How To Enhance The Usability Of Your Business Website
0In this digital day and age, the one thing that consumers are never short of is options. There are a plethora of products and services to choose from, delivered through a variety of platforms. As a business owner, therefore, it is not enough to have good offerings.
You also need to have a top-notch business website with engaging content, an attractive design, and a user-friendly interface so that visitors are encouraged to stay on your site, engage with the content and initiate action that could potentially lead to conversions.
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With the year 2020 coming to an end, now is the right time for you to take a long, hard look at your business website and identify areas that require improvements. To make things easy, here are the top nine things to keep in mind to improve your site’s usability:
1. Make your site mobile-responsive
In the last few years, Google has been consistently pushing all business websites to become more and more mobile-friendly, and for a good reason. In 2018, mobile searches finally surpassed desktop searches, with the former garnering 52.2% of traffic share.
It is a fact that the vast majority of consumers tend to use their smartphones to browse through the internet. If your website is not mobile-responsive, therefore, you are not giving them the best experience, which means they are likely to bounce off of the website sooner rather than later.
Google bots are now penalizing websites that are not mobile-optimized, which means your SEO rankings could go down. Usually, implementing a mobile-friendly version of your site is not difficult and requires only small tweaks to the theme, such as image sizing and the maximum width of the page.
Everything else, including colors and fonts, should be kept the same not to confuse the user. If resources permit, you can exclusively design mobile page layouts with minimum elements to maintain a subliminal user experience across platforms.
2. Reduce web page loading time
If your web page takes longer to load, you might end up putting your visitors off your website before it is fully loaded. A 2013 study by Radware found, in fact, that 87% of consumers will abandon a webpage if there is a two-second delay in load time. This still holds true even today.
Therefore, to avoid losing your visitors to the competition, try optimizing your website images by reducing the file size so that they do not take too long to load with the rest of the webpage content. Other things that can help include optimizing CSS files and browser caching.
3. Use images across the website sensibly
Pictures are a great way to inform your consumers about your products or services, and they will undoubtedly have more of an impact than a big block of text.
Instead of describing a point in a paragraph, you can use a related image that adds to the information you are providing in that paragraph.
At the same time, choose images carefully to create the necessary impact on your visitors. An image that is not correctly placed or that does not match the rest of the website will stick out like a sore thumb and distract your visitors and leave a negative impression on them.
However, while pictures improve your usability and make your site more attractive, using too many of them will overwhelm the users and slow down the loading time.
Pick appropriate images that are descriptive of your offerings and your theme, and update them from time to time if you see that they are slowing your site down.
4. Use a simple, skippable navigation layout
Most consumers are accustomed to a simple layout for a site – navigation bar at the top, links to important pages, a drop-down menu on the side, and concise terms used to differentiate pages. Without this, they might just become confused and abandon the business website.
Thus, it is essential to stick to a familiar, simple layout that works well on both desktop and mobile devices. Besides, horizontal scrolling is typically a bother for users on all kinds of devices, so do away with it as far as possible.
It would be best if you also considered the fact that people living with a disability also browse through websites and consume information available to them.
For instance, screen reader users have to read HTML documents from top-to-bottom. That means scrolling through the webpage however as they please is not possible for them.
That means deploying skip navigation would enable them to skip long lists of links. You could add a link at the top of the webpages, that on being clicked, direct the visitors to the section they are interested in on the page.
To achieve accessibility you must follow the ADA compliance guidelines that ensure accessibility so that everyone consumes information quickly and conveniently in an equal manner.
5. Ensure ideal background color and contrast
Choosing the correct background color for your website is a crucial step, as different colors affect a user’s psychology and experience in different ways. An excellent place to start is by thinking of the target audience for your website.
For example, if you are creating a website for vegan food lovers, you should go with different shades of brown and other earthy colors such as green, orange, and yellow for a pleasing effect.
You should also ensure a clear contrast between the font color and the background color so that users can easily read what you have written.
Maintaining a contrast between the background color and font color is also vital for people with low vision or impairment. They can then better differentiate the content on the web pages.
6. Improve the website’s readability quotient
If your business website text lacks readability, you will likely annoy your visitors and lead them to abandon it. However, there is a way to fix it. Start with ensuring the proper use of typography usability guidelines, therefore, when formatting your site text.
Use adequate amounts of white space, break your text up into paragraphs and display lists with bullet points wherever you have large blocks of information.
The impact of white space is enormous in terms of both design aesthetics and user experience. A clean design creates a much more favorable effect on the eye than something cluttered.
Plenty of white space also makes it easier for consumers to scroll up-and-down the page and find the text or image they want.
In addition, be sure to use high-quality and relevant images and position design elements such as sidebars, banners, and text boxes that do not distract users going through the site.
7. Optimize your web page layouts for better engagement
A disorganized business website layout where consumers have to search for ages to find what they want is the opposite of a good user experience. Be sure that your site layout is easy to navigate and easy on the eyes, with everything displayed clearly.
If you are having trouble coming up with a layout like this, you can use a tool such as CrazyEgg that provides you with a heat map and a suitable schema for putting each element of your webpage.
Website optimization is an ongoing activity, and you must keep updating your site with new elements and plugins every quarter or six months without fail.
8. Don’t forget hyperlink differentiation
It is vital to draw suitable attention to the hyperlinks you want your users to click on. Differently colored text and underlined text tends to work well for this. Moreover, a study by Karyn Graves shows that the average web user recognizes blue and underlined text as link text and knows to click on it.
Sticking to a convention, therefore, is a good idea here. It is also essential to think about the length of the hyperlink text. Typically, the longer the link titles (3-4 words at least), the more comfortable they are for the user to identify.
Again, hyperlink differentiation can help people with low vision or impairment distinguish between the “clickable words” on the web page and initiate action accordingly.
Before taking the plunge
We understand you are all riled up to make changes to your website. But before you do so, ask yourself the following questions:
How can I inspire potential consumers to visit my website?
How can I garner the attention of potential consumers to my website?
How can I create a great first impression as soon as they land on my website?
What information do I want them to seek on my web pages?
Answering these questions will give you a purpose to enhance the usability of your business website. Once you are done with that, there are still multiple factors to consider when redesigning. Your content needs to be informative and accurate.
Your pages should be organized in a simple, intuitive manner. Your images should be relevant without overwhelming the webpage. Your links should work properly, and each of your pages should load rapidly.
Keep your target audience, and your user’s buying journey in mind when designing your website to create an experience that is the most appropriate and attractive for them.
