Most visitors will decide within seconds whether to stay on a page.
In fact, some of you may have already decided to leave this page. It just goes to show you that brands need to work harder than ever to meet users’ needs and provide a great experience.
A positive user experience, or UX, is critical to capturing attention and loyalty, which ultimately increase engagement and revenue.
What is UX?
UX describes the quality of a person’s interaction with a system, product or service. We have tons of daily “user experiences” – driving our cars, checking out at the store or microwaving a meal, for example. User experience grew out of the disciplines of human factors/ergonomics and user-centered design – in other words, designing systems and things based on how humans actually interact with them.
How do you improve UX?
- Understand your users. Who are they? And what do they want and need? You can gather this background information in a number of ways, including one-on-one interviews, surveys and focus groups. This initial research can take the form of a persona, or a representation of ideal customers, to serve as the important “voice of the user” during all phases of the project.
- Decide what you want to measure. If you can measure it, then it can be tied to Return on Investment (ROI). Gather analytics to see how people use your site then establish your metrics based on those analytics. Let’s say a user’s first task is to create an account with your new service. The average time to complete this task is 10 minutes and out of those who attempt, only 65 percent are successful. That’s a sign you need to improve your numbers on “Time on Task” and “Success Rate.”
- Analyze your competition. Many teams will gather with stakeholders, review competitor websites and document what they like and dislike. These are great steps but now it’s time to listen to your most important audience: the user. User-testing competitor sites will give you much more valuable insight than looking at websites alone. Find out what is working - and what mistakes you should avoid - so you have a head start and laser focus.
- Design, test, repeat. Wireframes help everyone connect the dots between information architecture, design and content. But those wireframes are rarely tested with users. The benefit of getting user input early is major improvements can be made quickly, informing the next round of wireframes or visual design iterations. During the later phases of development, testing fully functional sites as a user is just as valuable. Watching people use your site can uncover all sorts of interesting and unforeseen scenarios. Example: A user “thinks” he or she has submitted a form but in reality an invisible error caused the form submission to fail. A quick design tweak and you’ve saved everyone a lot of trouble.
How does UX improve ROI?
The Nielsen Norman Group, a user-experience research company, says paying attention to website architecture and design will help to increase ROI for a number of categories (see chart below).
| KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATOR |
AVG. IMPROVEMENT |
| Sales/conversion rate |
87% |
| Traffic/visitor count |
91% |
| User performance/productivity |
112% |
| Use of specific (desired) features |
174% |
You can read more
here on how to harness the power of UX to increase engagement and revenue.
Jim Ellis has over 20 years of experience in marketing strategy and implementation throughout a variety of industry sectors. Since 1999 he has been with Signal, a digital agency based in Wilmington and Raleigh, North Carolina. Signal has proven strengths serving as the “local agency” for global companies, generating solid results in web design, brand identity, mobile app development, digital strategy and more. Jim provides counsel to many of the agency’s largest clients with an eye toward integrated communications and a vast knowledge of both traditional and modern practices. As a songwriter and musician with a business degree, he believes his artistic/corporate “dual personality” gives him added perspective to be an effective liaison between clients and Signal’s talented creative team. Originally from Ohio, Jim graduated from the University of Richmond with a B.S. in Business Administration.
