To help separate yourself from competitors and boost productivity at work, we recommend approaching web design projects using a well-defined workflow process. So how can you build an ideal web design workflow that fits you and your team?

This complete guide will cover everything you need to know, from understanding the basics of web design workflow to implementing techniques that’ll take your projects to the next level. By the end of this guide, you’ll have all the software and knowledge you need to streamline your process and build unique websites that your clients will love. 

Let’s get started!

What Exactly is a Web Design Workflow?

A web design workflow is a collection of procedures that address each stage of the website-building process. It includes everything from the planning stages to the post-launch period and doesn’t just consider the design process.

Its objective is to make it simple to move through the web design process so that you can monitor all of the steps from beginning to end. It also aids in determining which team and individual tasks must be finished first to keep the project on track and avoid any roadblocks.

Why Do You Need a Website Design Workflow in Place?

A workflow is a process. It’s a series of steps that you take when building something. So why do you need a website design workflow in place? The answer is pretty simple. It will help you be more efficient, organized, and productive.

With a workflow in place, you’ll always know the next step. This means you can eliminate wasting time figuring out what to do next. It also helps ensure that you complete tasks in the correct order. For example, if you’re building a website, you would want to wait to design the visual elements before you wireframe the site’s structure.

Moreover, a workflow helps keep everyone on the same page. For example, if you’re working with a team, everyone must know what steps to take and in what order. That’ll help avoid confusion and guarantee everyone is working towards the same goal.

How to Develop a Web Design Workflow

Developing a web design workflow that suits you and your team can seem daunting. However, it’s pretty simple once you understand the basics. This section will lead you through the steps necessary to craft a fitting workflow for your next web design project. 

Get To Know Your Users

A website user’s experience is only as good as their ability to navigate the site. You need to understand your users and how they will use the site. In this case, collect client details such as industry, target audience, competition, logo, content, and anything else you think will be helpful.

Define Personas and Their Needs

User personas are fictional characters that represent a group of users. They help you understand your users better and make decisions about your website’s design, content, and functionality. Typically, the user experience (UX) team researches and analyzes user personas. However, as a web designer, you should also have an excellent understanding of them. 

Gather Requirements for the Website

Before creating a website, you need to know what the client wants. Unfortunately, this is where many designers need to correct things. They get caught up in details like color schemes and font choices, which are optional at this stage of development.

Instead, focus on gathering information about your client’s goals for their new site—what does it need to accomplish? Additionally, you’ll want to note specific requirements that they might have, such as a certain number of pages or content types. 

Wireframe the Structure of Your Site

The next step is to wireframe the structure of the site. Wireframing is a vital part of the web design process, as it gives you a framework of how it will function and look. It’s also helpful to establish a blueprint early on. This guarantees every page element has its place and that there are no gaps or overlaps in your design. Moreover, wireframing allows you to determine the user journey and how they’ll interact with the site.

Gather Feedback on the Wireframes

Once the wireframes are complete, it’s time to get feedback from your users. You can do this in several ways: interviews, user testing sessions, and statistics. This feedback will improve the wireframes and ensure that they’re on track. Also, don’t forget to ask for suggestions from your team—they may have insights you haven’t considered.

Build Visual Mockups of Key Screens

After getting feedback on the wireframes, you can now build visual mockups of primary screens. Visual mockups are a great way to communicate your ideas, get feedback from clients and other stakeholders, and ensure that you’re on the same page as developers. 

This part includes building high-fidelity mockups or fully-rendered versions of each page. Creating a mockup is likewise an opportunity to add your personal touch and style to the project. But, again, they don’t need to be perfect—they need to give a general notion of what the actual product will look like.

Build a Style Guide

Another valuable component is a style guide. Notably, a style guide is a document explaining how to implement, use, and alter elements of your site to build a consistent experience. In addition, it will ensure your team is on a similar page by providing clear guidelines for how members can use website components.

As your project progresses, the style guide will evolve—adding new colors, fonts, and details as time passes. Hence, it’s handy for maintaining a consistent look and feel across the entire site. 

Prototype Different Interactions

Meanwhile, prototyping is the best way to test your website’s user experience before you start building it. You can use prototypes to test different features, interactions, or UI elements. This will help you to identify any problems early on so that you can fix them before development begins. For example, you could test how users interact with a search bar or sign-up form. By doing so, you can determine non-essential items and simplify the design.

Gather Feedback on the Prototype

Once you’ve completed your prototype, gather feedback. Ask people who use the tool or service you’re designing. Use their feedback to fine-tune the prototype. Prototype development is an iterative process.

Finalize the Design and Gather Approval

To finalize your design and gather approval, you’ll need to:

First, make sure the project is complete.

All content should read well, all visual elements designed, and all functions tested. Finally, get client or manager approval by presenting the project in its entirety. This step is critical to success since you must ensure the decision-makers are on board with your creation. 

Schedule a meeting to walk through the project, or send over a video explaining your design decisions. If you’re presenting in person, prepare to answer any questions or make changes on the spot. 

Get everyone on board with the final version.

Ensure your team is employing the most up-to-date version of the design. Send suppliers the approved design files if you work with outside vendors, such as a printing company. Get sign-off from the client or manager to avoid scope creep down the road or disagreements about the project.

Once you sign off, get it in writing (email is acceptable). Then, if any changes happen after the fact, you have something to refer back to.

Test your site again.

Before you launch your website, test it one last time: 

1. Go through all the pages and check for any errors. 
2. Then, run spellcheck, test all the links, and try out any forms or other interactive elements. 
3. You’ll want to test the site on numerous browsers and devices. 
4. You’ll also wish to try any new functionality you’ve added.

Please take this opportunity to create a training document or video for the client, so they know how to use the site. Likewise, see to it to iron out any bugs before you launch the website. Once you’re confident that everything is working as it should, it’s time to launch.

Use the Right Tools to Grow Your Workflow

You’ll need to use the right tools for the job to get the most out of your workflow and make it more efficient.

• Use intuitive tools: The goal is to minimize the time you spend learning new tools. If you find software complicated to use, it’ll only slow you down. If your client has already decided on the platform to use, you must stick to it. However, if the client is on the fence, it’s best to choose from this content management systems list with a comprehensive review. 

• Use reliable and flexible tools: The more flexible the application, the easier it is to use in various situations. An excellent example is a site builder that lets you create a website without any coding knowledge. Another example is a task management tool that will enable you to create custom workflows for your team. With platforms like these, you can readily adapt your process to the changing needs of your business.

• Use fast tools: The faster the app, the more productive you are. In the same way, there are numerous solutions today that can automate various processes and tasks, like Smartsheet. Automation can help you speed up your work without sacrificing quality. Moreover, tools like this can distinguish bottlenecks in the process and lets you focus on more crucial tasks. 

Map Out Your Web Design Workflow and Get More Done

Creating a workflow can be pretty complex, but it’s also crucial. If your team works together efficiently, you’ll save time and money, and you will only be able to get as much done in a day as possible with an optimized system.

A web design workflow is essential for any designer. It helps you keep your projects on track, streamline the design process, and get more done in less time. By following this guide and mapping out your workflow, you’ll be able to create websites faster than ever!

