One of the vital elements of your marketing strategy is excellent web design. It creates a significant impact on the digital customer experience. Features such as usability, your site’s aesthetic appearance and more are critical factors that determine your company’s success.

However, design trends quickly come and go, making your site look outdated. Sometimes, a makeover for your website design is needed. If that’s the case, hiring a company that specializes in web design is ideal.

In this post, we’re going to discuss the different ways how you can dramatically improve customer experience through user-focused web design.

You’ll also learn about the different steps in boosting user satisfaction and ROI by utilizing several UX techniques and practices:

1. Website Appearance Is Important

As soon as users click on your web page, they have already formed an initial impression in mind. So if your site doesn’t fit to what they want to see (or it isn’t compelling enough,) they’ll bounce from your website. Chances are, they wouldn’t likely visit again.

That’s why first impressions do count.

Your site doesn’t have to be complex. However, you must ensure that it’s always updated and more accessible to visitors.

Ideally, it must have the following elements:

  • Responsive Design: For a more seamless appearance across all devices, you must pick a design that’s responsive from your desktop computer to your smartphone.
  • Bold Fonts: Include easy-to-read fonts and content that gives value to your readers.
  • Eye-Catching Images: Compelling visuals and imagery help to summarize the text. It also helps users absorb information quickly.
  • Multimedia: Adding interactive elements like videos, infographics, images, and GIFs helps convert visitors into leads and leads into conversions.

Aside from having an excellent design, strive for a site that’s unique and consistent.

2.  Website Clarity Should Be Upfront

The importance of website clarity is pretty simple. It helps users find what they need, in the quickest way possible. It’s also gradually improved through the use of navigation tools.

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Here are two practical ways on how you can improve the overall clarity of your site:

  • Breadcrumb: Breadcrumbs help visitors to find their way back home. Every single time they click on a new link, a breadcrumb will see to it that it links back to the previous page.
  • Drop-down Menu: Usually reflects content that separated into different categories, making it easier for products and services to be searched.

3.  Provide Good Website Navigation Experience

The navigation of your site is how users will be able to explore and move through it. That’s why it needs to be intuitive and effortless as much as possible. The moment visitors get irritated and confused, you’ve already lost your chance in converting them.

Ideally, when users browse through your site’s menu, they should easily understand how your site is organized. They’ll also know what links to follow so that they can find what they’re looking for.

For instance, if you sell products, links to different kinds of products should be included in your drop-down menu. Meanwhile, if you’re a subscription-based service, a more appropriate thing to do is to add links to product categories and recurring subscriptions.

The bottom line is that it’s up to you ensure that your site visitors know where they’re going, and how they can find their way back.

4. Make Your Site Accessible Across All Devices

Over the last few years, mobile traffic has boomed worldwide. Last 2018, approximately 52.2 percent of all website traffic comes from mobile devices. Now that is has overtaken the number of desktop users, cannot afford not to have a mobile-optimized design.

While having a responsive web design has been overlooked for many years, it’s not the standard. Customers use it to measure and make conclusions on your site’s overall experience.

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That’s why you need to be focused on creating an online experience that can adapt to any screen size ‒ making your site look aesthetically pleasing and function appropriately across any device.

5. Understand Customer Requirements

Here’s the thing, you need to have a clear concept of your customer’s requirements, as well as their browsing habits. Once you identify those needs, it’s easier for you to formulate a plan on how to fulfill them.

Integrate all forms of communication with your customers in a single database. Then carefully review those preferences.

For instance, most customers would want more personalized communication with your brand. They long for an emotional connection.

If you can deliver, more people will buy your products and services, and giving you more credibility in return. Creating positive emotions make them trust you more, encouraging them to come back in the future.

6. Utilize Human Faces On Your Design

According to research, the human eyes are drawn on instinct to photos with human faces.

When placed strategically, pictures with human faces help build stronger customer relationships with users.

For instance, in your About Us Page, show the human faces behind your brand. If you’re trying to sell something, you can include photos of a person interacting with your products. Doing so helps users relate to your products even more.

While making these changes are relatively simple, they can have profound effects on how customers will experience your website.

Using human faces might seem like an odd design principle, as it helps users relate with your brand more. While you can still use stock images, what works best is to use the photos of your team.

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When you show the more human side of your brand, people are more comfortable getting in touch with you. It also goes a long way in establishing trust and fostering a positive relationship with your customers.

7. Improve Site Loading Time

Your site’s loading time is another crucial factor that has a significant impact not only on your site’s accessibility but also your overall rank on search engines. People are getting more and more impatient these days, so if your page takes more than 5 seconds to load, they’ll leave and move on to your competitors.

You can avoid this from happening to you by making a few practical changes:

  • Optimize your images so that you’ll gain maximum load speed with minimal wait times.
  • Add white space in your site’s overall design to speed up page loading times.
  • For various forms of multimedia such as images and video, disable the autoplay mode.

Strive for Better Conversion

In today’s ever-changing digital marketing landscape, your site is becoming a powerful tool. It acts as your 24/7 salesman and can become a vital asset in improving your marketing efforts.

Always remember that designing a website with excellent user experience requires a thorough understanding of users’ different problems and solving them. Making these simple tweaks can do wonders in improving your conversions.

Hopefully, you’ll have a better understanding of how web designs can impact the overall customer experience. However, web design is more on just the visual aspect. It’s still up to you on how you can make the entire customer experience a positive one.

Author Bio

Kenneth Sytian is the CEO of Sytian Productions a web design company in the Philippines. He has been designing websites and developing web apps for more than a decade. He is regarded as one of the top influencers in web design and development in the Philippines.