Doing business is hard. With new competition creeping each day in the market, you will always have to reiterate your products and approach to services. While you are hyper-focused at developing your products each day, it is easy to lose track of ensuring your existing audience base pipeline isn’t leaking. Traffic can only do so much for your business. If your brand customer experiences aren’t impactful, you will lose the interest of your prospects eventually.
So how do you deal with this?
Enter web experience design. Today, if your first impression has to have a chance of creating an impact, your website’s usability is your trump card. This means if you care to sustain your business in the long term, you have to take your usability seriously today.
To give you a comprehensive understanding of how web usability helps your business, we have laid down a detailed checklist. But in this post, we will not stop there. We go even further to reveal the top critical areas you should review to make your website the usability superhero.
Let’s get started.
4 Areas Your Website Usability Adds Fuel To Your Business Growth
In a world that is increasingly transforming itself into a digital-first era, if you are neglecting your online brand presence, you are losing both tangible and intangible assets. What follows is lower customer retention, higher bounce rates, low-quality traffic, and the list goes on. A usability test exactly alleviates this problem.
Think of it as a vulnerability curbing tool. By ensuring simplified usability to your customers, you give them a reason to stick around your brand. What follows is the increased duration of brand-customer interaction. Here are the top ways where your business organization can benefit from a usability testing guide today.
1- Brand Equity
Take it from the experts. Today if your website has a cluttered content architecture, you will encourage your audience to bounce. Your audience takes just 3 seconds to judge a site. This means having low-quality photos, complex navigation systems, confusing messages, inadequate product descriptions are all a big no-no.
Related: Branding Cycle: Your Complete Guide
If you have to gain authority in your market, you need to send a positive message about your brand actively. Having an unmanaged, challenging to explore website hampers the overall customer experience exponentially. Your brand will lose all chances of customer interactions. But, done right, usability can be one of the critical determiners of gaining the right eyeballs over a period of time, sustainably.
Related: Most Powerful Brand Words
2- Quality Leads
The first step is to make a website and the second driving step is to attract the right audience to your website. But this can be tricky. Ideally, your customers will enter your site from different stages of the customer journey. Going right from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel through the middle is theoretical. This means you need to have an offering for every group of customers.
Related: Marketing Agency Directories To Get You The Best Leads
Otherwise, you are just losing money and time. But, this is tricky. Understanding what your customer is looking for is the core activity you need to perform. Everything you offer depends on this understanding. This means your site navigation system and structure need to be organized, systematic, and semantically related. If your e-commerce business sells baby entertainment products and gets an audience visiting your site from google ads that display baby food, then the fault is in your semantic matching.
3- Sales
More quality leads equals more sales. Right? Wrong. Creating a host of quality leads ensures that you know that the prospects are much closer to the bottom of the funnel. But, they are still leads, not paying clients. Your site usability can help to convert them. Here’s how? Let’s assume you are a B2B startup rendering IT services.
Related: Ecommerce Growth Strategies That Fire Up Sales
Your target audience is primarily the lifestyle and e-commerce industry. For engaging this audience, you have launched a blog to keep them informed about the latest technologies to power their business. So, if a potential lead visits your site blog frequently, does your online presence recognize that? Have you created a system for them to contact you if they are thinking of collaborating with you?
Related: Top B2B Ecommerce Marketing Stats
Having a contact form attached to the blog reduces the friction between you and your potential buyer. They now do not need to explore your site to another area to contact you. Remember, the key here is to be simple, fast, yet productive.
4- New Business Opportunities
Having a great site doesn’t only benefit your business today. It creates opportunities for tomorrow. Creating more room for customer-brand interaction, you promote your audience into engaging with you. Having dropped a pixel here, you can gather valuable data that converts into rich insights about your earned audience.
Having data information like the best performing content, the maxim visited pages, the highest interacted buttons, highest performing CTAs, and information gathered from form data can give you opportunities to better understand your audience’s problems. You can brainstorm these problems to come up with innovative products for the same customer base. Feedback forms are a great way to explore this domain.
Related: Best Digital Marketing Tools For Small Businesses
So when you know how usability can affect your brand, it is time for the critical question. What are the key usability areas that can protect your brand image?
What Are The Key Areas That Can Save Your Brand Name?
Multiple elements can improve your site’s usability. But the following are the high-impact ones that can improve your user’s overall experience by exponents.
1- Accessibility
If your website’s usability could be wrapped up in one word, it would be accessibility. Design for all should be the go-to motto for your accessibility goals. The best way to start approaching accessibility is to create a mood board of your ideal audience’s world.
Related: Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
What kind of lifestyle does your audience have? Are they morning larks or night owls? Do they browse on a mobile or a laptop? How tech-savvy are they? Why do they visit your site most of the time? Answering these questions will help you create an experience that has the least possible friction.
Cross-platform interaction capabilities, site responsiveness, semantic markup tagging, and color choices are a few ways to ensure accessibility. Another critical point is your website speed. If it is more than 3 seconds, you need to fix this now. Optimizing visuals, CSS, and JScript delivery and keeping plugins at a minimum can help you with this.
Related: Best Ways To Increase Site Speed
2- Readability
You may have often heard the phrase; content is king. But, let’s take a moment and understand why?
Having a virtual product is naturally foreign. If you have to strike a chord of familiarity with your audience, you need to design your product embedding elements that simulate their natural world.
Related: SEO Copywriting Tips For Bloggers
Semantical understanding and use of words, colors, and typeforms are the general ways that create the first form of likeability in the psychology of your audience. This means if your content is not big enough to be read from a distance, easy enough to understand in the first read, and doesn’t use the similar emotional value that your audience likes, your content is failing.
One good way to ensure readability is to have enough white space. You can even embed new forms of content styles like presentation decks to align them to your audience’s interest. There are several top presentation software that can help you achieve this.
3- Task Alignment
The primary goal of any usability test that you perform is to ensure that your mock audience is able to accomplish the goals you want them to achieve fast. This step should primarily start with understanding how steep the learning curve is for your target audience while interacting with your product.
Granted, there are innate complexities of some digital products which are required to solve the problems targeted by the product, but is the existing solution the least friction path? How do you alleviate the complexities here? Do you have educational guides and videos? Or did you invest in real-time customer support? Intuitiveness is something you can’t miss. Does the task accomplishment path seem obvious with the support feature?
Efficiency is something that you need to keep an eye on regularly. This will also give you a fair advantage over your competitors. Any chance of reducing the time of task accomplishment needs to undergo experimentation.
4- Navigation
Your site’s navigation is a cluster of UI components. Menus, search boxes, internal and external links are primary components of UI. This means ensuring the visibility of what your users are looking for in your site is critical for overall UI success. The faster they find what they are looking for, the higher the dwelling time. Information architecture, findability, AI-powered trending box are a few ways you can ensure navigation efficiency.
Parting Advice
Great user experiences are created from close observation of the audience. This means the top ways that can ensure success today are transient. With time they will change. Observing your current audience will help you stay aligned to your audience’s behavior and alleviate the little nuances that create big distractions in the online transactional processes.
How many of the above problems did you face with your website? What are your current ways of addressing your website usability hassles? Did we miss something? Let us know in the Comments section below.
