In website development, user experience (or UX) is one of the most important, and most overlooked, factors. The usability of your site dictates whether visitors will get frustrated with it and move another site instead, or if they are likely to return to it in the future. If you are not sure what user experience entails, take a look at some key factors for making your website user-friendly.
You want your site’s visitors to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily, and user experience makes this possible – or not!
Start by making sure the categories on your website menus and other navigational elements have accurate titles, allowing readers to anticipate what they will find when they visit a page.Another important tip to consider in website development is readable text. Make it large enough so that the majority of visitors can read the text without taking out a magnifying glass. An ideal size for most sites is 16-point type, though it's a good idea to make the fost size adjust to the size of the screen. A fixed 16-point can look very large on a phone.
In addition, you should choose a font that is known for being easy to read, such as Arial, Verdana or Courier, and avoid fonts that don't differentiate between upper and lower case letters. Choose a color that clearly stands out from the background. Black text on a white background is far easier to read than white text on a black background.
Design pros advise that you avoid using large blocks of text on a page. Instead, keep the paragraphs short and simple, about three to five sentences each, with bold headings to logically break up the subject matter. You can also make text more visually interesting with bullet points, charts and images. Images create visual interest but also provide additional opportunities to optimize your site for better search engine performance.
These days, your customers are accustomed to instant gratification, and this includes near-instantaneous access to the information they need from your web pages. Most businesses have recognized this imperative and their websites do not disappoint. That means that you must also make sure your site loads quickly, with the pages coming up within a couple of seconds. Otherwise, people will leave your site when it fails to load immediately, making the user experience poor. This will cost you website viewers – and sales – as they leave in favor of other sites that simply load faster. Luckily, this problem is easy to avoid when you pay attention to load times during the website development process.
Now that you know the basics of user experience, you can apply these tips in the creation of your own site. If you do not yet have a site, or if your site’s UX leaves a bit to be desired, you are losing business (and money). Contact Be Locally SEO today for assistance from experienced website developers.
More recommended reading:
Building a User Friendly E-Commerce Site
A Great User Experience: The Missing Piece of Your SEO Puzzle
Top 4 UX (User Experience) Design Tips for 2015