The post How to Build an Ideal Web Design Workflow: A Complete Guide appeared first on ColibriWP Blog.

Below, you’ll find the critical ingredients that have been tried and tested to work, and which will make your homepage stand out from the crowd.

Bring focus to what the site is about

When a user first lands on your website, he/she will want to know as quickly as possible that they’ve come to the right place. Users are fickle, with a short attention span, so they want to be convinced of the value they’ll get, right off the bat. It’s necessary to immediately make it obvious what a website is about, so they know if they should continue spending time on a website or skip and find another site.

A website homepage should communicate value, from the very beginning.

To focus users’ attention, you can do the following:

Use a relevant keyword

For instance, if you sell consulting services, mention “consulting services”, if you sell shoes, mention “shoes”, etc.

A keyword, if it’s relevant, helps users better understand what the website is about. It anchors in their mind the core topic of the page, and an important part of the website message. Also, a keyword is useful for search engine optimization, as it indicates search engine bots that the web page is relevant for the topic and will better index and position the home page in search engine results pages.

Here‘s a website homepage that makes good use of a relevant keyword, directly in the homepage. The main and most relevant keyword here is “brand”, and it’s chained in an impactful paragraph that users can’t ignore.

And they nailed the slogan as well: “great brand design is measured in memories”.

Here’s another example from Mooosor, that talks about garbage d=statistics and how we can help diminish waste:

• Use a relevant graphic or image that sustains the words and the focus keyword, through visual cues. Such a graphic should immediately make it obvious that the website can give what the reader wants. For example, if they’re searching for a pet care center, you should have an image with a pet, if they are searching for a doctor, place a medical symbol on the homepage. The image and the text (keyword included) should have a strong correlation to one another, so the message keeps its coherence and really has an impact onto the readers.

The example from above is relevant here as well. Strong imagery and fonts really manage to emphasize this huge garbage problem humanity is facing.

In the following example, Vaayu uses round shapes that grow and diminish to make you think of measurement, carbon measurement in their case.

Survicate, a survey tool, uses arrows as a visual cue, to move the eye toward certain content.

Use a catchy slogan and memorable copy

Slogans are simple phrases designed to grab people’s attention, with a few words and a short message. A good slogan is striking, and it decides in a very short space the persuasiveness power of the homepage.

A good slogan can turn a homepage from good to great, from forgettable to memorable. It brings in the page message, quick and naturally, and it ticks a slight surprise effect that triggers users’ attention and puts them in the mood for reading more.

And to keep them engaged in reading more, the homepage should display good copy. The copy of the homepage has a decisive role for the effectiveness of the web page.

According to studies, there are some criteria that should be taken into account to ensure effectiveness of the homepage copy:

• Promotional writing (this is copy that boasts the benefits of a product/service with obvious commercial purposes) – the less promotional writing on the homepage, the more effective the homepage will be.
• Concise text – the copy on the homepage should be concise and present the essentials of the business; studies show that conciseness of the copy improves usability (users’ easiness in going through the text) with 58%.
• Scannable layout (a layout that is easy to be scanned, visualized, so information is quickly assimilated) – easily scannable layouts of the homepage lead to an increase in usability effectiveness with 47%.

Also, the homepage copy needs to perform well, as research showed that 38% of people will stop engaging with a website if the writing or layout are unattractive.

Homepage copy is a unique chance to makes users return to the website, once the first impressions were fine. Otherwise, studies show that 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience with it.

This is an example of a good slogan that does its job and has a truly effective impact on the readers’ minds: BE MOVED (Sony’s slogan).

You can also tell a story that your website visitors can relate to. Take Blok, for example. They are creating “kid-proof” watches. The website design is colorful and engaging. The story goes the watches are built “adults who lit (metaphorical) fires as kids”.

If you click on the CTA you’ll find out the rest of the story. It goes like this:

“We’re parents who haven’t lost our curiosity. We’re an independent watch brand that gets it. We’ve designed a stylish, analogue watch with a real-deal, Swiss-made heart. Credible with our friends in haute horology, yet self-evidently cool to our magnificently inquisitive, adventurous kids. The Blok 33 educates, engages, and inspires.”

They convinced me, what about you?

Here’s another story coming up via Everyday Robots. They build helper robots, in order to bring back time into our lives. And this is the story:

The story of ReGrocery started because “the grocery industry has made it impossible to avoid plastic packaging and waste, and we want to change that”. I’m pretty sure that this kind of message resonates with many of us.

Storytelling is important on a website. Having a brand story is more important than ever when it comes to businesses, because, in the recent years, our buying behavior moved on from looking at product features to how a product, a brand, make us feel.

Provide a unique value proposition for your homepage design

Every homepage should have its own unique value proposition.

The unique value proposition of a web page communicates what the company does differently than other companies on the market. It delimits the unique benefits people will have from the company.

The unique value proposition is more elaborate than the slogan. It’s, in fact, a succinct, punctual copy – a presentation of the solutions that make users’ choice of them the best possible option.

To help you get a clearer understanding of what the unique value proposition is, we list the key elements that it consists of:

• What you do.

I love how ReGrocery communicates this on their homepage. They deliver groceries in environmental friendly packaging.

Take a look at Vovi, a branding studio. Straight from the hero, you get their message. They do brand, social, website, and video campaigns.

Here’s a great example from Potion,  a tool used to personalize videos, to be used by marketing and sales teams. Potion has three main product benefits that are strengthen by social proof.

• Who you do it for. In the example below, Salesforce (one of the best customer relationship management systems out there) shows how it can help small businesses, sales and customer support teams.Here’s another example, from Woset, creators of imaginative kids toys. Love their copy: “Woset creates imaginative objects for endless play”.
• Why you do it better than the competition. You could say it or let customers say it. Take a look at this homepage testimonial from Netguru, a top software development company, among the fastest growing European companies. The testimonial shows how Netguru was the best choice for their client, and how they are good at going to market with speed.

Now, you could also create separate pages where you can compare yourself with specific competitors. It’s how ClickUp does it (great productivity tool). Their comparison pages are listed in the homepage’s footer.

Ahrefs, a great SEO tool, has a separate page to compare the product with its two main competitors: Semrush and Moz.

Provide an effective CTA

Some sites are more “action-heavy” than “information-heavy”, such as eCommerce websites. And the home page should be the first to set this content frame. For instance, a visitor on a real estate website wants to quickly go and see house listings, rental offers, etc. If the first thing he sees is a wall of text or images in non-actionable sections (with no buttons for reservations, for instance), he’ll immediately press the back button. Such sites really need to include an immediate, and clearly visible “call to action” or CTA to help the user do what he wants to do.

The folks at Lush, a great cosmetics online store, have a lot of calls to action, for various steps in the buyer’s journey, such as:

• “Shop now”, “Add to bag” for the ones ready to buy,
• “Read more”, “Learn more”, for those still doing product their research.

Take a look at the Land of Ride website. They curate unforgettable journeys for sports aficionados of all levels. There are two main calls to action on a page: “Choose land” (as in choosing the place for the adventure) and “Choose ride” (as in choosing the type of adventure: snow, sky, surf, etc.)

