Summary
User experience is about how to make your website easy to use, valuable, and effective for visitors. User experience will help your business with lead generation, a better online reputation, matches your customers’ needs to your business objectives, gives you a competitive advantage. Good user experience helps to reduce costs and increase revenue. It is the cornerstone to your online reputation. It helps you with reputation management by enabling you to interact with your customers and get feedback from them, and quickly respond to any issues they may have. It builds are relationship with your customers 24/7/ 365.
Easy website = easy customer experience = more business.
If your website is easy to use, valuable and effective, your customers will think you are too. Their experience of using your website tells them what it will be like to interact with you and your business. The easier, more valuable and effective it is, the more likely it will be used more, by more customers. With a good user experience, your website will work hard for you every day all year.
Lead generation
A good user experience will help your business with lead generation, and create positive feelings about your business. If your website is difficult to use or makes people feel frustrated when they use it, they will think you will be difficult to deal with. A bad user experience will make your potential customers go somewhere else.
On line reputation When people use your website do you think they will smile or frown? If it is the latter, you will be losing business. If your website looks and behaves professionally, people will be more likely to think you are. If your website is friendly and helpful, people will be more likely to think you are. Your potential customers will make up their minds in about 30 seconds when they first visit your site. If they find it easy and satisfying to use, they will stay, and be more likely to use the site for longer and more frequently, and come back. Having a poor user experience these days is the same as telling your customers you don’t care about them. User experience is precious, just like your customers. If you care about your business, you care about the user experience of your website.
Connects customers to your business
A good website user experience comes from good web design. What makes up good web design is a combination of what you want your website to say about you, and what your customers need from your website. What do you want? What do your customers want? Your website design should bring together what you want to say and what your customers are looking for.
Competitive advantage
A good website user experience is a competitive advantage. If they discover a poor user experience which frustrates and baffles them, they will very quickly move on to a competitor website. And the business with the easiest, most satisfying website will end up being the most successful.
Your website tells customers who you are
If you had to choose one of the following to describe your business, which would you choose?
- Modern
- Exciting
- Attention-grabbing
- Unique
- Personal
- Professional
- Organised
- Stylish
- Affordable
- Luxurious
How a website designer uses this
A good web designer will then make the right choices of layout, navigation, structure, copy, typeface, colour, and imagery which combine to say what you want your website to say about your business, to describe the overall experience. So, if you wanted to tell your customers you are modern and exciting, your website designer would choose potentially different layout, typeface, colours and imagery than if you wanted to tell people you are professional and organised. Therefore, to make the right choices, you need to be really clear about what it is you want to say to your customers.
Top tips
- 30 seconds to make the right impression –You’ll only have 30 seconds for your website to say what you need to your customers. What is 1 word your website needs to say about you and your business? How do the copy, colour, imagery, layout and your own branding need to combine to describe your business the way you want?
- Customer 1 word summary – Ask your customers to describe what they want from you in 1 word. Do they want you to be exciting? Or organised? If your website describes your business in a way which clashes with what your customers want, they will go somewhere else.
- Ask customers – Do you have a website already? Ask your customers what they think your website is saying about you. If it’s saying something negative, you will be losing business.
