Web design has a big impact on customer experience and because of it has is an integral part of any web marketing strategy. Design usability and aesthetics influence the success of your company in long term. This article outlines the most important factors of web design related to customer experience one should consider.
Appearance
The way your site looks and feels is determined mostly by the your website’s design. It creates the first impressions visitors get from your company. Newer designs that follow modern web standards are much more successful at attracting customers’ attention than old designs.
No matter how your website looks, the idea is to always follow the modern design trends such as large, bold fonts, responsive design, attractive hero images, multimedia and parallax scrolling.
Having a responsive design ensures that your website will feel and look equally well on different types of devices – from mobile phones to large desktop monitors. Large, bold fonts, on the other hand, have been a design trend for several years already. Using easy-to-read fonts from the sans-serif family is also essential. This leads to better customer experience and presents more value to the reader.
Level of Professionalism
You must create the impression of a respectable and modern business whenever someone visits your site. Such an impression results from how successfully your design represents you. Having a page with information on the company’s culture, photos of people working in the company and a list of customers is important in this regard. The culture page must have a section on how daily operations are handled in your company. It must also list the values and traditions held at regard there. Everything the company does outside its daily operations should be listed there. Staff photos add an additional hint for professionalism. They give a face to your business and stand as a testament for a company in which professionalism thrives.
You can also choose to display a list of customers. Doing so gives an impression of a real business and quantifies your work.
Easy Navigation
Visitors should be able to find what they are interested in on your website with ease. In the majority of cases, this means you will have to have a good and easy to use navigation. If you keep your navigation as simple as possible, intuitive and well styled, people are much more likely to find what they want.
The most widely-used types of navigations are the drop-down menu and the breadcrumb navigation.
A drop-down menu, when you hover or click a link on it, allows you to see a sub-menu displaying more pages of interest, corresponding to your selection. A breadcrumb navigation, on the other hand, reveals the current user location on a website and presents him with the options to go forward or step back. What is especially helpful about it, is that it presents a form of trail back to the homepage of a site.
Load Speed
The speed at which a website loads is an important factor affecting customer experience. Google also recognizes it and accounts for it in their ranking algorithm. Users are fond of websites that load instantly, which means that a site’s owner should be concerned with matters such as image size and code optimizations.
Images are often the deciding factor on how fast a website loads, meaning that their optimization for the web should be a priority.
Removing auto-play media is also a thing to consider as it greatly affect the load time of a site.
Successful Conversions
A successful web design should be able to convert visitors. Conversion is the single most important factor a business should be concerned with.
There are countless of ways a web design can impact conversions but the most obvious among them are the “keep it simple” principle, the use of colors and the use of faces.
The “keep it simple” principle comes from the idea that simpler designs are easier to follow and are in general better designs.
The use of colors implies the adoption of certain color schemes that fit well together and highlight selling propositions.
Faces, on the other hand, add a human side to your business. Although stock images are a good choice, using real staff photos is even better.
There are many ways a web design can improve user experience and a single article cannot cover them all but going through the aforementioned suggestions when you have lost your way on what part of the design affects the experience, is definitely helpful.
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