Here’s another CTA example, from the Quebec Metropolitan Orchestra website:

Characteristics of an effective homepage CTA:

• It has compelling text, that triggers action
• It uses the right tone (it “speaks in words users want to hear”). E.g. “Let’s Go!” uses a familiar tone, that fits perfectly the buyer persona searching scenario – “I’m gonna start searching for a new home, so…, good…, let’s go…”.
• It’s prominent and stands out from the rest of the page, through contrast.

Use testimonials for your homepage design

Testimonials can be a great way to sustain the homepage content with credibility. They are recommendations of products/services/companies from clients that tested them and have been content with their quality. They are one of the strongest forms of social proof and they have to make new users to try products/services for themselves.

A testimonial means that the person giving it is putting their reputation on the line. That’s why you should never underestimate its power.

According to research, 39% of consumers said they read reviews on a regular basis to determine whether a local business is a good business.

Even more, studies demonstrated that 88% of people trust online reviews written by other consumers as much as they trust recommendations from personal contacts.

Using the persuasiveness force of testimonials on the home page of a website is a good way to push readers into buying products/services of your company.

Here’s an example of the Codeacademy homepage that includes testimonials:

Testimonials should feel genuine, and suggest what makes you or your product worthwhile, like this testimonial for Kemal, a Prague-based photographer.

In B2B, a good practice is to include the picture of the one writing the testimonials, the position, and company, in order for the testimonials to feel authentic. Here’s an example from Miro, a cool online collaborative whiteboard platform.

Use mood boards to set the tone of the homepage design

Now that we talked about some key elements a homepage should include, let’s see how you arrange them on the homepage. What’s to be prominent, what’s slightly suggested, what other elements should complete the “picture”. Because they all have to outline a home page mood.

A mood board tells users how you approach certain subjects and communicates important aspects about you and your company. A mood board needs to create a certain kind of personality for your website or company. It’s an important way to communicate with your audience. If copy is your message, a mood board is how you transmit the message.

A mood board refers to:

• The color scheme of the website
• Typography used in the homepage
• Illustration style (this might be playing with effects such as overlays, image frames, frame shadows, transparency/opacity, gradients, etc.)
• Spacing rules (how much white space is for different portions of the homepage)
• The general contrast (it emphasizes content hierarchy and elements structure).

Here’s the Mailchimp homepage that makes use of illustrations, across all the website pages, offering an attractive and aesthetic element to a website, plus consistency. Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing companies out there.

We can recognize this type of illustrations on the DrinkPerfy website as well. It’s a trend we’re facing in the recent years.

Here’s another example of a homepage that intrigues, arouses curiosity and stirs inquisitive minds. It uses bold typography, 3D visuals, and large images. And, considering that Likely Story, is an award-winning boutique design studio, their own website should be jaw-dropping.

Now, if you’re looking for mood board inspiration, Dribbble is the place to find it.

You homepage design should change

Homepages change and evolve for a variety of reasons. User behavior changes, browsing style changes, web design evolves, and you should keep up with the latest trends. Sometimes, your own analytical reports will tell you there’s a need to update your homepage. There’s no need to get stuck with one homepage design. Your branding guidelines might change during time, or else the company undergoes a shift in activity, and you need a change in homepage design.

Also, you can make incremental changes to the homepage design for your website. You can make optimizations to the home page, for SEO reasons or User Experience, or more conversions.

So, you can replace some elements with others, you can add new elements that fit the new design and branding guidelines, or you can combine elements in a different way. The result will be a refurbished homepage, with a modern aspect and a message that is better for current users.

Below is an example of the Mammut website (outdoor clothing and footfear), and how it changed between 2020 and 2022:

2020:

The 2022 homepage redesign added visuals that are more attractive and dynamic, with a focus on adventure, and living new outdoor experiences.

Web page layouts one can use for a homepage design

The layout is the backbone sustaining all the content placed on the homepage. It plays an essential role in structuring information on the page. So it is easy to read, browse, assimilate by users.

There are a few traits that make the homepage layout to be a good layout:

• It has to be intuitive, so it matches already-formed user behaviors when visiting web pages.
• The layout to be predictable. Hence, it’s easy for users to find what they are searching for, in the order they are searching for.
• It has to address skimmers. White space, usage of lists and columns, headings are all components making a homepage content quicker to assimilate.
• This layout has to be responsive. Mobile responsiveness has become a requirement. So homepage layouts should easily adapt to the screen, depending on the device from which users open the page.

Here are some of the most popular homepage layouts working for a wide variety of niches:

Layout 1 – example

Layout 2 – example

You can check for further details about how to choose the correct layout for your website.

Now, you’re almost ready to start creating your homepage design. Check to see which elements from the above are appropriate for your website and follow the guidelines. Your website homepage will be just perfect.

The post Why These 25+ Website Homepage Designs Work So Well [UPDATED 2022] appeared first on ColibriWP Blog.

The same goes for apps. Take a look at Revolut. They developed a user-friendly app that totally reinvented banking.

The same principle translates to the structure of your website. A simple one that’s easy to navigate will consistently outperform other complex websites. The average consumer wants a website they can easily use without having to read a manual. For example, Ikea products come with manuals, but many of them are so intuitive to assemble, that the manual is not needed. 

Now, at the surface, things may seem easy, but there are multiple things to consider. A lot of business owners want to impress their potential customers by using breathtaking designs. They forget about their practical side and simplicity. 

That approach can quickly complicate things, making a business website less user-friendly.

Keep reading to discover ways to verify that your website is easy to use. Avoid falling into the trap of building complex tools that won’t get used. Instead, use the following ways to bring your product closer to your target audience.

1. Usability testing

User testing is the best way to verify how user-friendly your website is. Aside from user experience, you can use this process to discover other unexpected issues. It’s the perfect option for product development and the auditing process.

If you’re creating a new website, opting for this process will let you build a sturdy foundation for your users from the start. On the other hand, if your website is already live, you can use the process to make incremental improvements to optimize conversion rates.

Crucial points to consider are:

• Opting the in-person or remote testing
• Picking either moderated or unmoderated approach
• Setting a precise testing goal
• Finding your target audience
• Creating a detailed scenario so the user knows what they should do
• Analyzing the results

The whole process requires thoughtful planning for getting the most optimal results. Deploying usability testing tools is a great way to simplify the entire process by keeping all the essential information in one place.

2. Analytics metrics

User behavior is a great way to check how approachable your website is. You’ll need different analytics tools that monitor user behavior. A heatmap will help get detailed information about the user’s behavior.

It shows where the user is clicking from the moment they land on your website. These details are helpful as you can get the user’s point of view and see elements they believe are clickable. 

Also, you can see what their last click was before they’ve left your page, showing the potential issue in your design. For example, if you notice that a high percentage of users are leaving your cart page, you can analyze that page to find the root of the problem.

To get the best results, it’s necessary to combine it with other analytics that display bounce rates, page views, and page session length. Combining all the feedback will indicate which parts of your website are easy to use and which are not.

For example, Bear Mattress used heatmaps to optimize just one part of their customer’s journey. “The frequently bought” section had to go through a much-needed change for a better cross-selling strategy. The redesign based on heatmap analytics turned into a complete success as the brand was able to improve its cross-selling conversion rates. Its adds to carts increase ranged from 36% up to 73% resulting in annual revenue growth of 23.22%.

