User experience: What is it and how to get it right [Infographic]

Creating a website with the right feeling, or one that hits the right note with your target audience takes research, insight and quite a lot of practice

User experience describes how a person feels when interacting with technology. It’s a simple enough concept, but online business owners the world over so often get it wrong.

Creating a website with the right feeling, or one that hits the right note with your target audience takes research, insight and quite a lot of practice.

It means asking questions like:

'Are my users able to navigate around my site easily?'

'Can they find everything they want within a few seconds?'

'Are they being distracted by confusing design features?'

'Are they frustrated by hidden information?'

But exactly how important is user-experience and how can you ensure your website is up to scratch? In this brief blog, I’ll provide you with the answers.

How important is user experience?

Creating captivating designs is always more fun than figuring out usability. But, ultimately, it doesn’t matter how great your website looks if people don’t get how to interact with it.

In fact, 75% of people judge a business’s credibility by the look and feel of their website, 59% expect it to be beautiful and more than half will leave if it doesn’t load quickly.

But how you present information is only half the battle. How easily people can access that information is the rest. Studies show that 86% of users visit a site to find information about products and services and 44% leave if they can’t find contact information.

What these statistics show is that if you’re not creating a website where information is well-presented and easy to find, you’ll lose between one half and three-quarters of your potential customers.

What makes an experience good or bad?

Good user experience is one where a person feels positive and satisfied with their interaction with your site. A bad one leaves them confused, frustrated or unfulfilled.

Understanding what impacts user experience will help you organize your content, choose the right design features for your site, and map out the best structure for your pages.

Essentially, it forces you to build a website that focuses on what your users want and not what you want, which can only be a good thing for your business.

What are the main causes of poor user experience?

What makes good user experience can be difficult to nail down because it will vary depending on your audience and subjectivity plays a role.

But knowing what makes it bad can be just as useful and is much easier to describe. The main causes of poor user experience are:

• Poor website responsiveness: It can’t be viewed properly on all devices.
• Slow loading speed: A page takes longer than three seconds to load.
• Inaccessible information: Users can’t find what they need easily.
• Dated design: 94% don’t trust outdated websites.
• Aggressive tactics: Heavy use of popups/overlays.

What should you do about it?

To give yourself the best shot at getting it right, you need to invest in research and planning.

You’ve got to understand your audience and their needs, plan how users will move through your site, and appreciate the order and hierarchy of your web pages. Your research and planning stage should involve:

• Working out your user persona/s: demographics (age, location, gender etc.), personality and motivations.
• Conducting user surveys: Ask for opinions and act on them.
• Creating a user flow diagram: Map out how you expect users to flow through your site.
• Drawing up sitemaps: Map out your site’s pages in an organized hierarchy
• Designing style guides: Decide how you will deliver consistent brand messaging

Final thoughts

User experience has become a byword for great design, and with good reason. We all appreciate businesses that offer us simple and pleasurable experiences. This only comes from understanding what people want and why. So do some research, invest in your UX and enjoy the inevitable rise in user engagement with your site.

Find out more about user experience with this infographic from UK Web Host Review, which explores some of the most recent UX statistics.

Embedded from UKWebHostReview