User Experience

The landing page, also known as the home page, is where visitors ‘land’ and then form immediate assumptions about your business and its activities.

In our opinion there are 4 things that create a bad first impression on your website:

• Content everywhere with no clear layout or flow to the page
• Too many words or too many pictures, both will overload the user
• Landing pages that tell you nothing about the business, the products or services
• Outdated layout and navigation

Once your website has made a negative impression on visitors, the chances are that they will be unlikely to go any further through your web pages and will not be thinking about coming back in a hurry.

People generally visit dozens of websites when looking for a particular product or service, so the point we are making is that you must make a good first impression with your landing page.

Check out this landing page from Slack, which has all the signs of great UX design: clean, simple and informative.

People expect good content that delivers on their expectations, and the truth is that less is more when it comes to content.

When it comes to writing content for a web page, Steve Krug, a UX expert, has this to say:

‘Get rid of half the words on the page, then get rid of half of what’s left.’

This is especially important on the landing page and the summary pages, and having loads of content in these areas will seriously affect the user experience.

Focus on quality over quantity, and try to abide by the 70% visual and 30% content rule.

The old saying goes that a picture tells a thousand words, and in today’s image-driven society, people would much rather see visual representations of what you do and make their own assumptions.

You can use icons and labels to cut down on the amount of text you use and make pages more consumable for visitors.

We use content refinement alongside our advanced on page SEO methods, like using semantics and headings so that you can keep your content clear while maintaining your ranking on Google.

Colourful and bold – this landing page from Brew Dog is exactly what people want to see on a home page.

Web design trends are constantly changing and evolving with the times, but these essential UX design fundamentals generally stay the same, but they are updated as time goes on.

We recently talked about our favourite web design trends in our blog article here, so it is worth checking this out to an idea of how the different design components come together to make a complete UX friendly interface.

There are several design aspects that we think lend themselves naturally to the UX design process:

• Minimalism – Simplifying the interface and removing unnecessary clutter is a great tool that can be used in UX design, however there is a fine line between being minimal and being uninteresting, so make sure you get it right.
• Micro-Interactions – These make the webpage animated and engaging for users, and make the web journey personal for the visitors, like the winking Smarter Panther when you hover over it.
• Mobile Responsive – Hugely important for websites in general, mobile responsiveness helps your visitors and your Google rankings, since all websites are now indexed with Google’s ‘mobile first’ protocol.

Great web design comes hand in hand with effective UX design, and they are very much co-dependent on each other.

In other words, get your UX right and your website should fall into place, as long as you keep a clear idea of what your website should be offering.

Anticipating what your customer wants means you can cater for their needs fast.

Analysing the mobile reports in Google Analytics will provide mobile search data which can be used to shape your campaign.

Which actions are your customers doing on your mobile website?

When you find this out consider adding the following to improve your mobile performance:

Even a strong mobile user experience / user interface will not be as effective if the page load time is slow.

“40% of shoppers will wait no more than three seconds before abandoning a retail website.” See this recent study about mobile user experience

Use a responsive layout which changes based on the size and capabilities of the device being used.

In the study above, customers with a with a mix of desktop and mobile optimised pages found it even harder to use than desktop only websites.

Website users are used to navigating and scrolling websites vertically, not horizontally.

Avoiding large, fixed-width elements can improve the user experience on mobile.

It’s advised to use CSS media queries to apply different stylings for different screen sizes.

It’s recommended to always make product images expandable, so it’s easy to see in detail.

Customers buying online will expect websites to allow them view high resolution close ups of products.

Recent studies have shown website visitors were frustrated when they weren’t able to see what they were buying on the website.