Have you ever ben scrolling along on a website and thought, “This website is awful, I can’t find anything I need.” If you’ve ever had to click a half-dozen times to get to the page you need, or if you’ve had to scroll up and down the page to find any bit of relevant information, you’ve been the victim of a bad user experience (UX) design. Now, here’s the really hard question you’ll need to ask yourself: does my website have good UX design?
If your immediate thought is, “yes, of course,” we challenge you to get someone who doesn’t know your site to try finding a product, service, or article. You know your website, naturally. You can probably find whatever you need with ease and speed. But you aren’t your target audience, nor are you driving your website’s traffic numbers.
In reality, most websites could do with a UX touch-up every now and again. There’s always a way to simplify the design and provide the fewest amount of clicks possible for the reader. You want them to not realize that someone designed the website, as strange as it sounds. You want your website to feel natural, like everything is exactly where it’s supposed to be and the user will “know” where to look to find what they want/need.
Start with functionality
Make it easy to scroll. Keep clicks to a minimum for the end-user. Make sure that your content is easily accessible and readable. Define an information hierarchy and deliver on it. Don’t overload your website with images, but don’t let things be too sparse either. It’s an interesting balancing act, but one that you absolutely need to work on to stay competitive.
Make it mobile friendly
Many people aren’t always going to view your website on a laptop or desktop computer. They may be looking on their phones while they’re commuting, or on their tablets when they’re at home. Any number of devices have internet connections now; make sure your website looks good and functions well across all of these possible devices. For the best results across all viewing platforms, keep your most important information and your CTAs at the top of the pages — this is what your users will see first.
Stop, collaborate, and listen
While technically, yes, you can design the UX of a website by yourself and it can be done as a one-person job, it’s often better to have more input from people to catch possible little mistakes. You’ll be too invested in the design and you’ll fall prey to the curse of knowledge. You know where everything is and how it should work, so everyone else will too. One of the toughest parts about UX is removing your biases from the project and trying to view it as objectively as possible without any prior knowledge. You’ll want to team up.
UX is a tough job, but it needs to be done if you want to stay relevant in the marketing world. Your website, and by extension your business, hinge on good UX to keep readers engaged on your site and ideally converting them to paying customers. This quick guide is to help you get started, but you’re going to want to do a much deeper dive into your website’s UX in order to maximize its potential. Our LA marketing firm also handles website designs, so we’d be happy to show you our portfolio and how we can help you. Give us a call and let’s talk UX.