A seamless user experience (UX) is critical to website success.
However, many businesses are unaware that their web pages aren’t intuitive and don’t cater to visitors’ needs.
The analytics show the reality: users visiting a website and quickly leaving without interacting with the pages, not completing a form or abandoning their carts after adding products.
Poor user experience is a revenue killer, so it’s important to make UX a primary consideration in the web design process.
In this article, we’ll tackle the commonly asked questions about UX:
• Why Is User Experience (UX) Important?
• What Is UX Design and Why Is It Important?
• What Is UX Testing?
• Why Is User Testing an Important Part of the Design Process?
• How Thrive Creates User-Focused Websites
Why Is User Experience Important?
User experience refers to how an end user interacts with a product, such as a website, particularly how they understand the platform to work, how they feel about using it and how they navigate to different features.
A good UX allows users to easily find what they need on the website and perform tasks. This kind of effective design meets users’ needs and leads to various benefits:
1. Repeat Visitors
Focusing on user experience in web design improves retention rates.
“It ensures long-term, repeat users by providing a satisfying experience,” said Zeeshan Zulfiqar, Digital Designer at Thrive Internet Marketing Agency.
People are more likely to return to websites that meet their needs and are easy to navigate. If they can effortlessly accomplish what they need to do on your platform, whether accessing content or buying a product from your inventory, they won’t second-guess returning to your site. In fact, they might spend more time on it.
These highly engaged visitors read multiple articles, watch videos, check customer reviews and play with interactive elements, like quizzes and polls.
All these help them better understand your products and services. Over time, you establish credibility, making them ready to take the desired action, such as contacting you for a free quote or checking out a product.
This domino effect of attraction, engagement and conversion emphasizes the importance of user experience in website design. UX should be one of your priorities when you want to build a community of repeat, engaged visitors.
2. Better Search Engine Rankings
As positive UX increases time on site and retention, so does your website’s visibility on search engines like Google.
“[Positive UX improves] usability. Elements like page speed, structure and navigation aid in SEO. Engaging UX reduces bounce rate, positively affecting rankings,” Zulfiqar said.
Google places so much emphasis on user experience importance that it has a set of metrics dedicated to evaluating it. These metrics are known as Core Web Vitals, a subset of Web Vitals that measure three main aspects of the user experience:
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This measures how long it takes for the largest content element on a page to load. A good LCP is less than 2.5 seconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): This measures how much a page’s layout changes unexpectedly when loading. A good CLS is less than 0.1.
• First Input Delay (FID): This measures how long it takes for the browser to respond to a user’s first interaction with a page, such as a click of a button. A good FID is less than 100 milliseconds.
Since web design significantly impacts search engine rankings, search engine optimization (SEO) should be part of the overall marketing strategy.
Focus on optimizing specific elements like website speed, navigation, mobile-friendliness and image file names to increase visibility on Google.
3. More Credible Brand
People share their experiences using online platforms. Some recommend websites with intuitive interfaces and rich functionalities to their social circles, especially eCommerce sites, where consumers value seamless shopping transactions.
If your platform has good UX, you’ll easily build a reputable brand through real-life reviews and recommendations. As you retain customers, you gain more as positive word of mouth about your brand spreads.
Zulfiqar summarized the importance of user experience in relation to brand equity.
“UX helps customers understand what sets a brand apart in the market. It increases customer familiarity and loyalty to the brand,” he said.
“Consistently good UX at every touchpoint reinforces brand perceptions and reputation. A strong brand identity enhances UX and vice versa, creating a cohesive brand experience.”
On the flip side, poor UX can damage your brand reputation, leaving customers frustrated at being unable to do what they want on your website. Worse, it makes your platform look suspicious.
When customers don’t trust your website, they quickly leave, never go back and warn people about it. To maintain brand credibility, keep in mind user experience importance and invest in a well-thought-out UX design.
4. Accessibility Compliance
Another aspect of user experience importance is compliance with laws, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). This legislation urges public businesses to make goods, services and programs easily accessible to people with disabilities.
Your website should be designed in such a way that people with limited vision, color blindness, hearing difficulties or motor impairments can still browse through your pages and perform the tasks they aim to do, such as buying a product or contacting you for more information.
This entails emphasizing color contrast, adding alt texts to images, putting video subtitles and supporting keyboard shortcuts. Keeping aligned with accessibility guidelines broadens your customer base, establishing your business as an inclusive brand that caters to all, including the disability community.
What Is UX Design and Why Is It Important?
Now that we addressed why user experience is important, let’s tackle what user experience design is.
UX design is the process of creating products that meet users’ needs, integrating aesthetics, usability and function. This discipline follows these six principles:
• User-Centricity
• Consistency
• Visual Hierarchy
• Context
• User Control
• Usability
User-Centricity
This refers to configuring products to fit who the users are and what they want from the website. A user experience test is critical to accurately understand web visitors’ goals.
Consistency
Consistency involves ensuring all pages across your site follow the same look and function. Similarly, your web design should be consistent with how users expect it to function.
Visitors to your site know how menus and buttons work based on their experience with other websites, and your website should accommodate these expectations.
Visual Hierarchy
This describes the arrangement of web elements according to their order of importance. The most important are placed at the top of the page and displayed in a larger font or different colors.
Context
This refers to the environment in which users will access your website. This primarily involves considering the device they use.
User Control
This describes offering users a sense of control over how they use the platform.
