Creating an Exceptional User Experience: Best Practices for Website Design
The craft of website design hinges on one vital concept every step of the way: User experience (UX). Developing a sensible, thoughtful approach to UX design can transform how users, customers, and clients perceive your business. A truly great website design provides UX that allows visitors to find the information they need effortlessly — and subtly find themselves guided to the most lucrative pages on your business’s website.
Imagine a website that’s not just a digital space, but a journey where every click brings a smile, every scroll unveils a story, and every page turns into an opportunity. That’s the magic of thoughtful UX design – it’s not just about looking good, it’s about feeling right and making connections.
Gone are the days of loud, flashy designs or the stark minimalism that followed. Today, crafting a UX strategy is like creating a bespoke suit – it needs to fit your business and appeal to your audience perfectly. At MYB, we believe that the best UX strategies are tailored, thoughtful, and always, always about the user.
How a Streamlined UX Increases Conversion Rates
Strategic marketing best practices will funnel web users towards your business. Once they arrive, their experience needs to match or exceed their expectations. A successful UX designer will make it their priority to envision how users feel when they see a webpage for the first time.
They ensure all the tools to navigate that web page are instantly recognisable and usable with few barriers. In a general sense, they should find:
- Easily readable, succinct text describing all products or services
- Simple, clearly marked user interface (UI) elements
- Consistent design language across each new page
The urge to fill pages with loud marketing-forward elements — loud videos, pop-ups, and overwrought text, for example — impedes the core principles of successful UX design. But, as we’ll see below, going too sparse can also be detrimental to your business, damaging the potential return on investment (ROI) of refreshing the UX of your business’s web presence.
UX Shapes the Customer’s Journey Through Your Business
Good UX doesn’t have to be about removing barriers between customers and your products. It can also expand a customer’s scope, introducing them to products or services they didn’t intentionally consider when visiting a business on the web. Tracking how users behave on websites allows UX designers to make potentially lucrative changes that subtly encourage users in certain directions.
User journey optimisation hinges on gathering data on how users interact with your website. For an e-commerce website, this would include elements like displaying additional products on the landing page of the product the user intends to buy.
“How often do these UI elements receive engagement? Are they distracting the user from converting into a paying customer promptly?”
Sticking to what seems intuitive is rarely the answer, especially as user interaction changes over time. Website conversion rates shift based on user expectations driven by the broader web. That is out of each UX designer’s control, so they adapt accordingly. And those adaptations can be the difference between retaining a user’s attention and losing them entirely.
How Modernised UX Increases Conversion Rates
UX investment ROI depends most on when a user becomes a customer. Committing to a recurring service, for example, is one of a website’s most sensitive design elements. Making a website painless and even enticing to browse adds up to little if the user shies away from converting to a customer.
A UX designer has to empathise with the user, knocking down any possible barriers. A marketing agency with little UX expertise might choose this moment to upsell a user, adding noise recommendations for additional unrelated goods or services. But a savvy designer will instead focus on making the sale as painless as possible.
A UX that allows users to quickly enter their financial information, with all options easily marked, is crucial. Straightforward dropdown menus that automatically prioritise an automatically-detected location for the customer or a credit card number entry field that quickly detects the card type.
Remember: As Jeff Bezos has repeatedly pointed out over the years, no decision has to be final. Great UX will lead to a strong ROI if user behaviour is adequately weighed and savvy changes are made accordingly.
Digital Marketing Brings Users In Good UX Converts Them into Customers
Great UX seamlessly pulls the user in and keeps them engaged. Rather than making them feel aggressively marketed, the UX should funnel the user towards genuinely helpful content. Then, at the bottom of that funnel, they should find a pleasant conversion to a paying customer.
Need specialised marketing help for your business? Contact our experienced UX design team for honest and strategic assistance with your website.