Throughout the process of writing for, designing and constructing a company website there is much to consider. For most companies, your website is a window to who you are as an organization. It’s your digital representative that is accessible 24/7, providing information about your team, projects and culture. Not only is your company website an important piece of your brand, it can also be a powerful sales tool–when created with user experience in mind.
“Usability expert Dana Chisnell, Beyond Frustration: Three levels of happy design” Good design isn’t just eliminating frustration, products must evoke positive emotions, be thoughtful, and get users absorbed in the experience (like on Netflix or TripIt.com).”
If you have an email sign-up form, a contact form or another way of capturing user information, you’re already using your website as part of your sales and marketing process. If you don’t have a place where users can give you their contact information, what are you waiting for? What is the point of having a company website if potential leads can’t let you know that they’re interested in your company?
It’s important to understand and regularly audit how users interact with your current site design in order to make it the most usable version possible! Some elements of a good user experience include:
- The content is useful and meaningful
- The information is presented and laid out in a way that is logical
- The experience provides an ease of use and is designed to guide users smoothly (or if possible, invisibly–the user does not realize they’re being forced to behave in an unusual way) through a process
- The user experience is able to convince a user to adopt a new or variant way of doing things without friction
- The experience delights the user through play, engagement, and/or entertainment
In this video from Fast Company, user experience professionals describe facets of a great user experience.
“I think one of the really difficult things about interaction design is that often, the best interaction design is the design that is completely invisible–that users actually don’t even recognize that they’re using. It’s the result of an enormous amount of work that’s gone into creating that.”
Is your website’s user experience costing you leads?
If you have a contact form or an incentive offered in exchange for a user’s email address but your users aren’t completing this prompt, you may be losing leads because you have a poor user experience. If users are confused or frustrated as a result of interacting with elements of your website, something as simple as changing the color or the location of a button could be your solution. To better understand the types of things that may frustrate your users, read more about characteristics of a bad user experience here.
A few ways to evaluate whether you have a good user experience are:
- Do a survey. Ask your staff, clients and friends to give you feedback on the ease of use as well as input on how you could make your process easier.
- Do research. While having a great user experience may not be your top priority now, if you think of it as a business asset, it will quickly become one. A good user experience can increase revenue. If you’ve already spent money and time on producing a great company website, why not optimize that investment. If users aren’t regularly completing your conversions there must be a reason and user experience research can find out why. Read more about the benefits of user experience research here.
- Use a heat map tool like LuckyOrange to understand how your users are interacting with your site. At the incredibly affordable price of $10 per month for up to 50,000 users, this is a no-brainer. If you want to know what your users are doing, use this tool!
- Pay someone else to do it. If you don’t have the time, there are many low cost ways to incorporate user experience research.
If you don’t yet have a website, keep user experience in mind from the start. Through wire framing and creating a proposed user flow from the very beginning, you can save a lot of time and money in the long run. If you’re in the beginning stages of creating your website, ask the company you’re working with to include user experience research and design in their process.
—Tara Urso, Content and Marketing Strategist