3. Customer support data

The department that receives the most complaints about your brand is customer support. Turning to that department and the data it collects is one of the best ways of improving products and growing customer satisfaction.

Create a unique strategy that will let your customer support team classify the variety of issues reported. That way, you can seamlessly collect information about the ease of use of your website.

Focus on reports that mention difficulties with using your product. A good example is paying attention to customer support queries regarding your checkout process. After understanding what the repeating issue is, you can start working on its solution.

Uber used such an approach for its customer support department. The company was able to achieve a 7% reduction in its ticket resolution time, but more importantly, increase customer satisfaction as well.

With such a tactic, you won’t be able to capture only current challenges, but you’re setting up a system to enable you to improve ease of use.  

4. User experience polls

Asking your users about their experience is another option for detecting any issues with the website’s simplicity. For example, in WordPress, there are various plugins designed explicitly for poll creation. 

With all the technical challenges out of the way, the only thing you should worry about is where to place your poll forms.

A couple of options to consider are:

• Homepage and a landing page — Allow your visitor to evaluate the quality of your UX from the moment they land on your website. However, keep in mind that the call to action to fill out the form should be inconspicuous. Use a pop-up or other subtle way to let the user know they can participate in a poll.
• High bounce rate pages — Add the forms on pages where people abruptly leave. They might help identify the cause.
• Cancelation pages — Add polls on pages where people decide to unsubscribe from your services. You’ll get to discover a wide range of issues your website might have, allowing you to act fast and improve its quality.

These are only a couple of ideas for you to consider where placing a poll might be effective. If you think of a better one for your website, go for it. The goal is to get as much feedback as possible to know which parts of your website require improvements.

5. A/B testing

Deploy different pages and see which performs better. A/B testing is a very effective method of improving your website’s user-friendliness. The goal is to create several landing pages with different designs. 

You could create pages with different calls to action, copywriting styles, and colors. Then, you should deploy them and monitor the results. That’s where analytics will be beneficial, as you’ll immediately be able to see which pages are easier to navigate. 

Over time, as you explore various pages, you can pick the most intuitive one to use.

A good example of a great A/B testing approach is Groove. The company used specific language that’s closer to their target audience and managed to almost double their conversions by growing them from 2.3% to 4.3%.

A/B testing is an ongoing process that you should repeat from time to time. It’ll allow you to build the ultimate landing pages that are easy to use and convert more customers.

The power of a stable foundation

Making optimizations to ensure that every user can easily use your website is an ongoing process that takes numerous tweaks. However, to ensure that there’s less work, you should create a strong foundation that guarantees a certain degree of simplicity from the start.

You can achieve this goal by thinking of the following things:

• Supporting multiple platforms — Don’t forget to use a responsive design that adapts well to mobile devices. More than half of your website’s visitors will come from mobile.
• Fast loading time — Visitors want to access content on your website quickly. Make sure that your pages load within 3 seconds.
• Easy-to-read content — Structure your content with plenty of subheadings and small paragraphs. Your visitors will be able to easily scheme through it and read the parts they prefer.
• Simple website layout — Don’t add too many elements to your website. That can be distracting and will confuse the visitors. Keep things simple with an intuitive design.
• Make CTAs visible — One element that needs to stand out is your call to action button. Make them easily discernible so your visitors can spot them from a mile away.

With a foundation like this, further optimization you’ll have to make will be minor. Of course, before you launch your site, you can rely on usability testing to see whether you’re on the right track. That way, you’ll ensure excellent ease of use from the moment your website goes live.

Concluding thoughts

High customer satisfaction should be the primary goal for all businesses. Given that the customer journey starts with your website, it’s a good idea to ensure it’s easy to use. Use one of the abovementioned ways to verify that the web pages are easy-to-use.

Remember that the process takes time, and building the perfect website that’s simple to use takes a lot of patience and testing with a dash of creativity.

The post 5 Ways to Verify That Your Website is User Friendly appeared first on ColibriWP Blog.

Our hypothesis is that you have already found a domain name and a hosting provider.

If you haven’t yet chosen your host yet, we really recommend our partner Cloudways.

In the example below the steps are presented for the case where you are creating a website for yourself. If the website is for a client, new steps might occur in terms of project planning, deadlines setup, contract, and more. But at the core, you’ll still have to stick to the steps presented below.

Now, here are the steps:

1. Scope identification: what needs does the website have to fulfill? Who does the website talk to? Which are its goals and motivators? Which businesses have the same scope and target audience as you?
2. Defining the website’s sitemap: what are the web pages and features that help the business and the audience in achieving their goals?
3. Content creation: preparing the copy for the website’s pages;
4. Creating the visual brand: preparing the color palette, fonts, and graphics to be used in your website design, that will end up shaping your visual identity; 
5. Wireframing: sketching your web pages layout;
6. Website design: creating the actual website, be aware of the limitations of the tools you’re using;
7. Testing: making sure everything works, from links to forms and buttons. Test the website on various browsers and devices to make sure it functions properly;
8. Launch: make some noise before going live with a carefully planned communication strategy.

Let’s take them one by one.

The steps of a website design process

1. Scope identification

At this stage you and your team will need to figure out the answers to some of the questions below:

• Who is the site for?

An eye-catching website might have its perks, but, if you want your website’s visitors to commit their money or time, it means that you need to dig more, in order to convince them that the commitment is well worth it. In order to be convincing, you will need to understand your target audience, understand its needs, internal and external motivators.

This digging also means that you need to create a product that is useful and solves someone’s need. 

For example, let’s say I have a hobby of making paper flower arrangements and want to take it further and transform it into a business. Does anyone paper flowers? Where can I find these persons? 

Well, I might think that wedding planners and future brides might want such an option.

But I must go even further. Would every bride want my paper flowers or just a type of bride? 

This means that you’ll need to go through some research and check your competitors. Are there other paper flower merchants? You also compete with good old flower shops. Which would then be your added value, or your unique value proposition?

• What would your website visitors expect to find on your website?

Going back to our example, probably your visitors would want to see a variety of products, of colors, info on shipping (they might need some extra care because the paper flowers are fragile), etc. What about some mentions that the paper is recycled? Maybe your clients are very conscious of their impact on the environment, and they care about such details

Can someone also rent the flowers?

Now, what if you include some testimonials? Maybe you designed some paper flower arrangements for your friends’ weddings.

See where I’m getting at? You need to do your research, before jumping into the website design.

• How do conversions look like?

Are we talking about course registration, the purchase of a product, a subscription to a newsletter?

In the case of Monday, you can easily figure out their conversions from the homepage.

The main conversion is obvious from the “Get started” call to action, which is positioned right above the fold, in the center.

Another micro-conversion is a conference registration, which you can notice from the message in the upper-left corner.

Another micro-conversion is the “Contact sales” one.

What about your website, is there a main conversion? Are there some secondary ones?

• How does the customer journey look like?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the path a visitor takes through your website from their entrance, till they reach the desired goal and leave.

A customer journey map should include info such as the pages that get visited and in what order, the steps needed in order for a website visitor to achieve its goals, the points of interaction between your company and the website’s visitors (forms, chat, etc), potential friction points.

