Making a new website or application for your online business? One of the most important things to consider is the user experience: the overall emotional and transactional journey that a customer might take from first interfacing with your brand to the end.
Want to know how to maximize the user experience for your upcoming launch? Follow these best practices for excellent results.
Put Yourself in the Shoes of Your Audience
For starters, make sure that you craft everything from the perspective of a hypothetical target customer. Don’t make things in a way that you’ll personally like. Try to make the website or application user experience enjoyable for your ideal user.
This means thinking about how they’ll see your platform, how they may wish to interact with it, and understanding what they will expect when arriving from one of your conversion channels. You should also consider localizing your user experience design.
Say that you’re primarily serving a Canadian audience. In this case, crafting your website with the help of a design agency in Canada might be a better idea than choosing a US design firm. For instance, Parachute Design – a local Toronto web design agency – understands Canadian tastes and demographic needs better than someone working on the project from afar.
This basic concept extends to every part of crafting the user experience for your site or app.
Don’t Conflate UI with UX
Many UX designers imagine the UI or user interface to be the start and end of their users’ experiences. But instead, the UI is just one small part of the total user experience. Your platform’s UI is indeed how your customers will interact with your brand, and it’s especially important if you’re developing a mobile app.
But you should also focus on other aspects of the emotional user experience they will undergo, including:
- Advertising
- Purchasing
- Navigation through the website or application platform
- And more
Test with Real Users
Any good user experience must be created using data from actual customers or testers. Never try to launch your platform or tailor your user experience without getting feedback from real people.
If possible, try to get your testers from your target demographic. For instance, if you’re building an online shopping platform, try to get people who like to shop for your goods or services to test your user experience from start to finish. Take their feedback and incorporate it into your future iterations.
Adapt Your Designs for Shorter Attention Spans
These days, people have much shorter attention spans than they used to. This can be to your benefit if you adapt your user experience designs for those shorter attention spans.
Don’t bombard people with tons of information they don’t need and won’t be interested in. Instead, keep things streamlined, attractive and to the point so that people can navigate your site or platform easily and find what they are looking for with a minimum of hassle.
People will easily click away from your site or platform if they can’t find what they’re interested in within a few seconds.
Ultimately, crafting an effective user experience can be difficult. But following the above best practices can help your website or application launch with much greater success. Good luck!
