User Experience Website Design – When you are thinking about designing a website, it is too easy to overlook User Experience.
But user experience is critical component of website design.
How often have you visited a website and couldn’t find what you were looking for?
What did you do? You clicked the “back” button right?
So does everybody else.
We see this too often on websites.
Without excellent User Experience Website design, this is what you end up with.
Information that is hard to find on websites that are hard to navigate.
Why do companies want to make things impossible to find for their potential customers?
There are several reasons this happens in Website Design.
One of the main reasons is, back in the day, Google only ranked whole websites.
So when Google found something a searcher was looking for on your website, they took that person to the home page and then they had to look around your site from there.
But because companies had LOTS of products to sell, they didn’t want you just getting what you came for.
They wanted you to see everything they had for sale on the entire website.
So they dragged you through the whole website before they let you get to what you were looking for.
Google Now Ranks Individual Pages – Not Websites
Some good news for end users, Google now ranks individual pages, and even single items or paragraphs within that page.
You no longer have to go to the home page and then look around from there.
More and more we are seeing searchers being taken straight to the item they searched for (thanks for that Google!).
So now, Google Search goes down right on the page itself, and gives you what you want.
This is great for the end user, but has created a lot of challenges for web design companies.
There are a lot of “old” websites out there that need updating as far as User Experience.
There are also a lot of website designers who haven’t kept up with the times.
They still design websites the “old way” and try to drag you through the entire website.
All this does is aggravate your potential new customers and often makes them click the “back” button.
Isn’t that what you do when you go to a site and can’t immediately find what you are looking for?
So does everybody else.
The House Built With Too Many Additions
Another reason you run into poor User Experience Website Designs is what we call “website creep.”
Most websites start off as just a few pages and then grow exponentially over time.
They just keep getting “added on to” over time.
It’s like a house where the owners just kept adding rooms but never stopped to look at the bigger picture.
Eventually the house becomes so big and convoluted that nobody can find their way around any more.
A lot of websites are like this.
An easy solution to this is to completely redesign your website at least every two years.
This will help you to consolidate information, improve the end user experience, and remove outdated content that is no longer relevant or ranking well on Google.
It will also help your site “look” keep up with the times.
People visit a lot of websites.
When everyone else’s website looks modern, outdated websites really look bad.
So rebuild your website every few year to reduce “website creep.”
Just Get it done!
Many websites are designed in a rush with no thought given to user experience.
In their rush to get the website designed they never thought about how the information was presented or how someone would navigate around their website.
To have a good User Experience you have to take your time and do a lot of thinking and imagining.
You have to try and image yourself landing on your website and think, “what you would do next?”
Which button would you click?
Is it easy to find what you are looking for? REALLY EASY?
Does the flow of your information make sense?
Do you “force feed” your client everything there is to know about your website
Or do you allow them to choose how much they want to read?
You can’t be in a rush to complete your website design and expect to do a good job on the User Experience.
Slow down. Think it through.
Otherwise, you will be losing customers on the front end, and will eventually end up having to start over on the website.
Rushing things that matter rarely leads to a positive outcome.
How We Approach User Experience Website Design
When we design websites we never make your customer work hard to find what they are looking for.
This is our MAIN objective with regard to User Experience Website Design.
Why do companies make it so hard to find their contact info?
We lace the site with clear call to action buttons (buy now) so people can stop reading when they want and click to buy now.
We spend HOURS thinking through how a person will interact with your website.
We think about who they are, and what might they want to see.
We imagine them scrolling down the page. What will they click on?
What information do the NEED to be able to find quickly?
Does each piece of content logically lead the person to the next piece of content?
What if someone wants to go back and find something they looked at before? Is it easy to do so?
If you don’t spend time thinking about all of these things, all of those people you worked so hard to get to your website will just click the back button.
Tim VanDerKamp is Co-Owner of Stay Wild Digital Marketing,. We are a website design Salt lake City agency that specializes in website design, UX, UI, and SEO. We pride ourselves on being responsive, highly skilled, and affordable.
Contact: tim@staywilddigital.com ‘