There is a well-known fact that the success or failure of any website is determined by usability and utility rather than by its visual design. What to click and what to buy, it is completely buyers’ decision; therefore, it becomes very clear that designers should follow user-centric approach to design a profit-oriented web design company.
Customer practices are same on the web as well as in a store. They give a fleeting look at each and every page of the website, scan the product information and click on the product that catches their interest or intensely search for the product they wish to buy. If they find something interesting and clickable, they continue browsing on a website; but if they don’t find anything interesting or if a new page doesn’t meet their expectations, they click back button and continue their search process.
So, when it comes to design, just keep it ‘simple’. It looks much better to the visitors and also communicates well. Instead of design overdoes, focus more on designs that can cater users’ desires, needs, and boundaries. In simple terms, you should opt for user-centered design. User-centered design is the one that simplifies tasks for the user and highlights important features and functions of your website. It involves structuring, interface, and demonstration of the content handy and connected. To convert visitors into buyers, it is necessary that they must get all the information on a click. It also depends on how rational architecture and navigation your website holds so that it can avoid the consequences of over designing.
The online world is flooded with several million sites and out of which there may be more than thousand websites that offer products or services similar to your business. Visitors potentially land on those sites that have website design optimized for usability and user experience. By user experience, we mean how interactive your website is for the users. In order to attain user-centered design and gain conversions, you need to eradicate user doubts, fatigues and lack of feedback. Your website should reduce the number of mental efforts that user exerts to find things on your website. Given below are some useful tips that you should keep in mind while designing your website so that you can provide your visitors user-centered web design and exceptional user experience.
Keep Your Website Simple By Removing Visual Clutter:
The visitors visiting your website are not coming to your website to check your website design and appreciate the design features you have added to it. They are coming with a purpose to buy or find something. If you add unnecessary design elements to your website that has nothing to do with the functional purpose, it will get difficult for the visitors to accomplish what they are trying to accomplish. You can remove additional colors, images, layouts and links as these will not add value to user experience.
2. Visual Ladder:
It’s true that you have to stick to the principle of simplicity, but you would also need to organize and arrange different web elements in such a way that visitors can go through them naturally in a hierarchical manner. You will need to adjust colors, sizes and certain elements in your website structure so that visitors will be drawn to those selected elements first and rest of the elements later. Proper use of color, font, and position of the text will naturally draw visitors’ attention. Visitors come with a mindset. They embark on a path to conversion made up of a series of steps. If they will find anything out of track or frustrated, they will simply cancel the process.
3. Intuitive Navigation:
It is necessary that your website must have quick navigation feature so that visitors can easily get what they are looking for. Page loading time should be so quick that your customers should not get time to think what they should do now?(till the time your website loads) There are few things related to navigation that you should keep in your mind.
– You should keep your principal navigation structure simple.
– Don’t offer too much navigation options to the users.
– Don’t forget to include navigation at the footer of the website
– To make people aware of their navigation trail, use breadcrumbs on every page except the homepage.
– Always include search box so that people can search using keywords.
After making all the changes if you find your navigation is working well, then keep it consistent.
4. Clear and Conversational Content:
Website content and information that you share on the website is very important to engage customers. You should present it well in a proper format. Your content should be straight, to the point, and most importantly conversational & easy to read. Representing text in the form of image, chart, infographics is the best way to let your ideas reach your customers. They can easily understand what you want to convey.
5. Consistency In Overall Website Look And Feel:
Apart from consistency in navigation and content, there must be consistency in overall look and feel of your website. Typefaces, color combinations, backgrounds and even the content you are using on your website, each one of them should be in a harmony, which can have a positive impact on UX and usability. Moreover, every website page should maintain consistency in terms of layout. By consistency, it doesn’t mean that there should be the same layout for all the pages. Instead, you can have different but related layouts for landing pages, informational pages, and product pages. This will help visitors understand what kind of information they are going to get on a particular page.
6. Save Your Conversion with Live Chat:
Many times customers have doubts or questions related to the product, but they have to abandon their search as there is no one available on the website to help them instantly. No one prefers filling query form and waiting for the response from customer support team. Most of them prefer a very direct approach where they expect to get instant answers to their queries. In such a situation, live chat is all you need that can help you save your conversions. Live chat gives you an opportunity to build some great relationships with your customers.
7. Accessibility:
It is a gadget era where people access websites from different devices. They expect that they should get a desktop like experience on their device. In order to provide them truly great experience, your website should be compatible with different devices. Device compatibility is directly related to website responsiveness. If your website is responsive, your website content, images, and icons will automatically resize and reshuffle to fit device dimensions. Mobile searching has increased a lot and even Google has made different ranking criteria for mobile sites. Mobile sites ranking is directly associated with page loading time. So, your mobile site should load quickly which can be possible through AMP (Accelerated Mobile pages).
8. Follow Design Conventions:
There are certain design conventions that are very common, and even visitors are also familiar to them. These include:
– Main navigation should be at the top or left side of a page.
– Logo should be at the top left or center of a page.
– Logo should be hyperlinked so that it always brings a visitor back to the homepage.
– Links should change color/appearance when you hover over them.
So, it is always suggested to take advantage of these conventions as people are familiar with them and they won’t face any issues during browsing. These were the top tips that you can include or take care while designing a website so that you can have user-centered design and outstanding user experience.
Author Bio – Priya is a writing coach and blogger at www.impingesolutions.com an IT company provides web development, designing, digital marketing and mobile application development services!
