How to improve your website's UX

At ALF Design Group, we create websites that understand your audience, delivering exactly what they need — quickly and with precision.

When designing a website, it is not just about the visuals. It needs to be an experience by itself that engages your audience and allowing them to get the information and the actions that they need to achieve with ease. Putting your customers at the heart of your business web design will set you apart from your competition.

Here is how you can improve your UX

Things that will help your website's UX

In our previous article, "Finding the right UX Designer", we talked about the difference between UX and UI. And this is important for all of us to understand. While UI establishes the design aspect of your website, the UX will go deeper into the actions of your users — by optimizing the site's functionality, understanding the user's behaviour and making sure that the content is what the users need.

So let's look at some of the factors that will help your website's UX:

Design

There are a few components that makes your website UX standout from the rest of your competitors. Some of the key components of your website's visuals can be categorized into

1. Design Layout: This is how you structure your content into different sections and components. The important thing to note here is how the information flows throughout the page.
2. Colour Scheme: How we use your brand guidelines to beautify your website to an exceptional level.
3. Aesthetics: The key components such as animations, micro interactions that enhances the whole website experience for your audience.

By making sure these different factors work together, it creates lesser friction between your users and your website.

Performance

We all have been frustrated before when it comes to websites that are not loading as fast as it should be.

With the current technology at hand, users are expecting to get results within seconds. More of than not, when users are not able to access your content within a few seconds or even micro-seconds, they leave your website and probably go to your competitors' websites.

These negative experience are contributing to your high bounce rates which ultimately affect your search rankings in Google. Improving your site's speed or performance has got to be one of the most important aspect that all businesses should carefully planned for.

Navigation

Why is website navigation important?

Optimized navigation allows users to go through your website for content with ease which causes less friction.

Imagine going through a supermarket where all their products are jumbled up making it difficult for shoppers to find what they need.

How you organize your content in a simple menu will allow users to scan through all the available options or services that your business provides.

Content

Having just a beautiful looking website is not enough if your audience are not able to find what they are looking for.

Content that aligns to your users' needs is what makes your website searchable on search engines such as Google.

Creating good content with proper structure and implementing good visuals enhances readability and allows users to spend more time on your website.

{{ad-campaign-2="/directory"}}

How to improve your site's UX?

We cannot stress enough that website UX is important especially now where everything is readily available on line. So by improving the user experience, you are able to align your customers' preferences with your business objectives.

Conduct User Research

Ever heard of anyone saying that user research is not needed? Every website that is built has a solid foundation and it comes from user research. Understanding users' requirements and preferences is part of our design process that allows us to create impactful websites for our clients.

We engage users directly be it offline or virtually through a google meet and have a little chat about their experiences. You will be surprised at what you can find out from these little chats.

Take a look at your analytics

When you take time to look at your website's analytics, you are able to fine tune what needs to be done on your site. You can use readily available SEO tools to collect the data and generate reports.

Some areas that we will look out for are where the users are constantly clicking on the website or on a certain part of your website. This can mean that that particular section is of high interest to users.

1. Using heatmaps: Tools like Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity are useful tools to track your site's heatmaps.
2. Tracking conversions: There are many platforms out there in the market and the most commonly used is Google Analytics.

Get user feedback constantly

Why is this important? Building a continuous feedback strategy with your audience is useful and you are able to create a more effective online user journey. Getting lots of input in the pre-design stage would also elevate your website design and structure.

What can we do to get feedback?

1. Surveys: Gaining quantitative feedback through surveys or questionnaires at different stages of your audience customer journey allows you to gain valuable insights on the users' pain points and satisfaction.
2. User Interviews: Doing one-on-one interviews can get your qualitative feedback since we will deep dive into the core areas on what is actually needed.
3. A/B Testing: By creating these tests, you are able to see which design or layout works better with users.

Make it simple

Simple is harder to achieve. But we have to try and focus on designing things that create maximum impact for your business.

Yes, web design trends are something that we look closely at to find inspirations but in the long run, a clear and clean website is a more effective approach to give users the information that they need easily.

Focus on things such as:

1. Information architecture
2. Whitespace
3. Visual Hierarchy

Start your UX redesign with us

We are constantly working on products that can create impacts with your users. Work together with us to strategically align your business goals and our creative minds to create a new and better experience for your users. The least that we can do is to give you valuable advice.