A customer journey is not fixed. You start with an assumption then adjust along the way. You can use tools such as Google Analytics to analyze website behavior and make optimizations based on real insights.

2. Defining the website’s sitemap

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Now that the customer journey is clear, it’s time to create the sitemap. A website’s sitemap is used to establish the website’s information architecture and explains the relationships between various pages.

You can create sitemaps in tools ranging from Excel to Figma.

3. Content creation

Now that the structure of the website is established, it’s time to create content for the individual pages. 

Here are some best case practices when it comes to copywriting:

• Use words and concepts familiar to your ideal users;
• Don’t go with fluff and jargon;
• Try to communicate as you would do in a normal face-to-face encounter. This way you will induce a feeling of familiarity;
• Write in the present tense, and avoid passive voice;
• Always check your readability. For this, you can use tools such as Readable.
• Test your headlines with friends, strangers, colleagues. As David Ogilvy puts it:

“On average, 5x as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you’ve written your headline, you’ve spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” 

This means that headlines are vital on a website. 

Try to optimize your content around certain relevant keywords for your audience (SEO). You can use tools such as Google trends (free), Ubersuggest (free), or Ahrefs (paid).

• Make use of the AIDA copywriting framework. 

A – Attention: create content that grabs attention, that incites curiosity, and that convinces your audience that it needs to find out more about your brand.

I – Interest: give your visitors a reason to remain engaged. The key here is to make the problem personal so that you’re only speaking to the prospect and no one else.

D – Desire: this is where you show your homepage visitors how your offerings provide a solution to their problem/pain. Here you can start explaining the features of your product, with a focus on how those features can improve their lives.

A – Action: now it’s time to persuade prospects to act: buy, subscribe, download a freebie, start a trial, etc. 

4. Creating the visual brand

This step doesn’t have to always be your 4th step. You can begin even earlier in the process with this. 

Visual identity refers to the way you shape the perception around your brand.

This is a whole process by itself.

Here you will need to:

• Define how your graphics should look like. Will you use shapes, 3D graphics, illustrations?

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• Define your website’s typography;

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• Choose a color palette. From the color palette, you can evolve to a style guide, where you can establish the colors of links, headlines, buttons, backgrounds, etc. for this you can use tools such as the Adobe color wheel.

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• Curate images that tell the story of your brand;

Source: https://convertsquad.com/blog/

• Design your logo

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• Prepare physical assets (product packaging, etc).

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Most of the elements above can be used to create a mood board. When you gather your fonts, graphics, colors in a mood board, you will be able to better understand the overall website mood vision. What will your overall tone and voice be: light or dark? Formal or playful?

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5. Wireframing

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Wireframes are sketches of a webpage or app. You can draw them by hand, create them in Google Docs, Sketch, or Figma, depending on the complexity of your website. A wireframe is used to layout content and functionality on a page. It should tell a designer where he should place a video, images, headlines, content blocks, buttons, etc. It’s good to use wireframes before jumping into design because they allow you to be more flexible. It’s easier to amend the structure of a wireframe than the one of a ready-designed website. 

6. Website design

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Now we’re talking business!

We’ve got our content, wireframes, visual elements, now it’s time to get to work.

As mentioned in the title, you don’t need to be a web designer or code geek to create a website. There are plenty of tools out there to help you design a website with no code. They are called Page Builders. 

Most of them allow you to customize every inch of your design, and to make it responsive. 

Inside WordPress, you can go with our very own Colibri builder, or Elementor, for example. Outside WordPress, Wix and Squarespace are really popular. These tools can provide you with templates, that you can enrich by adding your own sections, visuals, and content. 

Now, if your design requires certain animations, effects, you might need to add some code.

7. Testing

Ok, let’s say your content and visuals are up. Your job ain’t ready yet. It’s time to make sure that everything works: you don’t have any links that lead to nowhere (aka broken links or 404s), that all your buttons and forms work, that the website looks well on most browsers, and devices.

Now, before the launch, you could test a bit how your website is perceived by external people. This way you can avoid being caught in your own biases. For this, you could do a simple user research: the 5-second test. This is a method that helps you measure what’s the first impression users get within the first five seconds of viewing a homepage, for example

8. Launch

Now, when you launch you just hit publish and you’re done. No, you need to create some buzz, launch some PR campaigns, do a social media shout-out to let people know you’re out!

And that’s a wrap folks. Now you have the right steps for a web design process. 

Happy website building!

If you liked this article, and you want to learn more about how to design a WordPress website, make sure to subscribe to Colibri’s Youtube channel and follow us on Twitter and Facebook!

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The post The 8 Commandments of a Web Design Process (for Newbies & with No Code) appeared first on ColibriWP Blog.

What is a website layout?

A website layout is a pattern (or framework) that defines a website’s structure. It has the role of structuring the information present on a site both for the website’s owner and for users. It provides clear paths for navigation within web pages and puts the most important elements of a website front and center.

Website layouts define the content hierarchy, regardless of whether or not you’re learning how to start a blog or building a simple website for your small business. Content will guide visitors around the website, and it must convey your message as well as possible to them.

To put it short,  website layouts are critical elements that make a website a success, or a failure.

Why should you choose one layout over another?

You should carefully make a selection. This is why:

• A good layout keeps users on the site because it makes important information easily accessible and intuitive to find. A bad layout frustrates users which then quickly leave the site because they can’t find what they are looking for.

For this reason, it’s best to take as long as you need to find a good layout because users won’t give you more than a few seconds of their time.

• There’s a strong relationship between the layout and the engagement of users with the website. It determines how long they dwell on the website pages, how many pages they browse, and how often they come back to the website.

So, besides overcoming the problem of split-second choice, a good layout comes with additional benefits. Engaging visitors can be a rewarding effort.

• When selecting a layout, it might be useful to also consider the Gestalt law of closure. It says that, even if an image shape is not complete, the human eye tends to fill in the visual gaps and recognize the image as a whole. How can this be of use to you?
  • You won’t pay attention to details, rather focusing on the global view of the pages forming the website; users will find themselves the meaning path.
  • You pay attention to details, using some additional seconds to grow the engagement exponentially.
  • You intentionally won’t pay attention to details, letting originality speak for itself; users will find themselves the meaning path, and they will keep a strong memory of your website.

Example of how the Gestalt law of closure works

Getting familiar with the layout design best practices

To spend a fruitful time selecting a layout design, it’s important to get familiar with some basic notions related to website layouts. We’ve gathered a bunch of concepts that’ll help you get oriented into the abundance of predefined website layouts.

Visual weight and negative space

Visual weight is perceived by people when some objects on the website carry a stronger visual force. This visual force can be induced in specific elements through different techniques. Amongst them, negative space is the one that interests us directly here.

Negative space (space that is devoid of any elements) drives the attention towards elements outweighing the rest through visual force concentrated on them.

Example of visual weight created through negative space

The space between the black square and the white squares directs the eyes to the left-hand element. But the left-hand element is outweighed by the 4 smaller white squares. The black square carries a stronger visual force.

