, our team helped Paloma, a procurement management platform that handles day-to-day operations for Las Vegas businesses, create an efficient digital marketplace. This straightforward, no-frills layout allows buyers and sellers to scroll through and add products to their carts with ease, increasing productivity.
For additional control over your website’s page layout and UX, consider creating an app. Apps create a controlled, fully branded experience for users that limits distractions since this online environment is solely for your content.
4. Above the Fold Content
When you first visit a website, your eyes quickly take in everything in front of you before you start scrolling. If something catches your attention, you’re likely to click on it without ever scrolling down.
This section of a website that appears without needing to scroll is called “above the fold.” This term borrows its name from newspapers, where articles published at the top of the newspaper that readers can see without needing to physically unfold the paper receive more attention.
This principle applies to websites as well, so consider what content appears above the fold on every page, especially your homepage as it will earn the most attention from visitors.
For instance, you might consider your business’s philanthropic efforts worth putting on your website but ultimately feel getting eyes on your sales catalog is more important for new visitors. In this case, you would feature a sales proportion prominently above the fold and include details about your business’s philanthropy further down the page.
5. Accessibility
Everyone who visits your website should be able to access its content in full. This means ensuring your site follows accessibility guidelines.
Getting Attention’s guide to 501(c)(3) website requirements details accessibility guidelines nonprofit organizations must follow. While these rules only apply to organizations that receive federal funding, businesses can still benefit from following these guidelines to expand their audiences and improve their UX for all audiences.
A few accessibility guidelines to implement include:
- Text alternatives. Some of your visitors may use assistive technology like screenreaders to navigate your website. Ensure these visitors can engage with your content by including text alternatives to visual content, such as alternative text that explains images and subtitles and transcripts that describe videos.
- Clarity. Within accessibility guidelines, clarity has several definitions. First, all content should be easy to access and comprehend. For example, if your website features videos or audio, this content should be easy for all users to play and pause. Clarity also applies to language choices. Limit technical jargon where possible and provide definitions for terms visitors may be unfamiliar with.
- Text layout. Ensure your written content is legible for all visitors by implementing proper text and paragraph spacing. Getting Attention shares that paragraph spacing should be at least double the font size, line height 1.5 times the font size, word spacing 0.16 times the font size, and kerning (letter spacing) 0.12 times the font size. Additionally, ensure your text has sufficient color contrast with its background to increase readability. Use accessibility tools that allow you to view your website in grayscale to assess color levels and adjust contrast as needed.
For a more detailed overview of accessibility guidelines, refer to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). This is a comprehensive list of international accessibility standards that all websites should strive to adhere to.
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Optimizing your website’s UX can earn your site more visitors and ensure those visitors stick around long enough to make a purchase. If your business needs help improving your site’s UX, turn to our team at Foxsense Innovations to assess the scope of your project and create a plan for developing a modern, branded, and user-friendly website.
