5 Simple Hacks to Improve User Experience
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Nowadays, people want an easy, efficient, and faster user experience. So, a good user experience (UX) has become one of the most important factors to be considered in the web development process. When you create a user experience centered website, it becomes easy for the user to access, understand, and navigate it. This helps you generate website traffic, reduce bounce rate, and hence rank your website. To help you build a user-friendly website, we have brought you 5 simple but amazing hacks you can use to improve your user experience.
Improve your UX designs
User experience design also termed UXD is one of the major parts of UX. It helps in making the overall experience of the users better by improving the usability, accessibility, and visuals of a website. You can improve your user experience right away by following the following ideas:
- Sprucing your buttons
Whenever you provide the user with multiple options, it is easy to differentiate them by simply designing them according to their positive or negative effect.
For example, a ‘buy button’ in green color while a ‘cancel button’ in red color.
It is quite a legitimate option but the problem in the above example is that this will signify both the buttons with the same priority.
The buttons should be designed according to the importance and hierarchy of each element. If you demand action from the user like buying your products or clicking on a particular product, these buttons should be bold and highlighted than the other.
- Proper usage of space
Most of the designers use lines while separating different elements but as our main aim is to make it attractive to the users, usage of lines will look quite messy. Instead, you can make the proper use of negative space by simply increasing the amount of space between two elements. This will give a clean and tidy look to the page and even be easier for the user to navigate.
The proper usage of space gives a modern, impactful, and organized look and provides a great visual experience with purposeful breathing room and balance. When properly used, space can increase comprehension and user attention by 20%.
- Drop shadows
A drop shadow is a visual effect that consists of drawing elements one of the few ways used to make an element pop. It serves as a fundamental block for more advanced techniques.
Expertise in making use of it and provide your users with a realistic, ultimate, and beautiful user experience. You can also use a classical way of using a border but drop shadow will give it a neater and less intrusive look.
- Background
Background haves a big impact on your visual presentation and thus the user experience. The simpler and sorted is the background the more appealing it looks visually and can define each element properly by simply using different shades.
For example, using different background colors for different elements creates a more powerful effect than using other forms of separators like the line. It is essential to darken the text on a light background whereas using dark text on a light background to create a good visual experience.
- Fonts
Fonts also play an important role in visual appeals. Amongst the different types of fonts present, fonts of Serif and Sans Serif families are most preferable. Serif is a small stroke at the end of the letter while Sans Serif means without a Serif. Georgia, Times New Roman, and Cambria are fonts of the Serif family while Helvetica, Montserrat, and Gotham belong to the Sans Serif family. These fonts make long passages easier to navigate visually.
Remember to use each type carefully and not mix too many different fonts.
Remove unnecessary elements
You don’t need every web design element in your website. Learn to follow a simple rule that says be sure to include everything that should be there, but be even more sure about not including the things that shouldn’t be there.
The first thing that you need to be concerned about is unnecessary ads. Irrelevant ads are dangerous for conversion, take visitors away from your website, gamble with your reputation, and even spoils the look of your page. You can of course modify the ads according to the design of your page but you need to think that is this worth sacrificing the user experience.
Below is a quick list of some more major things you need to remove from your website.
- Irrelevant and outdated images
- Under construction pages
- Links of blogs and your websites that you don’t actively maintain
- Un-maintained social media pages
- Out-of-date testimonials or reviews
Removing these unnecessary things will make your website look neat and clean, hence improving the user experience
Simplify Navigation
Users should be able to find what they are looking for effortlessly while browsing the site. So, the website should contain multiple navigational elements to simplify this process for the user. These elements are navigation bar, search box, categories list, archives page, and bread crumbs.
Placing the most popular articles or sections of your website on the sidebar will help users to reach them quickly as well as improve their visibility.
The archives page will enable the visitors to access the old posts quickly. You can also make the archives page more user-friendly by including browsing by category, date, and tag if you categorize and tag your content accordingly.
Breadcrumbs help the users to know where are they on the website.
All the above features are important to achieve ease of navigation because if your site will be easy to navigate, users will spend more time on it. This will eventually result in decreased bounce rate.
Fix Broken links
With making navigation easy, fixing broken links is also necessary. Whenever a visitor sees a link on the page, he is likely to visit it to gain more information. If that link comes up as broken and directs the visitor to a blank page or 404 error message, it will be quite annoying. Nobody likes to click a broken link. It frustrates the user.
Additionally, besides giving a bad user experience it also reduces the website traffic and significantly reduces your SEO ranking. This also results in a decrease in conversion rate as you lose your visitors and potential customers.
To check for broken links make use of a tool like Google Webmaster Tools that gives a list of links you need to fix and hence enhance your user experience.
Create attractive content
With the quality of content, the way of presenting it is also important for improving the user experience. Otherwise only a few people will read your content and all your efforts of writing it will be pushed down the drain.
An attractive content not only grabs the user’s attention but also improves the user experience. The attractiveness of the content depends on the way it is structured, formatted and the typography used in it.
To make your content easily readable for the users keep the sentences and paragraphs short. Differentiate the sections by adding subheadings to make them easily identifiable. You should emphasize the important parts of your content by using bold and italics font style.
On top of all these, make sure to develop a responsive website due to the rise in mobile phone users.
Poor user experience leads to lower conversion rates which will ultimately stop your business growth. Hence, investing time in enhancing your user experience is a must. These hacks will not only improve the user experience but also optimize the site for SEO. So, go ahead and apply these hacks on your website to improvise the user experience and get more traffic on your website. Or ask your web developer to do so.
If you searching for a local web development company in Jacksonville, you can search for the best Web design Jacksonville services on Google and approach the best company that can help you to get more leads.
Also, check out the most used technologies in 2021 You can also read our article on how do you improve your website traffic to learn more about how you can generate traffic to your website.
