Website user experience
As we all know by now, websites are the focal point of most businesses when it comes on finding business online. They are very often the flagship of your digital marketing campaigns. They not only represent your company to the outside world – they should offer users the chance to answer any questions they may be asking in their online search. That way, you can encourage them to drop into your online marketing funnels and capture their data allowing you to nurture potential clients.
But when there are so many different things to pack in to one place, it can be easy to overlook website user experience issues. Websites that are added to organically, can quickly become more about how the site looks rather than how good the user experience is.
What does your web visitor want?
The most vital thing to remember when creating a website? What does the visitor want and what does it take them to get there?! Now, not everybody that pays a visit to your site knows exactly what they are looking for – but they will when they see it. The navigation you offer around your website is key – it needs to take them right where they need to go and suddenly, your visitor is looking more like a customer. In this part 1 of our series on blogs on user experience, we will cover 1 of 3 website user experience issues that you need to solve to make sure your site works well from a visitor perspective.
The route to good site navigation
There aren’t many people who have a lot of patience when browsing the web and who’s to blame them. Nobody wants to jump on a website only to spend the next 10 minutes searching through pages trying to find one that even vaguely sounds right – and to be honest, people just don’t do that anymore. In fact, users often only spend 10-20 seconds on a webpage before moving on to other (possibly more user friendly) sites. Obviously you don’t want that to happen to your site visitors, so here are three fairly common flaws in site navigation:
The Paradox of Choice
There seems to be way too many companies that elect to pile as many navigation links as possible into their homepage and expect success. This might be understandable as the user can theoretically find any page they want as soon as they arrive. The problem is that this creates a rabbit in the headlights effect of sorts. Visitors simply don’t know where to look and become helpless. Instead of clicking on the best option for them they usually just click on the one that stands out the most. If they don’t find what they want, they’ll be gone and looking for somewhere else that can easily guide them to the right place.
Hidden Product and Services
On the flip side of overcrowding your site with as many things as possible, is remembering what’s important and placing it front and centre. It’s good to have the likes of “about us” and “contact us” pages for obvious reasons, but make sure the important stuff is what catches the visitors eye when they land on your site. After all, the reason you want someone on your site is for them to see what your offering and, ultimately convert into a customer. That means it needs to answer a question or provide a solution to a pain they are experiencing.
Unclear Options
Site Navigation options need to be clear. Each category you have should be clearly labelled so the visitor can easily identify it and knows exactly what to expect when they click it. Using company terminology that only those within the company understand might confuse a new prospect, and therefore isn’t recommended.
Using phrases that have a meaning to your visitors ie. in their own words – will allow them to effortlessly navigate through your site. This is where keyword research comes into play. Find out how people are searching and what things they are looking for – make sure this is the kind of terminology you use in your navigation descriptors, to give you the best chance of driving traffic to the right places on your site.
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