Providing an excellent user experience is indispensable to the growth and success of any product or service. The same goes for websites. With passing time, websites have now become an integral part of businesses. Today, having a good online presence is as important as having a tidy storefront. In other words, your website is a 24x7 salesman and holds the potential to be one of the most powerful assets of your marketing efforts.
However, with rapidly changing digital trends your website may start looking and feeling outdated. Sometimes, choosing to re-design might be the right thing to do, but you may not have the time or money to invest in it. To help you quash this challenge, you can go through a list of 5 simple ways that tell you how to improve the user experience on a website with the best user experience examples.
1. Increase User Attention Through White Space
Whitespace or as called many times as negative space is the portion of a page that is left blank. In terms of website design, it’s the space between columns, graphics, images, margins, text, and other elements. Now, don’t get confused; even though it’s called white space, it doesn’t mean that the space left has to be white actually. It just has to be free of any elements.
White space helps to smooth things out and gives an elegant look and feel to your web page. Most of the time, it is used to deliver a clear and direct message. Moreover, it is also associated with sophistication as it is considered as a way to organize text and elements. It also helps to fix the users’ attention to the important information and elements.
One of the most common user experience examples can be the Google search page. It’s neat, clean, and only lets you focus on important things.
Source: Wikipedia
2. Improve The Page Loading Speed
In the current time, when everything is moving so fast, people do not have the time and patience to wait on the screen if your website page takes minutes to load. The longer it takes, the faster the visitors will drop out.
A study shows that the visitors bounce rate can increase up to 20% with every passing second. So, what can you do about it? Well, if you are not aware, Google offers a free tool to check your website’s speed insights. All you have to do is put your website URL and you will get a proper speed analysis for mobile and desktop versions. Accordingly, you can optimize the loading speed of your web page. You can also choose to download these free open-source server modules.
One of the website user experience best practices is to compress all your images before uploading them to your website. This will significantly improve your website’s loading speed. Tools like TinyPNG can help you with this. For example, a study shows that bhphotovideo.com is one of the fastest loading websites.
3. Use Outstanding CTA’s
Your visitors already know which information is important and what to focus on on your page. CTA’s have to be one of those elements. Call to Action buttons guide your visitors throughout and encourage them to take action. This is why you need to make them stand out.
While designing them, you need to focus more on the colors you choose and the psychology of color. Many studies show that it’s the colors that actually affect the user’s choice. Select the right color for the CTA button depending on the emotion you want to evoke and the message you want to deliver. You can try and test it with different colors to check which works the best for you.
Another thing to consider when it comes to making your CTA buttons stand is the words you use. Make sure to add a verb or an action word that encourages or excites the visitor to click on it. Choosing the right words is really important. They trigger the emotions of a person leading them to take an action. So, it’s better to choose words that are straightforward, time-sensitive, and provoke to take an action.
For example, check out the signup page of Netflix. It says nothing more or less, just what is to be rightfully conveyed. One of the fears that many visitors face while signing up for something is whether they will be able to cancel their subscription. Netflix takes that fear away the moment any visitor lands on the sign-up page. It clearly mentions that they can watch anywhere, cancel anytime. Also, thanks to the white space and the wisely chosen color of the CTA buttons that help them stand out.
4. Don’t Experiment With Hyperlinks
When you add a link to your page, you want the visitors to click on it. The best way to make it stand out is to not worry about the length of the hyperlink. Most people hyperlink just 1 or 2 words which makes it difficult for people to differentiate between regular text and hyperlinked text. So, instead of saying to know more ‘click here’ it can be ‘get more information about hyperlinking’.
Another thing is the color. A study shows that usually people take blue and underlined text on the web as hyperlinks and know that it has to be clicked upon. They are instantly recognizable and known to be useful. So, experimenting with other colors and ways to highlight it won’t be helpful. Because if you cannot recognize and understand its function through its appearance then there’s no use of it. Sticking to the regular approach is the key here to providing a good user experience to the visitor.
5. Use Bullets for Important Information
Bullet points make it easy for visitors to consume the information. It makes them feel that it’s readable, won’t take much time, and cover the gist. You can mention your benefit, key features, your services, or achievements in bullet points.
When talking of bullet points, you don’t have to stick to the traditional ways. With so many cool icons and vectors out there, you can align them to represent your points. Here is an example to help you understand -
Have a look at this page from Unacademy’s website where they have used non-conventional bullets. This looks clean, easy to consume, and has appropriate icons used to represent each point.
Conclusion
Providing a good user experience to your visitors is very crucial. But you don’t have to spend too much on redesigning the whole thing. Reading the top 5 website user experience best practices and examples will give you plenty of ideas to revamp your website to make it more user-friendly.
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