Why do we need a good web design? It is not just to enhance the user experience to make them happy and think well of your website only rather turn them into paying customers as well. A good user experience is everything you need for your business. It serves to be a major tactic in meeting your business goals and turning prospects into paying customers. The best-designed user experience is the only way to gain the attention of the customers online as in a brick-and-mortar store cap displays, signage, aisle navigation, and sales support does.
By focusing on the user experience, businesses can lead users to do a lot of stuff that is beneficial for the company for example attracting to explore your services or buying your products. This is not as easy as it sounds. By using specialized tools, monitoring the online activity of the customers gives insight into several things for instance the grey areas of the site, the interests of the customers and their position at the conversion funnel. The better the user experience, the higher the conversion rate.
Unfortunately, many businesses fail to realize the importance of the quality user experience and thus the sales suffer. It is very important to integrate a well-designed UX at the early stage of your business. The right user experience for your product or website requires intensive research, insight into the lives of your target audience and a lot of trial and error.
The importance of UX came into the focus of many businesses when big companies like Amazon and Google started to generate remarkable revenue by investing in UX. Now almost every business wants to enhance the experience of their users to reap the desired rewards.
Let’s take a peek into the concept of UX and how is it important in increasing the conversion rate.
What is UX?
UX refers to the reinforcement of the customer’s satisfaction by enhancing the quality of customer interaction with the website, devices or applications. To put simple UX tends to augment the usability of a site by transforming the complex components into simple ones. The term UX is often interchangeably used with UI but these are not the same. UI that stands for the user interface is the first impression that the user gets by the layout when he visits your site while UX is the impression of how easy the site is to use.
Several factors influence the user experience, the intuitive design being one of them. An intuitive design helps reduce the friction between the website and the target audience creating it to be a more desirable place for the customers to interact with. For instance, if you streamline your sign-in or checkout the process and make your site easy to navigate, it is highly likely that the visitors convert into paying customers.
The UX Honey Comb:
This honeycomb Peter Morville describes the seven essential considerations while designing a UX.
Conversion Funnel:
A conversion funnel is a phenomenon in eCommerce which indicates the status through the different stages of buyer’s journey that leads to purchase. The analogy of the funnel symbolizes that it is easy to make visitors aware of your brand but the real trouble is to persuade them to buy your product. The funnel is divided into three areas i.e
- The top of the funnel:
At this stage, the user acquires the knowledge of your brand’s existence, does the research of the market, and evaluates if your brand will suit their needs or not.
- The middle of the funnel:
This is the next stage when the interest and expectations of the prospects develop and they proceed further into inquiring about your product.
- Bottom of the funnel:
This is the most crucial stage which determines whether the customer has found your product relevant or up to the marks. The prospect that has turned into a lead is now going to turn into a paying customer if he finds the product promising at this stage.
There are four levels of conversion named as awareness, interest desire and action. At the first level your job is to pull the visitors to your site through advertising, social media and content marketing campaigns, and organic search. The next step is to develop the interests of the visitors through engaging content irresistible offers and visually appealing design. It has to be made sure at this stage whether the tactics are working or not. This step is the natural one to build the desire in the prospects to learn more about your product. This can be done by personalized content and targeted emails. The last step urges the prospects to turn into paying customers and to take action. Your goal is to persuade them to make a purchase.
Why is UX important?
Businesses always strive to deliver value to their customers. Customers, when they visit a site, have certain set expectations in their minds for instance clarity, speed and easy navigation. A quality UX ensures that the expectations of your customers are met and fulfilled and that goes well with an intuitive design of the site.
The user spends less than 10 seconds on a site which are very crucial for you to retain their attention. UX obstacles can increase the chances of the loss of customers ultimately to abandoned carts. UX is important to determine the demands of the customers and their patterns of interaction with the site.
Why improve UX?
The only way to successfully attract customers and persuade them to pass through the purchase journey is to augment and improve the customer experience. In conversion funnel optimization, middle funnel optimization is the step where a quality UX pull the customers further down the conversion funnel. A good landing page has already done half of your work. At this stage providing customers with testimonials, product reviews, case studies, community forum, price comparisons, various merchandising techniques and engaging content can be of great help for your business.
How To Improve UX To Generate More Sales?
The user experience certainly is something subjective and a very broad discipline to understand yet the goal is to educate and assist customers through your website and make them aware of the advantage of your product. So the purpose of designing a user experience is to solve specific problems. Here are some of the ways to improve UX to get more conversions:
- Know your users:
It is very important to keep a sound knowledge of your users’ psyche. Try to figure out the common view of people while visiting a website, which things arouses or allays their interests or what do they find credible. Also, try to know about your target audience interests and their purpose of using your product.
- Effective And Separate Calls to Action:
The call to action is the component of the UX through which visitors determine what the business offers. A vague call to action can reduce the chances of clicks and further inquiry about the product. Similarly putting multiple calls to action at one place can confuse the users and cause problems. It is better to place a variety of calls to action at different locations of the page for different users. The following heat map shows how strategically placing a call to action effects the user’s interest. It shows that the user clicks increases as you put less on the top and more on the bottom.
- Categorize every element of the site:
There different areas of each element that the user might be looking for. Careful segmentation and arrangement of the elements contribute a lot to the user experience.
- Optimize the most important pages:
Homepage, landing pages, sales pages, about page, and contact page are the pages from which you can impress a visitor. Keep updating the pages according to your business and customers demands for instance an e-commerce site will start with a sales page to become thrifty.
- Prioritize Customer Service:
Customer service is an important component of UX. Try to impress your prospects with quick action, kind treatment, and helpful tools.
- Testing:
A/B testing each area to figure out what works best is the crucial part of designing a quality UX. Heatmaps, scroll maps, confetti maps, overlay reports and list reports help generate a sketch that can be run for testing. Potential design changes and improvement when done via testing proves to be effective than other methods.
So when you make your priorities clear about your customers, you get an effective UX. Follow the above steps to give your customers an incredible user experience and generate lucrative revenue.
CodeNinja with its team of UX generalists and specialists provides you with a unique set of skills and tools to improve user experience. Call us today and we will help you achieve your goals.