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 Understanding User experience and its importance

The father of UX – Don Norman defines user experience as a science that encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services and its products. User experience takes more than just defining it. Let’s relate it to the real model.

What makes shopping fun? Most of you would say – ‘buying the product’. I agree, but not entirely. Buying the product is the last step of the shopping process. What led to buying is your positive experience at the store, walking down the different sections, stacked with a variety of designs and then finding the perfect take away. Not to forget, the billing experience!

Let us map the real-world model to your online experience on a business website – right from getting to your website through a certain landing page, to reading your content; from navigating the site to finally taking a conversion action, everything counts as user experience.

Research studies on UX and A/B tests on websites have led to pointing out thrust factors that impact the experience of a user on your website.

UX Factors that lead to conversion

Let us see how we can build a good website design below:

1) Product Pitch: The pitch of a website sketches out the business identity. Content that speaks out about how the business goals are intended to benefit their customers, caters positively to the user’s experience. This is the part of experience where tone of the website builds trust and communication with the user. A strong selling pitch can boost your sales.

2) Comfortable and Intuitive navigation:

Comfort and intuitiveness are key factors that lead a user to conversion.  Even if you perfectly speak out how good your product is, if a user fails to see the interface as friendly, intuitive and quick – they are likely to bounce.

3) Content & Aesthetics:

Neil Patel says that great content is definitely the reason behind returning visitors and he quickly adds that good content is valuable only when it’s readable and engaging. That’s where aesthetics comes in. Content becomes friendlier when the formatting stands out in a way that grip the user’s attention. A good use of contrast colors for backgrounds and text can make a piece of content interesting to read; adding images that are crisp and meaningful, makes your content 10x; visual cues using text formatting, colors, icons  can guide the user about your site;

Everything that brings about a conversion like important content, call to action, contact information etc. should be made to stand out by using principles of aesthetics.

In addition to SEO, Google algorithm is emphasizing on returning results that have an excellent user experience. So it’s important to always look back at how your website is doing from the UX perspective.

Here’s an excellent example to demonstrate how the thrust factors contribute to providing an experience that builds a trust relationship between the customer and the product.

Gehna, a brand that sells stunning unique Indian jewellery have made their online presence valuable by providing a user-friendly platform for online shopping and jewellery customization.

 

Some of the reasons why Gehna’s landing page User eXperience ticks:

1) The first impact this website makes, is with its aesthetics. Clean layout with enticing images, interesting fonts and color balance, which ultimately leads to a pleasant experience.

2) The content on this page is kept optimum without distractions and has excellent customer value. Studies in cognitive psychology state that a user is prone to action whenever he finds all the necessary information around a CTA. The banner on this page impresses the user by laying out their available services in a dignified way. This is the point which engages the user and leads to conversions.

3) By giving their users an insight into their work, customization process and user testimonials, they have built trust with their prospective customer.

4) They also maintain a user-friendly blog with design ideas and jewellery trends. This shows that Gehna is not just a business but also a work of passion at customer interest, there by bringing out the personality of their brand.

To sum it up, with their unique propositions, well organized content and evident CTA’s, they have provided the customer an impactful experience that bags conversions. I urge you to remember, a great landing page UX leads to the quickest conversions.

If you notice in entirety, it’s the little things that tend to add up in the big way. What demonstrates this is the power of a well-designed form with a proximately placed CTA

Every CTA leads a step closer to conversion. Once a prospective customer decides on a product/business, the only thing in between, is the experience of making it happen. Be it a registration, purchase checkout or a reservation – more often, the last step towards a conversion is completing a web form. UX is indeed impactful here.

To understand this better, let’s take a look at a few insights from conversionXL’s  Peep Laja

• Less information request = more conversions

The key is to ask only for relevant information and skip the research questions. This means that a 5-field form out performs a 9-field form by approximately 30%. Research studies based on usability ROI, has seen that every time a form was simplified, businesses saw huge increases in their conversion rates.

• Provide necessary information on the form. Missing information leads to confusion, frustration and no conversion.

With a great service pitch, an eye-catching image and simple fill-out form, Pamperazi clearly tells you what you’re up to.

UX is so impactful that it can break or make your business revenue

   Statistics from experiments conducted by various organizations has shown the tremendous impact that UX has had on sales/revenue. Let us explore a few examples & case studies

Call to Actions

According to Jared M Spool, founder of user interface engineering, changing a CTA button on a checkout form increased a major e-commerce website’s annual revenue by $300 million. In fact studies even show that a prominent CTA button right next to some related content can increase conversions from 2.78% to about 19%.

Here is a great example of Casa Grande’s Aldea. It adds prominence and proximity to the CTA.

1) Providing sliding images of the exteriors and interiors of the apartments.

2) Displaying the amenities and perks of the apartments, evidently

Having given a perfect picture of what the user is signing up for, a CTA is provided right in place for users to make further enquiries. This is a high-converting UX.

Visual Design

A well balanced design is about proper use of page elements and colors. Visually balanced designs have a positive impact on the user experience.

LaundryBoy is a winning design that puts together a great visual balance. With their website themed around blue shades, they’ve made their CTA completely stand out in a balanced contrast. Would you ever believe that a visually balanced design could lead to a 25% higher conversion rate.

Practice of Decluttering

Your landing page will always face a 5 second test to grab the user’s attention. The impact made here brings about the conversion. The Weather Channel wanted to turn people into premium subscribers. They decluttered their homepage and had a single subscription action with their features enlisted

Listen to the Users voice

Users, be it retained customers or prospective customers, have come into the habit of letting businesses know what is causing the friction. Valuing their feedback yields huge difference in your conversions.

Creating a new sign up page based on user feedback, raised the revenue for SEO Moz by additional $1million.

 Your users are adapting to trending designs, which is why your designs has to update as per contemporary standards or be even better. 

With a great UX – make them an offer they can’t refuse

A lot of research has been done around the impact of design on content. Recent studies on cognitive psychology states that people are moving from text-driven content towards visually mediated content.

Content is more strong and easily assimilated, when accompanied by informing design/images.

Olympia Grande makes the right use of content and images to showcase the strength of their residential project. By placing prime information like project overview, cost and enquiry in a compact space of the user focus, they’ve got the user’s attention. That’s a winning strategy for quick conversions!

UX impacts SEO which in turn impacts your sales

A good UX makes your website accessible, useful, usable, findable, credible and valuable. All of this impacts the SEO positively, leading to a good ranking on search engines. A website that is optimized with quality content and good experience, will gain customer traffic and succeed at customer retention.

It is wise to learn from others mistakes; it’s a faster path to move ahead. Bad UX is mostly about doing the basic functionalities wrong. So in addition to demonstrating what works, let me point out what doesn’t.

Common Issues in UX that break sales

• slow loading time of websites
• lack of content hierarchy
• cluttered and confusing navigation
• lack of basic functions or information that a majority of the users expect
• exhaustive user engagement for simple tasks
• falling short of an impressive personality
• lack of responsive design .

Research studies in UX have shown that 88% of the visitors do not visit a website that has given them a bad experience.

As you see, UX is an integral part of a business website bridging your customer to your business. Understanding the usage pattern of your users gives an insight into their experience, learning what part of your website frustrates or confuses them helps incorporate some necessary changes to the website to get better conversions.

With a lot of companies investing in UX, it is evident that the user’s experience with a website is having a soaring impact on the sales and revenue.

Here’s wishing your user eXperience a good health!