When we need something, the first thing we do is to look it up online. That’s why many marketing experts say that if you don’t have an online presence, it’s as if your business doesn’t exist.
But there’s one thing even worse than not having an online presence. It’s having a badly designed website that gives visitors a poor user experience.
The key to a successful business is creating a seamless customer journey that addresses the needs of potential customers right away and provides relevant answers to their questions.
This is where improving UX comes into play.
That being said, we explain what good UX is, why it is important, list some ways you can revamp your UX to drive more revenue, and discuss why we should always think about usability and user experience.
Why Should You Care About User Experience?
User experience focuses on collecting data about customers: what they need, what they want, their values, abilities, and limitations along with business goals and objectives and uses these insights to make the app or website more engaging to users.
UX is vital, as it aims to meet users' expectations and needs and keep them happy and engaged. Good user experience is based on research and customer feedback that allows website and app makers to create out-of-the-box customer journeys, acquire, and retain customers.
In a nutshell, UX has the objective of providing value to users. To have a better UX, information provided online must be accessible, useful, easy to act upon, and have credibility.
9 Ways to Improve Your User Experience
Now, when we explained why UX is important, let’s see how you can improve the user experience of your web and mobile applications.
1. Use White Space
White space is an important element of good website design. White space can help the content itself on the website stand out more. According to Daily Egg, white space around titles, headings, and body text increases user attention by up to 20%.
White space can help you enhance your content's readability and attractiveness. For instance, Buffer's home screen has a lot of white space except a clear value proposition and a call to action. This openness makes it easier and more inviting for readers to explore the website more.
2. Increase Page Speed
Website speed or, the speed a browser can load fully functional web pages from a website, is one of the most important things every webmaster should improve if they want to increase user engagement. What’s more, website visitors today expect a fast and seamless experience. Pages that load in 1 to 2 seconds have higher conversion rates than those that take longer to load.
You can leverage free online services like PageSpeed Insights to check your mobile and website speed. You can find other ways to reduce load time such as deferring scripts and compressing images before uploading them.
3. Keep It Simple, Stupid
To improve the user experience of your website, follow the "less is more" rule. Users have to have a clear overview of the content on your website and be able to find what they need quickly. If they need to navigate a maze to find what they need, they won't hang out for long.
That said, make sure your layout is clean, your color scheme is simple, and make the most of your graphics, and the white space.
Pro tip: Check your bounce rates in Google Analytics to see where you are losing visitors, and use Hotjar to create a heatmap to look at how users behave on that particular page. Do note, however, that Hotjar is not compatible with mobile apps, so for mobile behavior insights, try a service like UXCam instead.
Furthermore, you should make sure the intent of each page is immediately understandable to users and that the most important information stays above the fold or easily accessible from the home app screen.
4. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
If we see that over 50% of all web traffic comes from mobile devices, we understand how important it is to optimize our website to be mobile-friendly. The best way to do that is to take a mobile-first approach to building your website.
Besides the greater ability to retain visitors - including those using mobile devices, optimizing your website for mobile can help you improve SEO since Google crawls both for desktop and mobile, and uses both versions to index your website.
To make your website more mobile-friendly make sure to optimize the content, place your call-to-action buttons in the most convenient places, design layouts so users can interact with a single touch, and use navigation menus built for mobile devices.
5. Watch for Missing Pages
Even though you won't get dinged by Google for a "404 Page Not Found", this seemingly slight mistake can turn away your website visitors without them getting the information they need.
To avoid this, you can set up a Google Webmasters tool that will help you detect and correct such pages or choose among plenty of free tools to check for any missing URLs on your site.
6. Using Gestures
If you ever switched between two mobile phone manufacturers, you know how hard it is to erase the habits you picked up. When we get used to a device, it seems that our fingers work on their own, without thinking.
That said, if you want to improve the UX of your app and retain users, you should make your app in a way that respects the habits mobile users have.
For instance, iPhone users go back by swiping from the left to the right side of the screen. You can improve the user experience of your iOS app by including a convenient back button in the left corner, or by allowing users to make the same gestures within the app.
7. Efficient Onboarding
If users don't get what they want immediately upon downloading your app or visiting your website, users are more likely to bounce quickly. Statistics show that, on average, user retention falls by 25 percent a week after downloading an app, while the apps that have an excellent onboarding process managed to double their user retention.
There are several strategies app developers can use to increase the mobile UX for both native and web-based apps during the onboarding phase. This includes creating tutorials to guide users on how the app works, decreasing the number of steps needed for account creation, and having multiple registration options.
8. Personalize the User Experience
Personalization is one of the most important marketing strategies that drive growth and success as it helps in driving repeat engagement and loyalty over time. More specifically, if a customer repeatedly purchases from your website or app, you'll get more information on their needs and habits which will help you provide them with custom-made offers that nurture loyalty.
Website and app developers should personalize the UX and offer relevant content to their customers that will keep them engaged and retained. Another good idea of personalization is creating displays based on specific users’ preferences if different from default settings, or initiating chat within the messaging app or sending tailor-made push notifications.
9. Integrate Chat Into the Buyer Journey
Improved UX goes hand in hand with good customer support, and this is exactly what in-app and website chat does. In-app messaging, live chat, and chat bots allow businesses to talk to their customers quickly and easily.
These chat services also allow users to exchange media such as photos, documents, and voice messages with customer support that help them find solutions faster.
In-app messaging comes with a wide array of benefits:
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Improves user engagement: Brands can nurture their relationship with customers via chat more easily.
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Decreases cart abandonment: Chat gives customers a way to ask questions and quickly resolve any issues.
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Reduced wait time for support: Since customers can send their inquiries directly via the app, they don't have to wait long to get a response.
Customers want quick and useful answers. With in-app messaging, customers can send inquiries directly and your support team can respond quickly and efficiently.
CometChat’s SDK allows you to build your custom-made UX chat app solution effortlessly without compromising security. All security and compliance features are already built in, allowing you to effortlessly integrate it into your own application.
Enhance your users’ experience with CometChat today. Get best-in-class text, voice and video messaging added to your site in minutes. Signup for free now, or connect with a member of our sales team to learn more.
Nabeel Keblawi
CometChat
