Five ways to improve user experience on your website

He Googles and comes to your online store. He skims around, finds the shirt, and is about to make an order.

Then he stops. “Let me see if they have some sorts of discount.” So he looks for a way to contact you. Unfortunately, all he saw in your store was an email ID. No live chat support.

Kyle is not from the ‘80s.  He’s a Gen Z, which means there’s no way in hell he’d wait around for you to respond to an email. He wants to know about the discount right now! So he heads to another store. There, he finds the exact t-shirt (probably not as good as yours) and looks to contact the seller for a discount!

And voila, he sees this:

So, he reaches out:

And he bought from them!

Because you didn’t give the searcher (Kyle) a good experience.

With that in mind, here's how to improve user experience on your website so that Kyle will come to you for all his football shirt needs in the future: 

Web design is constantly evolving, which means that stuff that worked a few years back may no longer hold for today's users. Therefore you need to ensure your website embraces every element of modern design.

Common elements of modern web design that improves user experience on a site include:

According to Crazy Egg, using sufficient white spaces on your web pages increases user attention by 20%.

Today’s users are so impatient. Therefore, you need to categorize your offerings precisely so that they can find what they’re looking for in one, two, or three (max) clicks.

Users want to find answers to their inquiries almost instantly. Therefore, your website must embrace proper customer support like a Live Chat system rather than the archaic email or telephone system.

A few years back, sliders were a common feature of web design. Today’s users tend not to like this feature as much, and like all of the information presented before them rather than having to click through a bunch of slides. 

A study conducted at Notre Dame University showed how people clicked on images/offers according to their position in the website's slider.

Today's users prefer bulleted lists to a long block of texts. Even search engines clamor for it. This is because it helps users and search engines to extract necessary information from a web page quickly.

Gone are the days when website homepages contained long blocks of texts. Today’s websites are built with large homepage images and a minimal amount of texts.

You can check websites like Uber, Airbnb, 4 Rivers Smokehouse, or Evernote to see for yourself.

Users expect a fast, smooth, and glitch-free experience when they visit a website. Any website that fails to deliver on this front loses risks losing lots of visitors. 

According to various expert reports, the average load time expected of a web page is between 2 and 4 seconds. Anything above this will result in immediate “bounce.”

To improve your website’s load speed, you can do the following:

Today’s users are savvy judges of websites. As such, you want to avoid stock photos at all costs. Site visitors can easily identify them. In fact, in some cases, some visitors might have even seen the photos elsewhere. Thus, discrediting the brand.

Instead, snap and create your own photos. It will resonate better with users and will help gain their trust, but make sure they look professional and go with the theme of your website. If you're selling clothing items, make sure to photograph them in good lighting with a full length shot so site visitors can view the whole garment. 

Every website asks for users’ details at some points.However, a good user experience does not put users through a back-breaking form filling process.

When requesting users’ information – maybe to sign up for your email list or join a group – ensure you ask for the least amount of information as possible.

At best, ask for their name and email. That’s all the information you should unless they're actually ordering a product from your website, in which case you would need the address they intend to send the product to. 

Mobile compatibility is one of the most significant elements of a good user experience.

More than 50% of online searches are done with smartphones.That means if you want to satisfy a vast majority of site visitors, you need to make your site mobile responsive.

You don’t want users coming in to discover your site loads differently on phones and desktops. To make your site compatible with mobile devices, you need to implement a responsive design.

That is, formatting for all screen sizes – smartphones, tablets, etc.