How you need to design your website depends on how your audience feels when interacting with your site, how easy your site is to navigate and find what they are looking for, whether it is information or a product. To simplify it in terms we can work with; for making a website more user-friendly, the design needs to be simple, there should be consistency throughout the site, the information should be concise and easy to read, page loading should be faster and customized to mobile devices.
Optimizing your website to be more user-friendly can effectively push more traffic towards you, so let’s learn some great tips and tricks to do just that from industry professionals.
Build A Simple Navigation Scheme
“The most important feature of a user-friendly website is navigation. Users must be able to locate the details they need in a matter of seconds. They should be able to easily navigate through the website’s pages. Redesign the navigational system if they have to pause to search for the buttons and connections that will lead them to the desired detail. Look for common navigational errors in the web page template. Ensure that users can quickly locate navigational functions. The menu bars must be accessible at all times. If the navigational menu has any outdated acronyms, delete them. You might believe that abbreviations and acronyms would be recognized easily, but that is not the case.” says Alex Claro, VPN Analyst for Credit Donkey.
Claro recommends eliminating complexities, “If there are several layers in the navigational menu, remove them. Many websites have several levels of sub-menus. That’s a dreadful user interface. Users shouldn’t have to go through a lot of layers to get to the details they need. A search box is essential for the web because it has excellent navigational functionality. Users only need to enter a keyword into the box to get the information they need without having to manually navigate to other pages. There’s no limit to how you can improve the menu and make it stand out. Simply put yourself in the shoes of your guests by using your imagination. Then, create innovative navigational features that are convenient and straightforward to use.”
Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly
“People use mobile devices to explore the internet for details. As a result, you must determine how your company’s website looks and how consumers access it on mobile devices. A user-friendly website today is one that is still mobile-friendly. The concept must be mobile-friendly. Keep in mind that the navigational scheme for handheld devices can vary from that of a desktop website. The buttons must be placed in such a way that they can be conveniently tapped with fingertips on the small screen. Your responsive design layout should also be capable of producing customized images. You will get rid of the latency and scaling problems this way. GIF, PNG-8, and JPEG are the best formats to use. With these steps in place, you can expect to develop a true brand name that aids in your company’s steady growth.”
Bram Jansen, Chief Editor of vpnAlert
Make Good Use Of White Space
“Distribute different items such as text and photographs judiciously to ensure a more user-friendly website. Considering white space is a good way to ensure it. The empty space between the two elements is known as white space. The reader’s eye is relieved by a deliberately left white space between two items. This aids in retaining a guest to your website for a longer period of time. Due to a lack of room, the web page can appear cramped and congested, rendering it less legible. However, since there is enough room, readers will concentrate on the surrounding titles and text.” says Ansh Gupta, the Founder of Empire Crafter.
Gupta advises a balance the white space is key, “According to studies, using a lot of white space surrounding titles and texts increases user interest by 20%. If the page has enough space, there is a sense of openness and freshness. Maintain a healthy balance, as too much white space will lead to a lack of detail. As a result, strike a balance by placing the most important facts first. Allow some space around the text or pictures at the top to draw attention to them.”
Maintain Consistency Across your Site
“When it comes to improving the usability and design of your website, consistency is the most important thing to remember. Maintaining a consistent layout across all pages can help the user become more comfortable with your website.Our site’s layout is consistent, with identical fonts and colors on every page. When offering consistent branding, this continuity will reassure consumers that they haven’t been navigated anywhere.”
Timothy Robinson, CEO of InVPN
Make your Site Responsive
“The number of mobile users has increased in the last decade. 33% of internet users consider their smartphone to be the most critical device for going online. As a consequence, making a mobile-friendly and responsive website is no longer a choice, but rather a requirement in the design of your website.
“If the fact that more people are using mobile devices to access the internet, such as smartphones and tablets, isn’t enough to convince you to have a responsive interface, the fact that Google penalizes websites that aren’t mobile-friendly should. You could be impacting your rankings and potentially losing a lot of traffic if you don’t add responsive features to your web.
“When using a responsive interface, make sure it keeps the same look and feel as the desktop edition, no matter what computer is being used. While the layout of the site will invariably vary on mobile from the desktop version, only minor changes will be required, such as the maximum width of the layout and the size of the images and branding; in addition, if possible, the color scheme and fonts should be standardized. Any significant differences between the desktop and mobile versions would only add to the user’s confusion when visiting the web on various platforms.”
Thilo Huellmann, CTO levity.ai
Make The Data Understandable
“You undoubtedly have a great deal of valuable knowledge to share. However, if readers are unable to absorb it easily, you will lose them. People, in my experience, do not read a web page fully. Instead, they quickly search the pages. As a result, the website should be able to be scanned. Users would find it difficult to read the entire blog or another piece of material if there are large paragraphs. They’ll eventually abandon the website, having only read half of it.” says Dr. Pooneh Ramezani, the CEO and Co-Founder Dr. Brite.
Dr. Ramezani advises breaking down the information on a page to improves readability, “However, presenting the details in small paragraphs of two to three lines will grab the reader’s attention easily. This is why, after a few paragraphs of two or three lines, many web pages today have single lines. Often, to make a website readable, make surethere is some color contrast. The background color should be distinct from the text color. This strategy will make it easier to read the file. Font selection is also important. San serif fonts are preferred for online reading, while serif fonts are preferred for print design. Easy fonts should be used. However, don’t use too many of them on the same list.”
Ensure That The Loading Process Is As Fast As Possible
“The load time of a website is an important factor in assessing its effectiveness. When people click on the link to your site, it must appear right away. Users will abandon your site if it takes too long to load. When a website takes longer than ten seconds to load, users abandon it because their attention span is rapidly dwindling. Delete any extra elements that are no longer in use to make the site load faster. Your site will slow down if you use too many videos and other multimedia. Many websites have extra elements that make the pages of the site load slowly, which is a barrier to developing a user-friendly site. So, have your experienced graphic designer minimize the number of large images on your web pages and include fewer videos.”
Dusan Stanar, Founder & CEO of VSS Monitoring
Incorporate A Chat Function
“To learn more about your goods or services, your future clients would like to have a live chat with your company’s office. There is no substitute for a one-on-one conversation that informs guests of what you have to offer. They may have a number of inquiries about your services or goods. Many of them are averse to making phone calls. However, using the chat feature on your website, you can engage and invite them to communicate with you.”
Matt Weidle, Business Development Manager Buyer’s Guide
Test and Analyze Your Site To Find What you Need to Improve
“The key to a great user experience is testing, testing, testing! This isn’t something that should be confined to the website design stage. User testing is something that should be ongoing, so you can refine your user experience along the way. That’s because to improve a website’s usability; you need to first understand how your customers are using it. What are their goals, aims and expectations? What journey do you expect them to take through the site, and how does that change dependent on the landing page they start on?
“Google Analytics is a great starting point to help understand your site’s engagement. We like pairing this with heat maps and session recordings too, for a visual representation of how your users are interacting with the site. All this will help arm you with the data you need to improve your user experience. Then, it’s time to test. Going on gut or the personal preferences of the team isn’t good enough – one of the key benefits of digital is that everything is measurable. So make the most of that data at every stage.
“Our favourite tool for A/B testing a webpage is Google Optimize. This handy tool allows you to run “experiments”, serving two different versions of a page and tracking your chosen engagement or conversion metrics. Google runs the test until it has a clear “winner” so then you can deploy your updates with an understanding of how they’ll affect your users’ experience and actions.”
Sam Orchard, Creative Director of Edge of the Web
