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How to Improve Your Website's UX Design for Maximum Conversion Rate?
Websites and online shops thrive on conversions which are the central KPI in online marketing. Conversions are measurable goals in online marketing, such as the registrations for the newsletter on the website, purchases, or other economically validatable interactions.
Good usability, and a positive user experience of a web solution, are central prerequisites for achieving a high conversion rate.
To get higher conversions you can either increase the traffic or work on the conversion rate improvement.
This blog post is about the second. UXbee’s team wants to show you how you can get more out of the traffic and thus improve the overall efficiency of your online marketing activities.
Before you set out to explore a new country, you should learn its language (or at least a few words) and be aware of its peculiarities. Otherwise, you won’t enjoy your journey as much as you potentially could.
Therefore, we will deal with a few concepts and terms that you should know before getting down to business.
Before we go into a detailed monologue about user experience, it is vital to understand why you should be interested in the whole thing. We guess that you want to improve your website’s conversion rate.
The conversion rate is the correlation between the number of website visitors and the number of actions carried out. It describes a simple quotient that represents the amount of the desired activity per 100 visitors. A website can theoretically have many individual conversion rates: one for every possible type of action such as clicks on a specific button, submitting a form, confirming a purchase.
Now some of you are probably thinking: “Why should I care how many of my visitors click a button?? I only want to sell my $300 silver bracelets!”.
And it is undeniably true that not all conversion rates (abbreviated as CR) have the same relevance.
Either way, you should define which CRs are dominant and why in advance, and the next step is to do everything to increase and optimize these CRs. That brings us to the next important term.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a practice that consists of the continuous improvement of the website (mobile or desktop version) or landing page to convert users into customers. Keeping CRO in mind, you make sure that the message of your website is as comprehensive as possible to achieve your end goal.
Imagine a particularly futuristic car or an elegant pair of shoes: You see it in front of you, and you feel like taking a test drive/trying the shoes on. These products trigger an emotion, a need in you – if you bought them, you would have promptly increased the manufacturer’s conversion rate.
But how is it possible that something you didn’t know you wanted just a minute ago suddenly plays such a significant role in your life?
The hypothetical products are so well aimed at your senses that even without being in your possession yet they trigger endorphins in you and create an emotional bond. It works the same way with websites and applications. If you want to create an outstanding UX, trigger the positive user’s feelings.
Anything like a slow website, a form that is completely emptied if entered incorrectly and has to be filled out again, or important information that is buried too deep, are the factors that would decimate the CR.
The last three examples we have cited are not pulled by the hair but can be demonstrated measurably. A substandard loading time can, for example, cause a 16.5% lower CR, as determined by other experts in the niche. Why is that? When navigating and interacting with the website, the user feels stressed because nobody likes to wait. While feeling uncomfortable in queues (e.g. at the checkout of a shop) is understandable, website visitors won’t be forgivable when it comes to the long loading times.
If you look through your Google Analytics figures (or any other tracking tool) and see that only a few users open subsequent pages, although they should, then you have to ask yourself whether the page is even competitive in terms of its performance. Websites such as Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix can provide objective clarity in the event of such suspicion and give the tested page a grade or a percentage as a speed indicator. Likewise, a form that is reloaded empty after an incorrect entry is one reason why many users do not fill out the form again, and, thus, no conversion takes place.
If you also suspect that your forms are performing poorly, it can be helpful to redirect the form to a “thank you” page when it is sent successfully. With this data, you could see exactly how many of the users who submitted the form did it successfully (since they landed on the thank you page) and how many of them left the page in frustration. It can also be advantageous to record these and other interactions with a tool like hotjar.
It is a marvelous way to analyze how your website visitors use the interactive elements of the online presence. Also, with the help of so-called heat maps, it is possible to determine how many of your users scroll down on average to the most important elements and content of your website.
The goal of the proper UX is to improve the design of a website making it simpler, plainer, more consistent, and easier to use. In short, it seeks to make browsing the website the best possible experience.
Now that we’ve expanded on what constitutes the definition of the user experience, you can begin to understand why a positive user experience can improve conversion rates.
We could sum it up by saying that a user who does not understand your interface is a user who is going to leave the website in the middle of the purchase process, with no intention of returning. A disappointed customer is a lost customer.
Those who want to generate more sales can, on the one hand, give rise to more traffic through online marketing measures. On the other hand, they have an opportunity to optimize usability, user experience (UX), and ultimately the conversion rate. Alternative two is of almost inestimable value, especially today. Search engines have recognized the increasing importance of usability and UX and have made both of them an influential ranking factor in search engine optimization.
Again and again, we come across pages that cannot yet be used responsively or do not provide a clear call for action for the user. This way, you waste an enormous potential. Attempting to improve the user experience, you should think about navigation and, above all, information architecture at an early stage to bring users to their personal goals. Design elements like Call2Action buttons can work wonders at this point.
Sometimes looking over your shoulder helps – watch a potential customer interacting with the website. It quickly becomes clear at which points the user gets stuck and where the interaction with the website comes to a standstill. Here you can start with UX optimizations.
Finally, a few concrete, random recommendations that generally lead to good UX:
The appearance of the website/app should not overwhelm the visitor with text. Lines of text should not be too long and line spacing not too small -otherwise, the reader’s eye often loses the thread and has to start over. A number of characters between 50 and 80 per line are a good guideline. The line spacing helps to test how legible a text is – after a line, the eye often does not know which is the next, so it makes sense to increase the line height. As a rough guideline, you can remember that texts with short lines in a narrow column need less line spacing. However, if the text is embedded in a layout that shows the lines as rather long, it is better to increase the height of the lines.
A page with a lot of text should always be broken up with headings, lists, pictures, or other elements. It helps to absorb the content better or scan the page quickly and generally increases the readability. A website is only as good as its navigation concept. Always be careful not to show too many navigation points. A good value would be five navigation points, while seven should be the maximum. Of course, there are also appearances that (legitimately) contain many sub-pages. We can recommend that you should consider a categorization system for the content and work with overview pages. A good overview page should not overwhelm the visitor with options and make it easier for them to find the right content with the help of categorization or filters.
White space, white space, white space – there’s nothing worse than a website trying to fill every pixel with content. Of course, it makes sense not to expect the user to do too much scrolling work, but you don’t have to overdo it. A relaxed appearance with a lot of white space (which doesn’t have to be white, by the way) creates a calm feeling and enables the users to concentrate on the essentials.
According to any CRO guide, you should continually identify roadblocks, test new ideas, and optimize your online project to ensure it works properly. If your website/app is designed with the user experience in mind, the results will be outstanding as well.
In short, an impressive app/site is the one that was created keeping in mind how to combine conversion optimization with a flawless user experience. We should do both practices at the same time, since, after all, their objective is the same.
It doesn’t always have to be an expensive relaunch to generate more sales. Small but effective interventions are often enough to get you back on the road. Rely on the usability optimization, user experience (UX), and conversion rate of your website with our help! With the right know-how, little effort for a lot of success is not a dream but the reality that we create.
Working on building the conversion rate by the means of UX we provide:
Would you like to optimize usability and conversion rate with effective changes on your website?
Working with us, you will achieve:
We in UXbee would be happy to advise you on your on-page optimization options.
Together with us as experienced experts in the field of usability and conversion optimization, you can ensure a better user experience and thus achieve noticeably more sales.