Balanced website layouts

In balanced web design, the elements that make up the layout are supporting one another so that the user sees the text content with equal importance. In addition, the elements are easily scannable in a layout that efficiently presents them all. The design gives the impression of stability, and it feels really pleasing, from the aesthetic point of view.

One of the most popular balanced designs is symmetrical balance, where, similar to a mirror image, a visual element will look the same on either side of the center. Symmetry evokes balance, elegance, and pleasure. You’ve probably felt it too when looking at the architecture of some buildings, gardens, and even at the wings of a butterfly.

Sections for specific audiences or features

Arrangements of elements that can be changed meaning that users can easily switch to other website sections. To help you figure out how this is possible, we suggest you think about fashion websites addressing both men and women.

The layout supports 2 distinctive sections within the website, one dedicated to apparel for men, the other dedicated to apparel for women. The layout split serves functional content, highly useful for the 2 distinctive target audiences.

Go outside the standard layouts

Whereas some layouts follow the traditional path, with an aim at serving functionality at its best, other layouts use daring designs and structures, with the purpose of making an impact on the user. Breaking the mold means unexpected arrangements of the elements within the web page, and the experiences it triggers stand out in a sea of standard websites, that a user can’t help but remember your website.

Source: Schweppes.ca

Remember though that UX beats design. Always think of the end-user. Make tests before releasing anything.

Create Visual Tension for Eye-Catching Stimulating Layouts

In web design, visual tension strains the users’ attention by focusing it on key points of the website. Visual tension comes out by contrasts of space, color or luminosity, and it is easily noticeable if interwoven in a perfect overall balance of elements.

Its role is to visually stimulate the users to break off the web surfer routine and process the information on the website in a brand-new light.

Visual tension in a website layout, through the unexpected placement of some elements – Source: Stripe

Use focal points to draw attention to certain elements

A call-to-action button can be a focal point. An image can be a focal point. Headings can also be focal points. It all depends on how they integrate into the website layout, so they become the biggest points of interest on a website, that capture a user’s attention.

Source: Tesla.com

Due to focal points, you’ll have your users half-way to conversion (whatever “conversion” might be for your particular website) – users will concentrate their attention on those focal points and are more inclined to take the action you want them to take.

Design layouts that accomplish website goals

It’s a best practice that, before starting to design a layout/to browse through layout templates, you should define what the website goals are. They might be to sell products, gather traffic, or simply enchant users with some piece of art. The website layout should be chosen based on the website goals. It will trigger certain users’ behaviors that lead to completing those goals.

Source: Unbounce

Layouts that tell a story

Design the layout/search for a layout so that it molds onto the message you have to transmit. Section areas should come together to tell a complete story. Each element in this chain is another chapter in your story.

Layout made up of features sections, saying much about the app’s value

Best Website Layouts with Proven Success

Below you’ll find the most popular and effective website layouts that designers the world over use to make their websites.

1. The Zig-Zag Layout

Research revealed how users use to scan a webpage content: the eyes move along the page following a Z-letter direction.

• First, the eye goes from left to right
• Next, the eye goes down, and to the left
• Last, their eyes move back across to the right again

As it is intricately connected to some common web surfer behavior, the zig-zag layout is applicable to a wide range of websites, in different activity areas.

Restaurant Website Demo – created with Mesmerize Theme

2. The F Layout

The F-shape layout follows another widely-known scanning behavior, where the eyes move across a page in an F-letter pattern.
Due to its connection with a widely known user behavior, this layout is suitable for a wide range of websites, from e-commerce websites to portfolio websites.

Source: Patagonia.com

3. Full-Screen Photo

In this case, the layout implies spreading up content upon a full-screen photo/image. Thus, text sections or menu sections are there to support the “living” image. Good to use for websites that want to immediately anchor the subject of a site in the mind of a visitor. 

Source: Netflix

4. Grid Layout

Information is organized into grids, making it easy to browse., and people can stop to specific topics of interest. Grid layouts allow for an equal distribution of text, photos, videos onto the webpages, letting users decide upon the importance of each unit. Good to use for newspapers, vlogs, etc.

Source: Ikea

Source: iHeartRadio

5. One-Column Layout

This layout organizes information into one single column, and it’s one of the simplest layouts to put in place. The content (text, photos, videos) is easy to follow, and the need to scan is nothing more than identifying key points of interest into that single column. Good to use for research papers and long-form articles.

Also, single-column layouts are a perfect match for mobile experiences.

Source: Medium

6. Featured Image Layout

One of the most frequent layouts nowadays implies setting up a featured image representative of each page in the website. The image serves to concentrate attention and interest to a focal point expressive of the page topic. Also, the image stands as the source of meaning that radiates from this very focal point. Good to use for niche blogs, freelancers and professionals. 

Designer Portfolio Website Demo – created with Mesmerize Theme

7. Asymmetrical Layout

The asymmetrical layout plays with the rules of symmetry to the point of bending them in favour of a unique promise: there is more we have to offer than perfection. The trick is to create active space, and to make white space livelier.

Good to use for this very category of web design websites, for unusual portfolio presentations, and innovative business websites.

Source: Kiwi.com

8. Split Screen Layout

This type of layout refers both to vertical split-screen and to horizontal split-screen. Generally, a vertical split-screen plays a major role in conveying dual importance to 2 or more distinct areas. The purpose here is to favor quick choices, for better engagement with the website right off the bat.

The example below is somehow different, in that it contains both vertical split and horizontal split, on one and the same page. Looking only at the vertical split, it does not invite to making a choice, but rather to enhance one experience through the other.

The split-screen layout is recommended for online stores (e.g. selling to men & women), or creative websites “selling wellness” all through the web presentations (like in the case below).

Source: RedLight.dev

9. Headline and Thumbnails Gallery Layout

In a more and more visually-focused online world, this layout may work wonders. It is made up of image miniatures leading to full descriptions of those topics, and headlines (+ short presentations) that serve as a guide through the image album.

Suitable for travel websites, blogs, and magazines.

Source: wepresent.wetransfer.com

10. Modular Layout (also known as Card Layout / Block Layout)

This layout is tightly related to Material Design, the design protocol launched by Google. It’s becoming increasingly popular, due to its flexibility and responsiveness. The modular layout means each unit of content (text, images, videos, buttons) is included in a card, or module, having its own dedicated space.

When applying modular layouts to websites, the effect is a streamlined look and a highly coherent composition of items in a webpage.

Good to use for business websites, where clear and coherent presentations are fundamental to a professional online presence.

Source: UXPin

Source: thefutur.com

11. Magazine Layout

The magazine layout, as it is encountered nowadays, tends to be a mishmash of some other layouts, all serving to give a splendor aura to the news.
The example below combines headline + thumbnail gallery layout, and featured image layout, plus a solid F-shaped layout, to keep the glamour of the magazine up to par.

Such combinations are good for, but not limited to, online magazines.

12. Single Page Layout

Although not so widely spread among common website layouts, we wanted to list this layout here due to its fairly interesting characteristics. It combines multiple actions into one page (e.g. Gmail). Content is loaded dynamically, using JavaScript. And it is built so that it generates unique URLs for each viewpoint.

