Anticipating your customers’ user experience (UX) is crucial for entrepreneurs, especially when doing business online. When visitors form an opinion in seconds, it’s important to have a working, visually appealing site that gently nudges users toward what matters most: your product or service.
UI Should Balance Aesthetics with Info
When making or commissioning a user interface, entrepreneurs might lean too hard on aesthetics or informative value. Each satisfies a different kind of user, but often to the detriment of another. Aesthetics matter, but every product/service needs to explain itself and its value proposition to the customer. Those that don’t risk confusing users, making them look elsewhere. However, a dense, overly informative UI can also confuse and bore visitors. Businesses showing visitors a wall of text will lose out to the competitor that informs in a shorter, better-looking way.
Striking the balance between aesthetics and info is key, and what that balanced is will vary depending on the nature of the business and the expectations of the customer. Emerging or technical markets will need more explanation, while long-standing services with a pre-existing audience can afford to remove friction from the buying journey. Luckily, you don’t have to start from scratch with this – consider building from a template, or investing in a customer engagement tool that has things down to a science, with added AI-powered features to guide users to conversions.
Fast Page Speeds Show Competence & Convenience
While whether something ‘looks good’ is subjective, there are some more objective metrics you can monitor. For instance, keep an eye on your page speed. This is a foundational element of technical SEO, with many considering it a baseline to rank properly on Google’s search results pages. Plus, it hugely impacts the user’s perception of the business. If something isn’t loading, users might get bored or distracted, going elsewhere to find a page that works faster.
On a deeper level, a slow-loading page can communicate unflattering things about your business. Today, sites that load slow can make visitors suspicious about the competency or even the legitimacy of the business. It’s similar to modern sites that fail the https handshake, which is so commonplace nowadays that sites without it set off alarms. Whether the customer assumes incompetence or illegitimacy, they’ll search elsewhere for businesses that don’t.
One way to monitor if people are leaving is through a page’s bounce rate. If you notice a particular part of your website has a high bounce rate, it might be worth assessing your UX and loading speeds.
UX Should Change Between Platforms
Lastly, entrepreneurs should stay wary that solving the UX for one platform doesn’t mean they’ve solved it for every platform. Mobile UX is increasingly important, with many purchases are made using handheld devices. A site formatted solely for desktop will perform poorly against a competitor that serves an easily navigable mobile/tablet interface.
Naturally, a mobile UI should have a vertical layout with buttons large enough to tap. It should be easy to scroll, as well as not having too much content to load over an average data connection By targeting all hardware platforms, you can drive customer engagement on all fronts instead of just the one. When combined with a balanced presentation and a fast loading time, you have all the basics covered.
Feature image by UX Indonesia on Unsplash
