Building a Web Presence? Why User Experience Should be Top of Mind

If you’re a company looking to succeed in today’s highly digital, tech-centric world, you’d be greatly remiss to neglect the simple step of establishing a web presence. This can be as intricate and complex as designing a website with multiple subpages, linking your social media profiles to it, and creating weekly blog posts full of relevant content. Or, it might be as simple as making sure your business is listed in an online business directory. Either way, when taking your business online, it’s important to keep one consideration top-of-mind: the user experience, or UX. In short, this describes the ease with which a web visitor can interact with and understand your content. If they go to your website, that’s a great first step! Yet, if they’re faced with clunky navigation, slow loading times, and pixley graphics, they’ll quickly close out your tab for a competitor’s. Here are three top reasons why UX matters.

1. Users don’t have time to waste. Recent research shows that the average person has an attention span of around eight seconds. That’s shorter than a goldfish’s for comparison. As such, when someone accesses your online content, they’re impatient and want to find what they’re looking for as quickly as possible. Making them jump through hoops to get to the meat of your offering is simply bad business sense. Moreover, studies show that users will decide within three seconds whether to stay on your page or not. Especially if you are an e-commerce business seeking to drive online conversions, that first impression is critical to establish the path-to-purchase. Take a quick audit of your website. If it doesn’t communicate the value that your brand brings to the table in under 10 seconds, it’s time for a redesign. Thankfully, you don’t have to go at it alone. This is one business task you can easily outsource to companies skilled in user-centric design that can take the reigns and transform your online presence.

2. Your audience is mobile. In 2017, mobile-based web use took up 50.3% of the total internet traffic. That was up from 43.6% in 2016. In 2018, it has reached 52.2% so far. The takeaway? Your target audience is on-the-go and using their smartphones more than ever before. To that end, if your website isn’t designed to be mobile-responsive, you could be missing out on a valuable marketing opportunity. This is another example of UX-based design that takes a user’s anticipated actions and preferences into account. If you want to reach your customers where they are, you can’t assume they’ll all get to your online presence by sitting down to a desktop every evening. Rather, they’re scrolling through their phones on the subway, during an office meeting, and in bed before turning off the light. If your mobile site is unforgettable, they’ll likely stick around a little longer, and the opposite also holds true.

3. People are talking. There’s a reason that sites like Yelp are so wildly popular. People love reading about other people’s experiences utilizing a particular product or service. In fact, a staggering 84% of people trust online recommendations from total strangers just as much as they trust word-of-mouth advice from friends and family members. As such, if you’re offering a web experience that’s less than user-friendly, odds are high that the word is quickly spreading. Digitalization has afforded us more connectedness than ever before, which can be a richly rewarding thing for online business owners who now have access to a greater scope of customers around the globe. Yet, it’s important to build a reputation of integrity and quality, and that starts by putting the user first.

Ultimately, the web is an open frontier filled with opportunity to build your brand following, grow sales and improve your bottom line along the way. Yet, there’s no quick shortcut to amassing those advantages. Rather, success revolves around creating a platform that users simply want to be on. It’s one where they can easily find what they need, that caters to their tastes and goals, and makes the purchasing process as seamless and painless as possible. Does your current design offer that? If not, there’s no better time to put the user first than now.