13. Radial Symmetry Layout

Another less common layout type refers to radial symmetry. There’s a central point from which radiate correlated items, in a rounded form:

It’s a wrap

Now, that you’ve got familiarized with the different website layouts, it’s time you consider what particular layout is the best fit for your website. Is it a multi-purpose layout, or a layout adapted to a certain niche?

To do this, you should know your audience, their behavior, needs, and expectations, and built the appropriate message that molds perfectly on a layout. The layout will have the role to let the message shine and be so convincing for the users, that they cannot but accept it.

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The post 19+ Website Layouts Users Won’t Forget (UPDATE 2021) appeared first on ColibriWP Blog.

This is where user experience (UX) design comes in.

By designing your buying journeys and support channels, so they’re easier to use, you enhance the overall experience for the customer. In other words, better UX design leads to better all-round CX.

Read on to learn how you not to fly blind and use data to better inform your UX design and improve customer experience.

What’s the Difference Between UX and CX?

User experience and customer experience are often used interchangeably but have very different definitions. While they might overlap, each term has its place.

Customer experience is a term that belongs both to the customer service and marketing realms. It’s used to describe the whole experience for a buyer, from their very first interaction with a brand right through after-sales care.

Customer experience design is fundamental to the success of a brand, as it drives a company’s reputation. In fact, half of the customers say that customer experience is more important to them now than it was before, while 94% of people are more likely to buy from brands whose customer experience they rate as being very good.

User experience (UX) is more of a design-related term. Used in reference to buying psychology, UX design considers how the physical elements of a buying journey make it easier for a customer to reach their end goal.

In short, UX design streamlines the customer journey to improve the customer experience.

UX design can seriously help a company to net customers, increase conversions, and enhance the customer experience. Unfortunately, however, over half of UX professionals believe that the potential of UX design isn’t being exploited enough.

Source

One of the best ways to take better advantage of UX to boost CX is to analyze your brand’s data. By looking into how customers behave, you can better understand how to redesign your platforms and improve the overall experience.

Bear in mind that you’ll need rock-solid data storage methods to stay compliant when harvesting data. Whether you’re using edge computing, cloud storage, or on-premises solutions, make sure they’re secure enough to keep customer data safe.

Read on to learn how to use data to improve your CX.

How to Use Data to Design for Better Customer Experience

Customer data is your gold mine. By harvesting data on customer behavior and preferences, you can get a deeper understanding of how to improve your service for your current and future clients.

Here’s how to use that data to design a better user experience to enhance your customer experience.

1. Use transactional data to personalize future recommendations

63% of consumers have come to expect personalization as part of standard service. 

Not only that, but customers feel more seen when brands make a special attempt to personalize services to meet their needs. In fact, the same report states that 38% of buyers say they feel more like an individual when brands send them recommendations based on their previous purchases.

What’s more, a third of buyers say they’re frustrated when brands send them irrelevant offers. Worse still, 38% of buyers get annoyed when brands send them recommendations for something they just bought.

Unfortunately, though, marketers think they’re better at personalizing the experience than consumers think they are. 57% of marketers don’t think they’re struggling to meet consumer expectations for personalization, while 73% of consumers think they do.

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However, by harnessing transactional data from your CRM software, you can better understand how to personalize recommendations to meet customer needs.

For existing customers, you can use buying history to design better email templates and website experiences that recognize the customer’s previous purchases and offer recommendations based on these. 

For example, the folks at Dot&Bo are sending cart abandonment emails reminding potential customers that they have left something in their shopping cart. They also make some recommendations to lure people back to their website.

You can also use this transactional data to better segment your target audience and design personalized marketing more effectively. 

Look for demographic and behavioral patterns that show up among purchase history, as this will show you which kind of customers purchase which products. Use this information to design targeted advertising for the right audience segments correctly.

2. Use website behavioral data to streamline the buyer journey

While 40% of business professionals agree that customers are prepared to shell out extra cash for a better experience, 67% of product professionals admit that they don’t really know why customers drop off from using their services.

If you’re unsure why customers don’t gel with your online experience, you won’t know how to improve that buying journey.

Think about mobile access, for example. 64% of web traffic comes from mobile devices, yet 73% of web designers say that the main reason website visitors bounce off websites is because they’re not responsive to mobile devices.

By analyzing website data during your project management, you will begin to see patterns that indicate how you can redesign the user experience to create a more cohesive buying journey that makes it easier for customers to reach their end goal.

Take Bionic Gloves, for instance.

Source

The sports glove brand found that it had super-high cart abandonment rates, despite customers running through the rest buying journey easily.

The company ran tests with different UX designs for the cart. By analyzing cart abandonment data, Bionic Gloves found that the cart design that eliminated the ‘Gift Card’ and ‘Special Offer’ elements converted 25% more often. Not only that, but customers who converted had 17% higher profitability.

This demonstrates how reducing clutter in the UX design helps streamline the customer experience. It makes it easier for customers to understand what they need to do to purchase. 

Only by tracking and analyzing website data was Bionic Gloves able to spot this pattern.

3. Use social data to inform buyer personas

Social media platforms are a treasure trove of personal data that tells you all about your target audience’s preferences, interests, and behaviors.

Not only are customers accepting of the fact that brands use social data to understand them better, but they also encourage this to happen.

Tracking and monitoring social data helps you get a stronger sense of the kind of people interested in your products and services, enabling you to build more accurate buyer personas.

By understanding their behavior, you can get a better idea of how to design customer experiences to meet the requirements and preferences of each buyer persona.

For example, Millennials and Gen Zers are far more likely to use messaging apps than Baby Boomers.

Source

In this respect, if your social data shows that you’re catering to Millennials and Gen Zers, go ahead and integrate a social messaging support chatbot. If your data shows your audience is mostly Baby Boomers, you’re better off focusing your customer support on email services using your preferred email marketing platform.

4. Use social data to design your omnichannel experience

An omnichannel customer experience is made up of the individual customer touchpoints, over a variety of connected channels that allow potential customers to pick up where they left off on one channel and continue the experience on another.

Not only do 43% of buyers say that they feel like an individual when a brand recognizes them across all touchpoints, but they also think an omnichannel experience is more important than marketers give it credit for.

As Rich Gardner, VP of Global Strategic Partnerships at Klaviyo puts it: you need to “find out what your customers care about and design meaningful communications across all of your online channels that mirror how you would build a relationship with a customer in person.” 

Social data provides the key here. By tracking data across all social platforms, you can get an idea of what your audience uses each platform for, enabling you to tailor the design to facilitate those purposes.

For example, you may find that Instagram is used to discover your products. Following the discovery of your brand, customers head over to YouTube to watch videos about your products and learn more. After finding out about your products, customers head to your website to purchase from your product pages before switching to Facebook to leave a review.

Using this social data, you can better design the customer journey to improve the user experience with more effective navigational features and easy-to-spot signposts that link these channels together.

5. Use customer service data to address recurring usability issues

Looking for patterns and visualizing customer data can help you to understand where customers are getting stuck.

While this may indicate bottlenecks in the buying journey, you may also find that existing customers have usability issues with your products. 

For example, imagine that you offer a service through an app. You might find that customers are continuously contacting support because a certain feature of the app doesn’t work or it’s not easy to figure out.

