In this day and age, a website is many things. It’s the gateway for your business and the place where most of your interaction with consumers happens. More importantly, it’s a powerful marketing tool for any business, and its role is incredibly important.
When managing an awesome website, there’s one thing that should be held in the highest regard at all times – user experience. Everything you place or modify on the website has to be planned in line with that one metric that will define its popularity and user satisfaction, and consequently, contribute to the success of your overall business.
In fact, how you enhance user experience on your website may even be the deciding factor in the grand scheme of things.
However, ensuring and enhancing the quality and consistency of website user experience is often a difficult task to accomplish. It’s all about figuring out the little knicks and knacks, and there’s constantly something new to learn.
So let’s take a look at some of the more interesting techniques to improve user experience and keep your visitors coming back for more.
Check the basics first
More often than not, websites aren’t optimized for the best user experience, or at least not regularly. Frequently you’ll encounter websites with outdated interfaces, slow loading times, or even unfit for viewing on different browsers and/or mobile screens (the worst offense you can commit in the smartphone era).
That’s a bit harsh.
People expect speed and efficiency, and any self-respecting website owner needs to take measures to ensure the visitors get the experience they expect. Outdated interfaces need to be updated as soon as the problem is noticed. Speed can be increased by methods like compressing images. And of course, making the websites viewable on various screens is a must, and Google is even penalizing those are not mobile-friendly.
Make it stand out
If your website is already optimized for the best performance, then the next step would be to make it stand out from others. First of all, I’m talking about design. Visual content like aesthetically pleasing yet unobtrusive images and details, videos, well-used white space, etc. should be in a proper balance with the textual content. All of these elements must be carefully planned out and tested whenever even the slightest changes are made.
Secondly, the textual content (writing and curating) featured on your website should be meaningful, useful, and credible. This means you have to provide to your visitors relevant content that will tell them something useful and interesting, something they didn’t already know. And, of course, they must trust that what you tell them is true and precise.
Audio for your website
Speaking of website content, there is one medium for its delivery that is still relatively underused – audio. However, it’s bound to become more popular as we’re witnessing a true explosion in the popularity of smart devices and integration of voice technology into every pore of our lives. It seems like everyone these days has a smart speaker and/or communicates with a voice assistant on various devices to get things done.
Let me throw some statistics here. The percentage of the US population listening to online audio has doubled since 2012 and now amounts to two-thirds of the entire population. Furthermore, people spend nearly 17 hours a week on average listening to online audio, which translates to just under two and a half hours every day. Makes you think, doesn’t it?
This technology is experiencing such a revolution because it has the power to reach people on their own terms – while driving, jogging, cooking, etc. On top of that, people are already used to lifelike voices telling them the news, information about weather and traffic, assisting them in shopping, exercising, as well as organizing chores, errands, and work assignments.
If you’re struggling to keep up in the highly competitive online environment despite your best efforts to optimize and stand out, then audio just might be your go-to strategy to get out of the gutter and enhance user experience in a new and effective way. As a matter of fact, by the looks of things, maybe you shouldn’t just consider using audio as a content delivery method, you should start working on implementing it right now.
The case for audio
Here’s why you should consider implementing audio:
- Audio allows multitasking. This is one of the key elements that have contributed to the wide-scale success of audio and voice tech. It enables people to complete their tasks more quickly and efficiently, something that is greatly valued in the time when everything revolves around productivity and life is moving at a faster pace. Not many people today have to luxury (or patience) to sit down and go through entire (and usually long) articles.
- Audio is more intimate. Written communication lacks the intimacy that voice carries. With audio content, communication with the visitor happens “one-on-one”. The human and human-like voice that listeners hear can breathe life into the inanimate words and engage them on an entirely new level, creating a better connection between the content on your website and your listener.
So how exactly can you implement this? Typically, the solution involves inserting a native audio player anywhere you deem appropriate on the website. The audio player normally features a wide range of voices and languages to choose from.
With a voice reading out the content to them, the reader no longer has to focus all of their attention to scanning through the text. They can now consume it through their eardrums, freeing their eyeballs for other important things. Giving your readers more options to interact with your content will dramatically increase their loyalty and overall retention rates.
Here at Trinity Audio, we have just the solution you need, so make sure to check it out if you want to jump on the bandwagon and join the audio revolution. Adding our native audio player to your website will give you a competitive edge as you’ll be providing your visitors with a smooth and personal audio experience, allowing them to divert their gaze to other things while consuming your content at the same time.
Hopefully, these insights have put you on the right track and gave you some ways to improve user experience on your website. Good luck!