Digital Experience Principles to Evolve Your Website Design
Your website should continue to evolve with your business, as a stagnant website will only gather dust. Many digital experience principles of design focus on improving the user experience that can take your website from stale to successful.
Use these tips to keep your website up to date with the latest in user experience design principles.
Be Careful When Giving Customers Choices
There’s a principle in user experience design called the Hicks Law, which states the time it takes to make a decision increases with the number of choices. More choices mean more complexity. When designing your navigation menu, for example, make sure to include only the most important pages. Review your traffic and heatmap data to find the pages that are important to your audience.
UX designers should also be aware of cognitive load. If you think of your mind like a computer, there’s a limited memory load that can only sustain a limited number of tasks or processes at once. Overloading your users’ cognitive capacity means decision-making is likely to be impacted. That overload could cause frustration and an increase in bounces, for example.
Differences in Design Stand Out from the Rest
The user experience you present to your customers or clients‘ choices also impacts their memory. For example, your homepage is likely to compare different tiers of your services or products. The product that appears the most different from the rest is the most likely to be remembered by your website visitors. This is called the Von Restorff Effect. Therefore, it helps to make your best product stand out.
Another principle of UX design appears when you’re presenting a list. The Serial Position Effect states that users best remember the first and last items in a series. We tend to forget the middle of a series, so your least popular products can be almost hidden inside a series that includes your popular products at the beginning or the front.
Set Time Aside for Thorough Performance Optimization
No matter how you present your products and services on your website, the speed with which users can interact with your website will impact how they feel about your business. If a website is slow and choppy, with some elements loading late or shifting while loading, users will experience frustration. The more frustration you cause in your website visitors, the less likely they will convert into customers.
Your site performance may also impact your organic traffic. Since Google’s Page Experience Update release, your website speed may directly affect how much traffic Google sends your way. Websites that reward users with a lightning-fast page experience, no cumulative layout shift, and a fast largest contentful paint are more likely to be shown to users searching the internet.
User Experience Directly Impacts Your Bottom Line
Digital experience optimization, evolving your website to create a better user experience, isn’t about making your website look good. Well, it’s not only about making your site look good. It also influences how customers are moving through your site. It can even influence their thoughts and emotions about your business.
Those thoughts and feelings about your business directly impact their buying behavior. A smooth user experience keeps customers moving through the checkout flow, for example, or the process of filling out a lead form. If they can complete the form without waiting for an element to load or your site to catch up, they’re more likely to become a qualified lead.
Evolve Your Website to Keep Visitors Engaged
Keep your website up to date and react to the changing landscape of user experience design. Not only are customers more engaged with a modern website, but search engines like Google are more likely to reward your site with organic traffic. It also directly impacts your bottom line.
Focus on improving the user experience for your website visitors to take your website from stale to successful.
Ready to get started? Reach out to 3 Media Web today to improve your digital experience.