Let’s be honest, almost all of us can spend an entire day just surfing through Youtube recommendations or binge-watching popular shows on Netflix or listening to Spotify’s personalized playlists. These are some of the world’s most visited websites but what actually makes you continue visiting them? The answer lies in ‘User Experience’.

Statistics say that 88% of users are less likely to return to a website after a bad user experience. Hence, if your website is suffering from high bounce rates, you probably haven’t given much thought to interaction design, usability, and human factors.

If you don't want your users dissatisfied with your site and leave you for competition (there’d be no hesitations), read the blog all the way through to learn how to deliver a solid user experience to motivate users to take action and get the most out of your website

Table of Content

• What is User Experience and Why is it so Important?

• 7 factors that Influence User Experience

          1. Useful

          2. Usable

          3. Valuable

          4. Credible

          5. Accessible

          6. Desirable

          7. Findable

• Tips to Improve User Experience on a Website

          1. Optimize Page Speed

          2. Intelligent Use of White Space

          3. Categorize so that Visitors Navigate with Ease

What is User Experience and Why is it so Important?

User experience, in simple terms, is how people feel when navigating through your website. It’s human nature to judge a product based on experiences provoked by emotion. As an old adage in UX goes;

“Interaction with any product produces an experience (emotion) whether it had UX or not.”

Any positive emotion such as happiness, joy, satisfaction, and trust evoked while interacting with your product reflects a positive user experience while negative emotions such as frustration, agitation and anger reflect a bad experience.

It is the digital reputation of your product or your service and it can drastically impact the success of the product you are selling.  

UX focuses on understanding the user, what they’re looking for, what their values and abilities are plus their limitations, to create a better interaction between the user and the product.

The key takeaway is to pay attention to all aspects of usability. 

According to Peter Morville, a pioneer in the UX field who has written best selling books on UX, there are 7 key factors that describe the user experience 

7 Key Factors that Influence User Experience

When creating solutions to satisfy the needs of customers, designers should focus on several important aspects which Peter Morville presented through his “User Experience Honeycomb”

01. Useful

Does your site fulfill a purpose and meet the needs of your target market? 

Knowing and understanding customer needs is critical for providing useful and relevant experiences to users.

Take Netflix into account. It’s undoubtedly the top choice for TV and movie streaming. This is mostly because of Netflix’s recommendation system. People crave content that’s personalized for them, hence Netflix serves wonders for people looking for new shows or movies relevant to their palate of tastes or to continue watching their existing favourites. 

02. Usable

It’s easy to confuse usefulness with usability, however, they are significantly different.

Usability is a measure of the ease with which the user interacts with an interface. How easy is it for a user to navigate through your site and accomplish their objectives?

There are several usability testing tools to streamline the usability testing process by gaining insight into how customers perceive your product.

Let’s take Netflix as an example yet again. The user-friendly and flawless interface ensures the navigation and the streaming process are as seamless as possible. The first few seconds of users interacting with Netflix for the first time is enough to convince them to make it their number one streaming platform for life.

Read more on how Netflix creates immersive usability

03. Findable

It’s quite undeniable that if you can’t find what you’re looking for quickly and easily, you wouldn’t waste more time on a site. Hence, if you don’t want users to bounce off your site and leave you for competition, then it’s important to have an intuitive navigational structure with easily navigable menus and a layout that is clean and simple.

Remember, the quicker they find what they want, the happier they’ll be!

04. Credible

This is all about trust. For customers to take action, visit a link, and explore the products or services you have to offer, they should be able to trust the source. There are a few things that could be done by you as a developer/designer, to influence whether users will trust your product or services and deem your website credible. 

• Incorporate design elements to make the site look as professional as possible
• Keep content up-to-date
• Use transparent pricing and processes
• Include testimonials, customer ratings and feedback 
   

Essentially, every effort should be put into establishing your reputation and credibility if you don’t want people leaving you for another company.

05. Accessible 

Your site should be accessible to any and all, regardless of the hardware, software, location, language, or disability. Your design should be inclusive so that everyone can perceive, understand, use, navigate through and interact with your product/service.

