You’ve likely seen the term user experience a lot lately, as it relates to your website interface. User experience, or UX, describes the overall interaction that your customer has with your company, typically through your website.
When a prospect or client interacts with your business in any online forum, they are, by extension, interacting with you, your team, and your products and services. The best websites offer a great user experience to everyone, converting online visits to sales.
So what makes a great UX and how do you ensure that you have one? Let’s explore this concept in a little more detail.
Not surprisingly, one of the most important tenets of a good UX is usability, which determines how easy it is for visitors to use your website. Users should be able to easily locate the information they seek, and navigate to it without difficulty – even if they’ve never visited your website before.
The critical components here involve your site’s navigation, including tabs, buttons, links and menus. Effective usability depends on a minimalistic site design, logical and intuitive architecture, and flat design.
Gone are the days of a cluttered and visually overwhelming site design. Clean, simple and obvious are the way to increase usability.
Although usability is important, simply making your site functional and intuitive is not enough. Without good design, visitors will quickly move on to the next competitor and perhaps not even realize why.
Where once we had web designers, we now have UX designers. Color is used today to increase readability and delight the eye. Fonts are used in the same way. Logos are simple, graphics are few and written content is concise. Today’s most effective user experiences use mature design. In other words, features look the way users expect them to look. When your users aren’t distracted by unnecessary bells and whistles, they are much more likely to be engaged.
An engaging UX is memorable, but it also connects the user to your product or service. Engaging the user is a complex psychological process, and it depends to a great extent on your detailed customer profile. The elements that engage a farmer in search of agriculture-related products aren’t the same as those that engage an urban professional woman in search of a hair salon.
Images, graphics, videos, animations and written content are the tools most often used to engage visitors, but what works for another business may not be right for your site.
Designing an effective, engaging and usable UX is harder than it sounds. It involves a detailed understanding of your business model and client profile as well as the psychological principles of engagement. Those skills must be combined with the technical knowledge required to execute the design.
Because mobile use has become so common, your UX must be responsive as well, and engaging on any size device. Don’t forget to incorporate social media links and SEO optimization, and any ecommerce functions you may need. In short, creating an effective user experience requires the skill and knowledge of a UX and website design professional.
At Be Locally SEO, we understand the importance of having a professional online presence. Consequently, website and user experience design is a crucial component of our service offerings. Your site represents your business in the eyes of online customers, and it’s your most important digital asset.
Trust the Utah SEO company that focuses on quality UX and SEO. Contact Be Locally SEO today to learn more about the importance of the user experience.
Want more about UX? Our expert recommends:
A Great User Experience: The Missing Piece of Your SEO Puzzle
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