User Experience and Your Digital Presence
User experience has changed the way that we interact with the web. Back at the beginning of our history as web surfers, which dates to the mid-1990s, website design was in its infancy. Our basic point of reference to any design layout was traditional in nature.
Media such as newspapers, magazines, and brochures were what we understood, and the ingredients were all there: cover, story, pictures and a back cover. This is the way we are conditioned to receive information.
Have you ever tried to read a book where the text is too small? Was there ever a book that had text that was in difficult-to-read colors?
Most consumers would find the chore of reading a book with tiny text laborious. The common scenario is that the book ends up on a distant shelf where it will live the rest of its life in obscurity.
Why did this happen? The user had a negative experience! Chances are the author of the book that he put his heart and soul into has no idea about his annoyed customers. The result will be low sales and negative opinions left by customers. The same scenario can happen to you and your company’s website.
Put the User First
Business owners have the best intentions when approaching marketing. It’s understood that good marketing isn’t free, but there’s also no guarantee of success. The scenario that plays out thousands of times per day is the business with a great offering but a website that doesn’t seem to care about the users.
Being stuck in the past and approaching your website like a magazine or a brochure is a risk. The savvy business owner understands the importance and relevance of user experience. Unlike in the past, today’s designers and developers put the user first, not last!
Put User Experience Front and Center
What companies have discovered is that when the user is put front and center, the website becomes a far more powerful and effective tool. Furthermore, ensuring that users have a great experience interacting with your brand will result in increased traffic and, ultimately, more revenue generation.
Sound kind of weird? Well, here is an example of how considering the user experience can find where the ship is taking on water. There are endless stories of companies with well-designed websites that took into consideration all the needs of their ideal customers, but for some unknown reason, sales were not converting.
An HVAC engineering company in Florida had a great website, but sales had slowed considerably. What was going on here? The answer was found hiding right in the open in a very unlikely place.
By using Google Analytics, a company can see all the activity that their website has, even down to how long a user is on a particular page. In the situation above, it was discovered through user testing and data from Google Analytics, that users were getting to the shopping cart area to purchase a product, but that’s where they would leave!
The shopping cart area of the website was quickly updated and improved. The analytics then painted a much prettier picture and conversions increased.
Acknowledge Your Users
In today’s competitive markets, it’s crucial to understand your customers more than at any other time in history. Competition is fierce and the world, thanks to the web, is much smaller. So next time you think about a new website, consider the needs of your users before anything else. Understanding who is interacting with your brand matters. Staying focused on the experience your customers have will reward your business in the future.
