Part of creating a high performing website is to constantly optimise your user experience. A key factor to succeeding in this is knowing why people leave your site. Buuut this part of the customer journey can be tricky to deduce from standard marketing analytics alone. So what can you do when Google Analytics fails you? The answer is collecting feedback directly from your users!
This is exactly what our customers do. Based on their results, we have put together a list of the most common issues that they faced. And how you can fix them!
So, just for you: Here are seven ways to improve your website user experience.
- What is website user experience?
- What does it mean to enhance the user experience?
- Tip 1: Focus on clear content
- Tip 2: Website user experience starts with UX design
- Tip 3: Speed up your website’s loading time
- Tip 4: Make the login procedure easy
- Tip 5: Bugs everywhere?
- Tip 6: Deliver a moblie-first experience
- Tip 7: Ask for feedback
First: Let’s get back to basics
What is website user experience?
User experience refers to how a visitor or user interacts with and feels about your company/organisation, or your products. Usually via a website or an app.
Naturally, website user experience is the same thing, but with a focus on only the website itself.
What does it mean to enhance the user experience?
By tweaking certain things, you can improve the user experience on your website. This has a positive effect on several things. For example:
- Increased ROI
- Brand reputation and awareness
- Customer loyalty
- Engagement
- Conversions and sales
How to improve your website user experience: On with the show!
Tip 1: Content is king: Focus on clear information
Content is the backbone of all websites: from product descriptions to governmental information and FAQ pages. All deal with some kind of text, video, or illustration. This is why clear content can make a huge difference in your website’s user experience.
When people visit a page, they are looking for information with a certain goal in mind. Often to find the answer to a question or to fill a need (like buying an article).
The purpose and tone of your content are of course dependent on your market and brand. But something every industry has in common is that you always want your information to be:
- Easy to find
- Easy to understand
- Easy to follow
How can you get clearer content?
Map out the customer journey
If a user can’t find the correct information, their customer journey is going to get complicated. And the more complicated your website gets, the more likely it is that a visitor will leave.
The first step to address this problem is to map out your online journey and create your content based on this. Try to write down and decide:
- Who the people visiting your page are (buyer personas).
- Who your target customer is.
- All the reasons why a visitor might be on your website.
- How they behave while they are on your website.
Invest in UX writing
UX writing stands for user experience writing and it’s the process of writing content that carefully considers the users’ needs and behaviours.
Unlike copywriting, which tries to persuade someone to take a specific action, UX writing is made to enhance your website user experience by making it clear and easy.
Tip 2: Website user experience starts with UX design
UX writing is important for your website’s user experience. But don’t forget UX design!
User experience design, or UX design, is the process of making the content on your website easier to digest with the help of layout.
The goal is to make it clear to the visitor which actions you want them to take. Or where they should go to find what they are looking for.
So what can you do to create good UX design?
Keep it simple
Most people scan the content on a website. This is why it’s important to be able to get a good overview. Include eye-catching and clear headlines, bullet points, and click-to-actions that are easy to understand. Remember that every page should have a single, definite goal.
Lastly, don’t forget fonts and colour schemes. Usually, it is enough with two or three colours on a website and two different kinds of fonts: One for headlines and one for the text.
Include whitespace
This is the quickest way of improving the UX design of your website. Whitespace is the space between text, graphics, images, and blocks. It allows your designs to breathe and adds to the simplicity of your website.
According to Human Factors International, using whitespace in designs increases visitor comprehension (and therefore also the website user experience) by almost 20%!
Tip 3: Speed up your website’s loading time
Loading time is still a very common issue when it comes to user experience. And our customers are no exception. For some companies, it was mentioned in 30% of the user feedback they received. And we all know just how annoying it can be to go through a process if every click makes you wait an eternity.
Companies working with campaigns, promotions, or monthly cycles struggle especially with this. Think about limited launches on e-commerce sites, for example. (You got to get those new pairs of Nike sneakers right?)
While great for sales, these kinds of promotions come with bursts of visitors that can slow down the page.
What can you do to solve the problem?
Choose a good hosting solution
Mediocre hosting usually means slow loading. By going for a cheaper provider, you could sacrifice performance for money. However, this might turn out to be a double-edged sword that will cost you more in the long run.
Cheaper providers often mean you have to share hosting with other websites on a more than overloaded server. Do your research and make sure to invest in a proper performance-focused provider.
Assets
A solution closer to home can be found in the assets you use. Big images and videos can have a massive effect on your loading speed. This can be fixed by making sure that you minimize and compress your files correctly.
Caching
Last but not least: Take a look at the caching on your website. There are tools available that prevent your visitors from having to load assets unnecessarily. When your website runs on an unknown framework or CMS (like WordPress) there are often caching options available in the form of plugins.
Want to optimise your website?
Start collecting feedback to see how you can improve your website user experience.
Tip 4: Make the login procedure easy
Online services are an important feature for many companies. Think about all the accounts you use regularly: Streaming services, webshops, banks, energy companies, telecom providers, etc.
