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Optimizing user experience is a crucial aspect of every website as it can go a long way in increasing retention. As you enhance user satisfaction, you can stop losing visitors to your website due to poor experience. It also helps in improving your website’s conversion rates, letting you drive revenues. So, optimizing your website’s performance with user experience or UX design is important.
To optimize your website for a great user experience, you need to understand the problems that different users face while on your website. Irrespective of how sharp your website design is, if a user has to search for contact details for five minutes, it is obviously bad design.
On the other hand, even though a website looks just average but is very easy to use, it will give a better user experience. You can achieve this by optimizing the UX design of the website. This article will help you understand what UX is and how to optimize it for your website.
What Is User Experience?
There are two kinds of website design – experience design and interface design. The User Interface (UI) is related to how a website appears, while the User Experience (UX) is related to how a website functions. The website designers who work on the UX part focus on designing a website that is easy to use. It should be intuitive when it comes to finding the right details and work well from a technical perspective.
UX Design for Optimizing a Website’s Performance
Here are a few tips that can help you optimize the performance of your website with UX design:
- Make It Easy to Use
When a user visits your website, he would expect easy navigation to the details he needs. The more he has to look around, the more frustrated he is likely to get. Eradicate any unwanted steps so that you can simplify the user experience. This ensures clear navigation to the required details. A simplified website design lets users easily find what is needed.
- Optimize Page Loading Speed
Waiting for a web page to load for a long time can be a frustrating experience for users. People use different devices like smartphones, laptops, tablets, or desktops for browsing. Irrespective of the device they use, they expect to get fast results. When a web page takes too long to load, they generally bounce.
Slow page loading is an interrupting experience for users and more often they don’t have the patience or time to wait. Improve the page loading speed by compressing the images on the site before loading them. The file size of images is the major culprit behind a slow web page.
- Use Attractive CTAs (Calls to Action)
This is one of the best ways to improve the overall user experience. Action-oriented calls to action with attractive, large buttons are powerful tools for enhancing UX. Mark these buttons with clear action words and place them at prominent places on the web page to deliver an improved user experience. This also helps in driving conversions.
- Get Rid of Navigation Bottlenecks
This is one of the most difficult but very important parts of the user experience. It may not be possible to create a page and navigation structure that fits every website. Get back to the drawing board if you want to perfect this part of the website.
Make a list of situations that visitors are likely to experience on your site. This list can include anything like contact details, finding answers to particular questions, or completing a purchase. Go through each situation and see the steps involved in navigation. If any of these seems hard, take steps to simplify the process.
Use ‘user journey’ in Google Analytics to find out other bottlenecks that are not very evident. For example, you can follow user journeys that don’t end in conversions and take steps to improve.
- Use White Space
White space, also referred to as negative space, is one of the active design elements that appends more breathing space to the user interface of the website. It makes users more comfortable while exploring the website as they can process data more easily and quickly. Negative space adds a visual hierarchy, maintaining the tidiness of the website, keeping the design more pleasant, and highlighting CTAs.
In Conclusion
To wrap up, website optimization with UX design may take a few months as it involves quite a bit of experimenting and testing. However, at the end of the day, the rewards are worth the wait as it ensures a frustration-free experience for your website visitors.
