Your website’s design plays a very important role in how potential customers view your business. Factors such as whether your website is secure, how it displays on mobile, how appealing it looks and of course how easy it is to use will all play a part in whether or not people choose to use your company over someone else’s. In this blog, we’re telling you how website design affects user experience.
What is user experience?
User experience is concerned with a few different areas, such as branding, usability, functionality and design. All of these areas must work together to form a good user experience for website visitors. A poor user experience could be a website that does not have a clear navigation, therefore leading to users finding it very difficult to locate what they are looking for.
How does website design affect user experience?
Usability
Usability is one of the most important factors of website design. We all know how important the navigation bar is when we are visiting a website and searching for a product or service. It’s quite likely that you’ve visited a site with an unclear navigation before and therefore you’ve struggled to find what you need. One way that businesses can support their navigation is through the use of call to actions. Call to actions are a great way to guide users to more information or onto shop pages. An area of a website that is often overlooked is the process of checking out, you need to make sure that you have tested this to ensure that it works efficiently.
Branding
Your branding can affect user experience massively. Each time your branding is perceived, you will be either building it up or breaking it down. In order to gain and maintain trust, your branding needs to be consistent. This isn’t just involved with elements such as colours, but also if your brand has any other important signatures, such as a frequently used catchphrase. Make sure that your brand is displaying a strong and memorable image to potential customers so that you can build brand recognition.
Design
The design of your site must be appealing to customers, if there’s no order or form when it comes to colours or other features, people are not going to enjoy using your website. When planning a new site, it’s a good idea to create a colour palette that can be used in different ways. Another area of website design that is important is having a good image to text ratio. The image to text ratio is personal to each business and is important as too much of one or the other can be overpowering and lead to users skipping important information. You also need to ensure that both text and images on your site are relevant to your business.
Optimisation
For a while now, people have been using mobiles more than desktops to browse the internet. This means that you need to make sure your site is optimised for mobile, which will mean that your site will resize to fit the screen it is being displayed on. If you fail to optimise your site, users may not be able to see important areas of the site such as menus. This will have a huge impact on your site’s user experience and may also lead to your site ranking lower down on the search engine results page.
More and more businesses are choosing to operate online due to the success of digital marketing. This means it’s quite likely that there is more competition online for most industries. If you want to stand out, ensuring that your website offers a good user experience is a great place to start.
If you need any help with your website design and ensuring it offers a good user experience, please don’t hesitate to contact us.