For instance, it should be easy for web visitors to pause or stop videos, remove items from their cart, or input information using text fields.
Usability
This refers to the product’s level of ease of use. Ideally, navigating the website must have little to no learning curve. Web visitors should be able to perform their desired tasks fast and shouldn’t have to reorient themselves when returning to the site.
Adopting these principles when designing a website is essential, as they ultimately create a pleasant, seamless experience for users.
With this frictionless interaction, people are more inclined to return to your site, trust your brand, and do business with you.
What Is UX Testing?
With a better understanding of what is UX design and why is it important, the next question is, how do you ensure you have an effective UX design?
Aside from following the principles mentioned above, you must conduct UX testing. UX testing evaluates different aspects of user experience to create a robust web design strategy and plan.
Below are some of the most popular UX test methods:
1. Moderated User Testing
As the name suggests, test participants navigate through the website while a moderator supervises the session.
The moderator assigns users specific scenarios and tasks, such as finding a specific product on the platform, and observes participants’ sentiments, behaviors and body language as they complete the task.
2. Unmoderated User Testing
Unlike moderated UX testing, unmoderated doesn’t involve direct supervision. In the same way, participants must perform a set of pre-determined activities.
A software solution captures their interactions with the website and programmatically asks them questions.
3. Card Sorting
This method is used to determine how to design the website’s navigation and arrangement of elements. Participants are given cards representing different web elements that they should group together. This should help you understand how users expect elements to be organized on the platform.
These tests offer meaningful user insights that inform how to design your website. In addition to the actual scenario tests, conduct interviews with participants to further understand their needs and wants.
Why Is User Testing an Important Part of the Design Process: 4 Reasons
Some businesses neglect the importance of UX testing because they believe they already know what to include in their website, where to place certain elements and how to make it aesthetically pleasing.
However, sometimes our preconceived notions don’t align with the actual user’s interaction with the site. This is why running a user experience test is extremely important.
We discuss in depth the specific ways UX testing can benefit your business:
1. Accelerate the Web Development Process
Although testing may seem like an extra step that can stretch your project timeline, it can actually speed up the web development process.
It removes the guesswork in different aspects of the initiative, including implementing the design, arranging the structure and layout and adding different features to the website. It eliminates subjective perspectives on the platform’s aesthetics and functionalities.
With valuable insights from real-life users, executing different efforts is more informed and strategic. You won’t have to spend much time debating with team members whether or not a certain color palette or call-to-action button works.
This answers the important question: Why is user testing an important part of the design process?
2. Save Time and Resources
Web development projects can be expensive as they require extensive resources. Imagine the inflated cost when you have to go back to the drawing board to fix problems after launching a website. Incorporating testing right from the start lessens the need for massive, costly redesigns later.
“User experience testing reduces development and support costs, [as it] identifies usability issues early, saving time and resources. Moreover, it uncovers lacking aspects and pinpoints areas of the site that need improvement,” Zulfiqar said.
In addition to cutting unnecessary costs, including user experience tests in the web design process helps you save time. It lets your team focus on conversion optimization efforts, such as creating valuable content, instead of fixing website problems.
Automating the process will further optimize the workflow. Automated testing software solutions feature web test recorders that automatically capture website interactions. These recorders enable users to analyze a website’s functionality without human intervention.
3. Identify Specific Problems
User experience tests are important because they can uncover specific issues when revamping websites.
You can determine why a page isn’t converting as expected or why web visitors often abandon carts. You can pinpoint if it’s the complex navigation, too much information on a page, or slow load times keeping web visitors from successfully completing the task they want to do.
This lays out what is UX testing for: to identify what’s not working and become more intentional in applying changes to your site.
4. Establish a Competitive Edge
Almost all businesses now have websites. Aside from unique products and services, a seamless user experience makes customers choose a particular brand over another. When eCommerce competitors have the same offerings, the one facilitating a frictionless transaction wins.
As noted earlier, good UX increases repeat web visitors who become paying customers. Over time, customers can be brand ambassadors who promote your business to social circles.
How Thrive Creates User-Focused Websites
Thrive offers a range of web design solutions incorporating user experience testing. Over the last 18 years, we have helped various companies establish online presence and increase conversions through easy-to-use, engaging websites.
Here are some ways we can help your business:
• Creating aesthetically pleasing, responsive websites: Using responsive web design is ideal to enhance UX and improve search engine rankings. This design approach that adapts to the user’s device’s layout offers a better viewing experience and easier access to content. We specialize in developing websites that automatically adjust for different screen sizes, whether a desktop, a tablet or a smartphone.
• Building optimized WordPress websites: WordPress is a top choice for a website builder because it has a broad range of themes optimized for easy navigation. We have in-house WordPress website experts who can help you get started and take advantage of the platform’s customization options.
• Launching easy-to-use eCommerce platforms: User-friendliness can make or break eCommerce sales, which answers the question why is user experience important in the online retailing industry. Our team of eCommerce web design specialists will ensure that your digital store is equipped with user-friendly navigation, chatbots and easy-to-use checkout features, among other essential eCommerce features.
User experience testing is a critical part of the web design project. It reduces the guesswork in the development process, streamlines workflows, cuts down costs and reveals issues that may turn away visitors. It gives you a competitive advantage over other businesses as you gain the approval of satisfied users.
Let us help you run effective UX testing that yields meaningful insights for website optimization.
Contact us today for a free quote.
