User experience is all about the emotions that your site brings to those who visit it. Users will not forget what they felt when they were browsing your website, regardless of its content. We tend to focus on designing and reacting to a customer's interactions, that we forget about the end–user. Sure, one must take into consideration customer loyalty, advocacy and satisfaction but if your users don’t know how to navigate your website and find what they’re looking for, they will not return.
An experience bountiful with simple and easy to use interactions is the new gold standard for delivering results and bringing measurable business value. After all, audiences decide within only a few seconds whether your site is worth their time and this is where the tenets of UX are important.
There are plenty of tips on how to improve a website’s UX. However, these tips have one key pillar: to boost conversion rate. If your potential clients feel good when they visit your website, they are far more likely to be open to cooperation, and, therefore, the conversion rate stays high. At Tabs and Spaces, we spent fine-tuning and developing processes that enable us to get to the bottom of unique technical problems and specific marketing or business issues. We do this by understanding behaviour, people's aspirations and the challenges they could face, before putting strategies for success.
The end–goal is always the end–user and here’s what we take into consideration for an optimal user experience:
We understand your target audience
First and foremost, we understand your target group based on demographic and psychographic segmentations. We invest time and effort into developing a portrait of your typical user – i.e., this person’s age group, occupation, character, values, hobbies, interests, and the daily issues that they experience. This information is vital in determining their online habits. When your ideal visitor arrives, what frame of mind are they in? Seeking information? Ready to purchase? Are your users consumers or other businesses? Fashion-forward or more conservative? High-end or budget? Local to you or far-flung? Young or old? What about their style preferences? Which social media channels (if any) do you think your ideal visitor spends time on? Having figured out all of this we proceed to successfully implementing the strategies.
Architecture simplicity
Once we've developed a sense of what you are looking for, and learned about your services, it’s time to get to work. A solid outline acts like a framework to support the buildout of the website itself. Summarising your website in an outline not only refines your vision, it doubles as a convenient checklist to use while building. No one likes getting lost. If your users are too overwhelmed by all the menus, links, and categories, they will not bother trying to find what they need. They will simply switch to another website that is easier to navigate. To ensure optimal user experience, we minimise the number of menu selections and add links where appropriate. We also get rid of any links that are irrelevant or, even worse, broken.
We opt for the minimal.
While we keep abreast with Customer Experience, we always design with one key ingredient and that is, a minimal design. A good user experience gives your customers the ability to find information quickly and easily. It is the totality of your end users’ perceptions while they interact with your product or service. We utilise negative space (also known as white or breathing space). It is the space that surrounds the key elements of the page as to accentuate key information and to make sure users will not miss it. We get rid of everything excessive and leaving only crucial elements that can’t be removed. We leave behind the colour–crazed agenda and aim for a well-balanced color palette. Two colours and one swath are more than enough.
Performance, performance, performance.
My favourite aspect and a key component. Fact is, incredibly slow websites harm your website’s experience and trigger significant bounce rates. Uploading large images that take too much time to load and leaving unminified CSS and JS codes have a detrimental impact to your website's load time. We also assess your web hosting server specifications: the server may be the cause of slow page loading and we also use special accelerator plugins that cache parts of your website to make browsing as fast as possible. And since most access websites via their smartphones, we make sure your website is responsive across all devices.
We craft content with precision.
The average user has just an 8-second attention span, which is why users should easily be able to find all the details they may need. Our content marketers will audit the amount of text on your homepage. If it’s loaded with tons of text, we edit it and leave several lines between each key message to your users. Besides text, we also have a look at video or audio on your page and weigh up including such elements carefully.
Last but not least, we make sure you have a prominent and compelling call to action. We place it above the fold to ensure users will see it on every page of the site.
User Experience is the foundation of a good customer experience. Reach out to T_S engineers and let us help you make your site’s UX more pleasant than ever before.
