Most businesses are concerned about customer takeaway. After all, you go to a lot of effort to ensure that users receive and retain a very specific message about your company, your products, and why they should patronize your brand, especially over competitors.
Why is it, then, that so few business owners are aware of user experience and the role it plays in customer interactions, public opinion, and overall sales? Many businesses are only just becoming aware of the importance of user experience.
What is UX? How can you improve in this area? And really, why should you care? Here are a few things that every business owner should consider before hiring an Atlanta web design specialist to overhaul a website or contacting an Atlanta SEO company for optimization services.
What is UX?
There are two ways to approach defining user experience and all it entails. On the one hand, it is all of the elements that make up user interactions with your brand, with particular regard to your website.
User experience is the amount of time it takes your web pages to load, the visual appeal of your layout, the ease of navigation, the intellectual and emotional engagement your content inspires, and more. Do users get what they need from your website? Do you know what they want and do you provide it?
There’s another side to the UX coin, though. It revolves around your wants and needs. You want to present your brand and your products or services in a way that inspires admiration and compels specific action (such as liking, sharing, purchasing, and offering ongoing patronage).
It’s important to think about both perspectives when crafting a UX strategy. You have to strive to meet your own goals while also considering the consumer perspective. Striking a balance is essential to creating a successful user experience.
How Can You Improve UX?
There are several things you can do to improve user experience. You should start by asking questions. Who is your audience? What do they want? How are they currently interacting with your brand and your content? How can you meet your goals and theirs synergistically?
Once you’ve answered these questions you can begin to create (or re-create) your website with UX design in mind. You’ll probably need an experienced Atlanta web design professional to help you transform your ideas into actionable directives.
For example, you may want to provide users with a modern, intuitive interface that makes navigating your website and finding the information they seek easy. Or you might want to make sure that mobile users interact with your website with the same ease as those on computers. An expert web designer will have the knowledge and experience to take action on such requests.
This professional will understand, for example, that hamburger menus have largely replaced outdated toolbars in modern web design, and that users prefer the spare utility of this design feature. Your web designer will understand that responsive is the best way to create virtually the same interface for all users across a variety of platforms, from computers and laptops to smartphones and tablets.
In other words, a good web designer will provide the nuts, bolts, and two-by-fours that build your dream house, as well as the wood flooring and modern wallpaper that make it beautiful and appealing to visitors.
Why Should You Care?
Reworking your website and hiring an Atlanta SEO company to increase visibility and help you to implement your overall marketing strategy can be expensive. Why should you care about UX when you already have a website that visually and intellectually represents your brand?
The problem for most businesses that have had their websites up and running for a while is that they failed to consider UX in the first place. This means that users may not be having a good experience when they interact with your brand online (in the form of your website).
This is a big deal, to say the least. User experience is a crucial element of gaining leads, making sales, securing trusted peer-to-peer reviews (and even word-of-mouth promotion). You may only have a few seconds to make a compelling argument for visitors to stay long enough to absorb your message.
Do you want to waste this precious time with pages too bloated to load or a call to action at the bottom of the page that most visitors will never scroll down to see? By taking user wants and needs into consideration and finding ways to sync them with your own objectives, you have the best possible opportunity to make an impact with your website and turn visitors into loyal patrons. This is why you should care about UX.