User Experience

User Experience (UX) refers to the process of optimizing your digital content and website to ensure it is easy to find, read, and interact with for all users.

Includes:

1. Organization and Navigation
2. Workflows
3. Site Speed
4. Readability
5. Accessibility

User experience is key to any digital marketing effort as it puts the focus on the user.  By focusing on the user, you improve satisfaction, build brand loyalty, and clearly communicate with your audience.

If the user experience is poor, people will simply leave your site and you will lose the opportunity to connect with them.

Many small business think UX is too complex or is not necessary.  This guide will focus on implementing and evaluating UX even if your resources are limited.

Organization and navigation

The way your site is organized for your users has a huge impact on the experience your visitors have.  Pages should flow logically and be organized by the categories users are familiar with.  

1. Make sure your links are obvious.  Your main navigation should stand out and links on pages should be clearly clickable items.  
2. Keep navigation links in one place.  You may be tempted to add some fancy side navigation or links in various places.  Make sure your users can logically navigate from your main site navigation.
3. Connect the navigation to purpose.  For example, keep links organized for potential customers and current customers as they often will have a different purpose for your website.
4. Make sure to utilize the footer.  The footer is a great place to include site links that need to be quickly accessible from any page.  Think of Contact, Help, etc.

Workflows

Workflows is a fancy work for the steps users take on your site.  For example: a simple workflow when I purchase something on Ebay may by:

1. Login to my account
2. Use the search feature to find the item I need
3. Use the filter to only see “Buy It Now” items
4. Click the “Buy it Now” button and confirm payment
5. I receive a confirmation email, and the item is added to my “Purchases” page
6. Wait for the probably random and somewhat useless item I ordered to arrive 🙂

If you understand the workflows your users are expected to complete, then you can optimize this for the best experience possible.  An example of a poor Ebay experience listed above might be to have me enter in my address or payment information again (even though it is saved).  This creates unnecessary steps and adds to frustration.

A good way to test user experience is to test the user experience.  Recruit people who have never used your website to look at the process and give you feedback.  This can be a really formal process (typically in large companies) or a simple and informal process (ideal for smaller companies).

Site Speed

Online, people have very short attention spans.  On average, your website has 5.3 seconds to load, or people will begin clicking the ever dreaded back button.  There are a bunch of free website speed testing resources you can use to evaluate the speed and get recommendations for improvement.

Typical site speed improvements are often technical, and usually involve:

• Image optimization
• Minifying code (removing extra spaces and extra stuff computers don’t need)
• Compressing code (making the file as small as possible)

Readability

Finally, user experience has a lot to do with the text and content you choose.  Your language should be plain, simple, and easily understandable.  Unnecessarily complex language only adds to user confusion and readability, reducing the overall experience.

To test your readability, there are free and paid tools you can use.  If you use WordPress, there is a great plugin called Yoast that will rate your content and provide feedback to make it easier to read.

Accessibility

All users should be able to user your website.  Some users who have limitations in sight, hearing, mobility, and comprehension may user special adaptive technologies to access your site.  Designing for the best user experience means making sure your site is able to meet their needs.