There are a number of tools that will help you in your accessible web design process, from creating color combinations to adding audio and text transcriptions, all in line with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

Take a look at some of the coolest accessibility tools for designers and learn about each tool in detail

06. Desirable

Yes, your site might contain the ultimate solution to most problems of users but is it desirable enough? Is your site physically and emotionally appealing? It’s no secret that people’s emotional responses overpower their logical, analytical brain. Emotion is what really drives people to take action. 

Regardless of the usefulness of the product, aesthetic elegance, branding, identity and emotional design is what make the customer engage with your product.

07. Valuable

At the end of the day, it’s all about delivering value to your customers and to the business. A website should potentially add value to the business which sells a product/service and to the user who buys it.

“People don’t buy products; they buy better versions of themselves.” (Samuel Hulick)

All your efforts to drive and convert traffic will fall short if your visitors fail to find value in your site.

3 Tips to Improve User Experience on a Website

01. Optimize your page speed

Page speed is the amount of time it takes for a webpage to load. There are a number of tools to evaluate website speed with Google Pagespeed Insights being the most popular.

To wrap our heads around why it’s important to focus on improving the speed of your website and how it directly impacts your customer’s satisfaction, conversion rate and SEO rankings, we have to first understand what’s happening in the background when a webpage is being loaded.

When a user types in the URL of your web page into the browser, the browser looks up the IP address of the server hosting the website using the domain that was typed in. 

Once the browser has a connection to the server, it sends an HTTP request to the server to request the contents of the page. The server processes the request and sends back a response with the requested content that’s usually HTML, CSS, Javascript, image files or data. 

But very rarely does your browser pull all of the needed scripts or needed code to render your web page. Typically additional requests would be made to get Javascript, CSS, images and data from the server, and this is where things start to really slow down your site.

Most of the time between a user typing the URL in and seeing the webpage is spent on transferring data (HTML, CSS, images, etc) from server to machine. 

But how can you improve the overall response of your site by reducing the time spent on transferring content?

• Compress: Reduce your HTML, CSS and Javascript file sizes by enabling Gzip compression
• Optimize images: Larger images are the biggest culprit of slow-loading pages. Utilize editing tools like Adobe Photoshop, On1 Photo, GIMP, Affinity Photo, and others that come with built-in image compression features to ensure your images are compressed, while also ensuring they are in the right format
• Enable caching: For your webpage to load faster when a user returns to a site, enable browser caching as it allows the content to be stored in a visitor’s browser
• Minify resources (HTML, CSS, Javascript): Remove redundant elements from your website’s code and optimize it. CSSNano and Uglify-js are two recommended minification tools

2. Intelligent use of whitespace

Whitespace, also known as negative space, is simply the space that is unused with the intention of giving users a visual break. 

Essentially, the space between smaller elements such as an image and a caption, line spacing, and word-spacing, is called macro whitespace while the more ‘easier-to-notice’  space which is typically the space between major elements is known as macro whitespace.

The finest example is the homepage of Google. The intelligent use of macro space allows users to focus entirely on the search bar with no extraneous details. Simple and easy on the user’s eye.

Some quick tips to master whitespace:

• Prioritize specific elements by removing all elements around it
• Establish a visual hierarchy 
• Reduce redundant information

Whitespace is an invaluable design tool and is a crucial aspect of delivering a better user experience. If information is cluttered and cramped, zero content would stand out and all users would have a hard time digesting information. 

As a user, one of the biggest annoyances you will encounter is when content is overcrowded or excessively spaced out. White space allows you to organize content to de-clutter it and enable users to focus on the most important information.

03. Categorize so that visitors navigate with ease

It’s vital to make it easy for users to find their way around the site in order to keep them engaged. Website navigation should never be overlooked as this can make or break your website’s overall performance. Bad navigation will leave users eager to get out of your site.

Here are some useful tips on how you can deliver a better user experience through website navigation.

• Utilize menus, internal linking, and subcategories so people can easily find anything they need
• Ensure your search feature is prominent and frictionless
• Use ALT text on images 
• Use descriptive and accurate navigation titles