It’s hardly surprising that issues with logging in to a website can be the most infuriating thing on this planet for many users.
In other words: Everything you can do to make it easier to log in, will greatly improve your website’s user experience.
What can you do to create a seamless login experience?
Don’t reload the login page
Have you ever entered your login details into an account, convinced that you have the right information, only for it not to work?
The page keeps reloading and giving you an error message. On the fourth try, you finally notice that you accidentally typed “name@domain.con” instead of “.com”. These kinds of experiences are quite disruptive.
The good news is that the issues can be fixed with the help of a Javascript or Ajax validation! This immediately lets the user know that they have made an error, like filling in an invalid email address.
Did you forget something? Optimise the password retrieval process
Today, it is more or less standard to give users the possibility to reset a password. Often, this option is not shown until after the user has tried to log in incorrectly. But this might not be as helpful as you think.
Imagine that you are logging into a streaming service, like Netflix, and you know you don’t remember the password. But there is no button to retrieve it in sight. This leads to two issues:
- You don’t even know if there is a way to reset your password. This may result in you contacting customer service or searching for a FAQ page before you even try to log in.
- Even if you do realise that you need to try to log in to get the option to retrieve your password, it still adds another step in your journey to log in. A journey that is already inconvenienced by the fact that you don’t remember the password.
In summary: Include the button saying “Did you forget your password?” already from the start.
Tip 5: Have everyone be on the lookout for bugs
Even with the most extensive tests, bugs may still occur after you have gone live. They are sneaky that way!
To reduce them, you can use tools that allow you to test your website in all possible combinations. This usually helps with bugs in the front-end. But all kinds of different things can still go wrong in the back-end software.
Did we mention that bugs are sneaky?
Your customers are usually the first ones to discover the lingering bugs after your website has gone live. So make it easy to report them! This can be done by putting in a form where your visitors can explain what is going wrong.
This is a quick way to give you relevant insights into which pages need your attention. And it improves your website’s user experience in the process!
Tip 6: Deliver a mobile-first experience
Here is an aspect where trusty old Google Analytics doesn’t fail us! Have a look at your website traffic. Are most of your visitors using a desktop or a mobile device to browse your content?
We are betting that a large number of them are mobile visitors. More than half of all web traffic comes from mobile devices. That’s why it isn’t surprising that users are five times more likely to leave your website if it isn’t well-optimised for smaller screens.
Even if an overwhelming amount of your visitors are coming from desktop, you still want to have a mobile-first mindset. And this reason is called SEO! When Google indexes your website, it crawls both your desktop and mobile website. This means that if your mobile site isn’t optimised, it will be harder for your customers to find you.
So what can you do to create a mobile-friendly website?
Lots of things! But here is where you start:
- The images. Start with the smallest screen and then work your way up to larger devices when designing your website.
- Pay close attention to your texts. Stay away from too thin and complex fonts. Increase the readability by handling the space between the letters and the lines in a smart way.
- Make sure that your menu is easy to navigate by touch.
Tip 7: Ask for user feedback
Asking for feedback is the only way to get a concise answer to what your users are missing from your website.
As we said at the beginning of this post, it can be hard to deduce visitor behaviours with the help of traditional marketing analytics alone. They will show you THAT people exit on a certain page, but not WHY.
Asking for feedback fixes this!
How can I improve my website user experience with feedback?
Measure your customers’ experience and take action
There are many different KPIs that you can use to measure user experience.
One especially relevant metric to look at in this situation is the Customer Effort Score (CES) which literally measures the ease of an online experience. You can do this by asking your visitor how much effort it took for them to do what they wanted to do on your website.
Make sure to follow this question up with an open comment field, so you know why the user is giving you the score that they are giving you. And what you can do to improve their experience!
Want to know more about how to create a user experience survey? Read about 5 different user experience questionnaires here.
Ask for missing content
Do you have pages with a lot of complicated information? Or a page where a lot of people seem to leave your website? These are perfect spots for a feedback form!
Ask your visitors a simple question like: “Did you find what you need?” Make sure to follow this up with an open-ended comment field where they can give you more detailed information. This makes it very clear what you need to improve on your website.
If you notice that 60% of the feedback you receive says that your visitors didn’t find what they were looking for, it might be time to take some action. Like improving navigation, making texts simpler, or even adding a search bar!
Don’t be afraid to go in-depth
Do you need more in-depth feedback? Then it’s a perfect moment to create a user experience survey. This is beneficial when you have more extensive questions. For example, regarding the look of your website, your product/service, or even how your visitors found your brand.
Are you ready to see how feedback can help you improve your website’s customer experience? Want to learn more about Mopinion’s all-in-1 user feedback platform? Don’t be shy and take our software for a spin! Do you prefer it a bit more personal? Just book a demo. One of our feedback pro’s will guide you through the software and answer any questions you may have.
Ready to see Mopinion in action?
