Good Website User Experience (UX) - Why Businesses Need It To Retain Customers

Your user interface is your brand and your business.

User Interface (UI) refers to how customers experience your business online. UI design is how the user experience is developed from beginning to end.

Think of a regular old brick-and-mortar store.

What is the customer experience when they walk through the door? Are your products laid out in a way that guides the eye? Or are they overwhelmed with too much clutter?

Can they find all the information they need or can they ask your friendly staff for help? Or, are they left on their own to wander through the aisles (your website pages) at random?

The same principles apply to websites.

Potential users NEED an accessible design that's easy to navigate.

Follow Our How To Make Your Website Sell (5 Actionable Tips) to achieve this or use our 10-second user test and find out "How To Test If Your Website Is Broken"

Consistency is the key.

How many times and in how many situations have we heard that? And yet, it rings truer than ever.

UX research points to a crucial need for consistency to establish customer comfort and trust.

After all, your customers and clients will rarely have all day to peruse every word on every page of your website.

Consistency means the user experience doesn't meet any unexpected surprises.

While this does include visual design (think branding and colours), UX consistency also refers to the layout of each page being predictable and simple to navigate. After all, we don't want our clients to have to be detectives to find what they're looking for.

We want them to be able to find the information, products and services they need ASAP with minimal hassle or confusion.

Remember those old choose your-own-adventure books? Going from random page to random page?

Exciting, yes. Going to help your sales? Unlikely.

Hierarchy refers to web pages that start broad and continue into smaller and smaller niches.

Think of a store that sells outdoor furniture and décor.

What do they ask first?

Tables and chairs, BBQs, outdoor firepits, decorative pots, or decorative plants.

Click on BBQs and you'll see 2-burners, 4-burners, charcoal grills, gas stove attachments.

Down and down the hierarchy goes until your customer is guided to EXACTLY what they are looking for.

Consider your own information architecture. Your interface design should be considering the same.

If you run a eCommerce store you can read more into this topic here: How To Use eCommerce Category Pages For SEO

Your context is tied into your brand and your business.

And believe us - your clients WILL notice.

UX context refers to the circumstances, settings, previous experiences and expectations of your customers regarding your type of brand or business. If you've ever noticed breadcrumb links (or, trail of breadcrumbs) on a website, this provides context for where you are in the website and where you came from.

Or, have you ever noticed how news websites all share a similar layout? What about hardware stores or $2 stores?

Yes, they have an individual brand, but they share a context.

Your brand should be individual and unique, but straying too far from the design elements of your context... Well that risks your customers overlooking you in favour of the more familiar.

How many times have we clicked something on a website and thought "Oops!"

Your customers will be no different.

Giving your customers control over their experience means allowing for mistakes and changing their minds.

Consider a multi-stage buying process, choosing product quantity, inputting payment details and a delivery address.

As they review their cart, your customer realises they have made a mistake. They meant to order something else. How easily can they correct their mistake?

Another example of effective interaction design is allowing customers to cancel actions.

If they accidentally close their shopping window with no option to cancel, how many will want to start the process all over again?

Your product and business will be unique in its own way. But remember, your clients might be unique as well.

Your user's journey may even be affected by their physical circumstances.

Accessibility is not optional. It is a must-have for your digital product.

Consider this: Are your website colours clashing? Is your text easy to read?

Maybe not to you, but to others, your content may be difficult to read and your colours may blend together.

Did you know that 549,000 Australians (2.2% of the population) have some level of colour blindness? In men, this goes up to a whopping 8% or 1 in 12 men in the entire country!

Do you have videos on your website or sound prompts? Consider how that might affect people living with deafness.

That's not including potential customers who may have cognitive or physical disabilities.

Navigating your website may also be a tricky task for those who are motion impaired!

Learn more about making your website accessible here: How To Make Your Website More Accessible

You're a busy person. And so are your customers and clients.

Good UX incorporates usability into its user interface, saving everyone time.

The human–computer interaction should be as streamlined and efficient as possible.

From opening your website to clicking on the "check out cart" button, your user interface design should make finding and buying your products and services an absolute breeze.

Usability testing will take into account your user flow.

The journey from your home page to your individual product pages should be as seamless as possible.