You are squandering your most valuable resource and you don’t even know you are doing it. What resource am I talking about? Your customers! User experience is the single most valuable piece of feedback you can receive, yet it is all but ignored by most webmasters in favor of paid testers and market research.
Design is serious business. Failing to have an interface that is attractive and enhanced for customer interaction can lose you a lot of profits. A study done by Adobe found that brands with a focus on design outperformed on the S&P index by 219% over a ten year period. The best way to make sure you design is really on point and that your product/services are at their peak is to take customer feedback as your primary concern.
How User Experience Makes Conversion Rates Explode
Everyone wants better conversions and user experience is among the greatest tools to get you there. It all comes down to a single simple principle: when your users are happy they will be loyal to your brand. Pretty easy, right?
Making signing up, navigating and using your site, whether it is a dashboard, app or product checkout cart, will make them convert from ‘maybes’ to ‘yes pleases’ faster than any other tactic you could use.
Let’s say that you have created a landing page for a new product that is going to be launched in the next few weeks. Your goal is to get as many pre-signups as possible in anticipation for that release. So you provide a signup form on the landing page where new users can fill out their information to open an account.
Only one problem: you didn’t say on the landing page that the product had not launched yet. They thought they were signing up for a service, only to get a message saying that they will be alerted once it is up and running. This annoys the user and when they go to their inbox and see a confirmation email to verify their information they instead hit the Spam button and forget ever wanting to try that service.
Another example: you have a mobile app that brings your brand right into people’s phones…a great idea, given the prevalence of app for ecommerce these days. But the menu button is halfway covered by an ad. Half the time the use clicks the menu they get an ad taking them to a chrome tab and away from your app.
Within a week you see your uninstalls overtaking your installs. Your users have become so frustrated by the poor design of your interface that they have decided to go with a competitor. You have lost conversions, and perhaps lost lifelong users because you didn’t properly check the user experience.
How To Make Sure Your Users Walk Away With a Great Experience
There are a few very simple steps you can use to make sure this never happens. Once you have improved overall user experience you will be amazed at how your conversion rates begin to climb, without a single marketing tweak or extra dollar spent on advertising.
Make the right first impression. How long does it take for a user to gain an impression of your website? A minute? Twenty seconds? Actually, the answer is 50 milliseconds. You read that right, according to research Carleton University in Ottowa, Canada, it takes only only 5% of a second to gain an impression of a website. That is barely enough time for the brain to process any visual information at all.
So your clock starts the literal moment a web page is loaded. If you don’t manage to snag their attention right away they may never get to the point of using the features you have to offer. They might not even make it from the homescreen!
Make it easy to understand everything
Over the past couple of years we have seen a design standard developing for startups that are selling a service. They tend to be one page with folding or grid sections. But most interestingly, they look like infographics.
This trend shows us something very important, which is that it is crucial for conversions that you give all information clearly, succinctly, visually and in a way that it is immediately easy to understand what is being offered. All of these sites have price, feature, about and other pages. But the pertinent info is right there, detailed on that single first page.
Some people don’t even bother going to any other page because the sign-up is right there, where all the important details are. Download the blogging guides to better understand WordPress usability.
Constantly look for bugs, glitches and dead links.
I knew a startup founder who had developed a platform for freelancers. He hired some people for initial testing but didn’t retain them for further work, nor did he isolate any of his budget for regular testing. His reasoning?
“If something is wrong on the dashboard the customers will let us know.”
Yikes! Not only does this put a burden on users that isn’t their responsibility, but it is making their experience a negative one. He was working on a freemium model, relying on customers to switch to a paid service for access to more features.
Why would they pay for features when the ones they go for free didn’t work properly? Make sure you are always looking for bugs and problems through regular testing. Stick to a good trusted hosting services. If you do miss one make sure you thank the user letting you know and get it fixed right away, after sending a notice out to all users that you are working on the problem.
In the end you need good design, a solid product and good customer service in order to create a positive user experience. This is what is going to up your conversion rate, because you are making it easy, helpful and positive every time a user ends up on your site, app, service or uses your product. Before long your brand will become one of the highly touted ones, which will lead to more users to impress!
Have an idea to add to the ones above? Let us know in the comments!