John Cradden on how user experience (UX) will increasingly matter to SMEs who believe in putting the customer first.
If your business has skin in the e-commerce game, it’s likely you’ll have come across the term ‘user experience’ or UX.
It refers to the overall experience a person has in using a product or service in terms of its functionality and accessibility, but also how intuitive or enjoyable it is to use.
“Whether you’re a large tech firm or a small business, good UX will boost customer satisfaction and trust, increase conversion rates and reduce costs”
Another way to define UX would be to say it’s concerned with what it’s subjectively like to use a product or service and how a person feels about using that product or service to accomplish a particular goal.
UX is important aspect of the design of any product or service, but it’s particularly relevant when using a digital product or service for an e-commerce transaction, such as a website or mobile app.
Customer journeys
Put yourself in the shoes of a customer using your company’s website to purchase something. Is it easy for them to find what they were looking for? How many steps do they have to go through? Do basic tasks seem needlessly fussy and complicated? Are there any annoying distractions? Is the content or descriptions accurate?
If the answer to any of these is yes, they’re among the most common symptoms of poor website experiences, and can be traced back to poor UX design.
Your website is often the first touchpoint your prospective customer has with your business, product or service, which means their experience of using the website will be crucial in influencing their opinion of your brand. One famous piece of research found that it takes just 50 milliseconds for someone to form a first impression of your brand based on looking at a website.
So if customers are not happy with the experience of using your website, they won’t just not visit again, they’ll tell their friends, family and colleagues to give you a wide berth. If your website is poorly designed or lacks modern features like mobile responsiveness, this will damage your credibility and make you appear behind the times.
So whether you’re a large tech firm or a small business, good UX will boost customer satisfaction and trust, increase conversion rates and reduce costs.
Getting started with UX
A practical way to start reviewing your website UX is to put yourself into your customer’s shoes and try and anticipate how they would want to navigate through your site’s content.
It’s important to stress, however, that this approach alone will only take you so far in terms of ensuring your UX is on the right track. One of the central tenets of UX design is to start with the users and their needs in mind, so it makes sense to do some research to uncover your customers’ pain points, wants, needs, interests and desires.
This could be as simple as asking a few loyal customers to explore your website and provide you with some unstructured feedback. This can help you narrow down what the real issues or obstacles are in the way of a good user experience.
Structured research
The next level would be engaging in some structured online surveys or questionnaires that aim to find out a bit more about your users, such as their ages, occupations, family status, etc. They can also be used to get simple yes or no answers or ratings for specific aspects or features on your site that can be analysed in detail.
You can also gather more qualitative data by leaving in a number of blank fields and asking customers to add any thoughts or opinions on the topics being covered.
User personas
With this information you can create user ‘personas’, which are semi-fictional characters that aim to reflect, broadly speaking, who your customers are, their mindsets and motivations. These personas can also class their main pain points, goals and interests, all to help you build better and more tailored user experiences.
User flow maps
The next step is to create user ‘flow maps’, which is a customer journey roadmap that shows what you want people on your website to do and the relevant steps or sequences you would like them to follow. There is no right or wrong way to create one, but a good rule to follow is to keep it as simple and as streamlined as possible. It can also be adapted, tweaked or refined as you progress your website design.
Design tips
There are some good general pointers and ideas regarding good website design that you can bear in mind, too.
- Use white space: Resist the temptation to cover every cm of your site with imagery, videos or graphics. White space helps focus a user’s attention to key titles and text.
- Optimise page loading times: Research shows that users will leave your site if your page fails to load within a few seconds, so consideration needs to be given to image file sizes, which can be compressed to load faster without affecting quality. Videos or audio that auto-play as soon as users land on a page also slows down page loading, not mention being quite annoying.
- CTA (Calls to action): Even if your content is very engaging, the next challenge is to convert that engagement into action, whether that’s bringing the user to the online store, linking to further content or to booking links. This can be as simple as labelling buttons with simple calls to action like ‘Buy now’, ‘Read more’, or ‘Get Started’.
- Headline crafting: Your headlines need to be direct and concise so that your visitors know what they’re about to read and why it’s important to them. Also remember to use specific keywords to help boost your website’s rankings for Google search.
- Visual consistency: Ensure a look and feel that is the same across all pages on the website, which means consistent styles, fonts and colours.
Useful tools
Google Analytics allows you to measure various long-established metrics for website traffic, including time on page, user demographics and where your users link from to get to your website. This type of data can give you a good picture of who’s visiting your website and how they navigate it during their visits. Alongside user surveys and questionnaires, this can provide the information you need to create user personals and flow maps.
There are various free tools available for UX design, wireframing and prototyping, with the most common names being Figma, Sketch, Canva and Proto.io, although needless to say you may need to pay a premium if there are certain tools or functions you need.
A simple online search will also bring up loads of free starter materials on good UX design and how you can get started, but bear in mind that UX is an ongoing process as user behaviours, attitudes and preferences are constantly changing.
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