Monitoring the patterns in your customer support data helps you to get a clearer understanding of how to tweak UX design to smooth out the customer experience of your product or service.

Don’t forget to look into self-service customer support data, such as your help center. You may find that customers are accessing particular help guides and how-to videos more than others. Nowadays there are plenty of screen recording tools to create quick video tutorials for such purposes. If this is the case, these features could likely do with a UX tune-up to make them easier to use.

6. Use chatbot data to improve website navigation

Last year, around 20% of companies implemented a chatbot to enhance their customer service.

Not only can a chatbot speed up customer service and deal with minor support requests instantly, but it’s also a reservoir of informative data.

Source

One important use of chatbots is to help customers navigate around your website. 

According to 61% of web designers surveyed by GoodFirms, bad navigation is the number one reason why visitors abandon a website. Despite this, over 30% agree that convoluted navigation is the most frequent web design mistake they see.

Poor navigation is frustrating to users. It makes it tough to reach the end goal, encouraging them to click off your site and look for answers elsewhere. A few simple adjustments to the UX design of your navigation can improve the customer experience, helping customers better reach their end goals.

Just look at Bizztravel Wintersports, for example.

By simplifying navigation, the Dutch travel company managed to increase goal completion by more than 20%.

Chatbot data can be extremely helpful to this process.

By harvesting chatbot data, you can find the most common navigational queries from visitors to help you tweak UX design and make it easier for users to navigate around your site. Apart from the chatbot, you can also implement the use of other customer service tools like Live Chat, Self-service portals, Customer portals, etc.

7. Use customer sentiment data to find emotional triggers

Sometimes referred to as opinion mining, sentiment analysis uses natural language processing to analyze consumer text data to decipher the emotional sentiments of customers.

Most often, brands use customer sentiment analysis to find common themes within customer reviews.

Source

Feedback tends to be emotionally driven since customers only tend to give feedback if they’re very happy or very frustrated. Sentiment analysis enables you to identify the customer experience elements that drive these strong emotions.

Look for patterns among negative feedback to spot areas where you can improve UX design to enhance the customer experience. Identify patterns in the positive feedback so you can use these devices as inspiration for your UX tweaks.

8. Use A/B test data to optimize the buying experience

57% of brands agree that tracking user data has a significant impact on internal design decisions.

A/B testing is a great way to create data that directly informs design decisions.

Ultimately, customers will respond better to design features that improve the all-around customer experience. By testing different UX design features, you can get a better idea of which elements improve the user experience, in turn enhancing the customer experience.

The German firm Dachfenster is a prime example of this concept for effective working.

Seeking to help customers navigate the buying experience more easily, the window and blind company chose to address the ineffective dropdown menu on its homepage.

Source

Testing two alternative list menus with an A/B test — one in orange font color and one with green buttons — Dachfenster found that it increased both conversion rates and revenue acceleration.

Source

However, the orange font only increased conversion rates by 18%, compared to 33% when using the green.

Using A/B testing, Dachfenster worked out which UX design elements are better at helping visitors reach their end goal, streamlining the customer experience.

9. Use social listening data to align with industry trends and expectations

It’s not enough to simply look inside your own company. You need a wider perspective on the industry to understand what drives your target audience to pick you over competitors.

This is where social listening data comes in. 51% of marketers are using social listening to get quick insights into the trends in their industry and the expectations of their target audiences. 

By monitoring when and how key terms are mentioned, brands can begin to understand the kinds of conversations that customers are having around these terms.

Final Thoughts

While UX and CX aren’t twins, they do go hand-in-hand.

Not only can UX design help boost customer experience, but CX data can also help to inform UX design. 

By dwelling into all kinds of customer data, you can begin to pick out patterns that show what your customers expect, the service they require, and the issue they’re having. This helps you more effectively design customer journeys to streamline CX, so customers reach their end goals more easily.

The post When UX Meets CX: Using Data to Design Better Customer Experiences appeared first on ColibriWP Blog.

However, there are certain difficulties here too. In particular, when developing a design, a lot of unnecessary features come with it, which makes the site overloaded. Because of this, the loading speed is significantly reduced, and usability deteriorates. Therefore, the use of SEO concepts in the design must be approached carefully and thoughtfully. Here are 5 important factors to consider when optimizing your site already at the design stage.

1. Mobile-first design 

There are currently 4.8 billion phone users worldwide, out of which 3.5 billion are using smartphones (Statista, 2019). That explains why Google made the transition to mobile-first indexing,  meaning that when it comes to ranking, Google first evaluates the mobile version of a website.

If you want to take your site to the top of search results, then responsive design should be top of mind, from the very beginning of web development. Responsive design is a design that automatically adapts to any device on which it is opened: desktop, smartphone, or tablet. 

So, if you want to grow your site SEO-wise,  you should pay attention to the following aspects:

• optimize images for mobile devices;
• adapt texts for small screens via CSS;
• remember that visitors of your site may open it in portrait or landscape orientation;
• be sure that texts, images, GIFs, and videos are displayed correctly both on a desktop and a mobile device;
• use short titles and structured texts that will be easy to read from any device.

When you’re done, you can use the official Google tool to test if your site is mobile-friendly. 

2. Content structure

When users navigate your website, they should be able to easily find what they’re looking for. This means that your website design should have a logical navigation, structured content, visual cues, and more. I have some tips for you on the topic, below.

Menu

The menu or the navigation bar is usually a collection of the most important links of a site placed usually at the top of the website and on all its pages. If the menu is not providing a good user experience, it would be as if you’re driving without GPS in a new city. How would that make you feel?

A proper menu has tons of benefits:

• increased website visit duration
• decreased bounce rates (meaning people are browsing multiple pages of your site)
• more purchases (if your site is an online store)
• returning users

Take a look at this menu example from Miro, a SaaS company offering an online collaborative whiteboard platform for all sorts of teams. The menu is split into:

• product – where they list templates, the features of the product, the integrations Miro works with,
• use cases – all the situation where the product can be used, with personalized examples,
• teams – where they explain how different teams can use the product,
• pricing,
• enterprise – how bigger teams can collaborate using miro,
• contact sales,
• log in,
• sign up CTA button.

I mean…there’s no question left unanswered, isn’t it?

Source: miro.com

Headings and subheadings

You will need to use headings and subheadings to group content on your website, to make them easier to read or skim. If your content is unreadable, it will quickly discourage the user. Information should be presented in a structured manner. Using HTML tags such as H1, H2, H3, and H4 tags will help a lot in this. When reading a structured text, it is easier for the user to assimilate the information. Subheadings actually allow the readers to “take a break” to comprehend what they have read. In addition, the use of subheadings in the text makes it more attractive for Google robots.

Visual hierarchy

Visual hierarchy is a technique that allows you to smoothly lead the user to the desired action: purchase an item, get in contact with someone, find information, etc. Visual hierarchy is using principles such as scale, contrast, color, balance to rank elements based on their importance, or in the way you want your users to view them. Headings and subheadings are part of this hierarchy as well.

Now, this subject definitely deserves a whole article, but, at the end of the day, you’ll need to take a step back and figure out the goal of your website’s design: how do you plan your info architecture in order to reach your business and user goal?

Visual cues

Visual cues are elements used for drawing attention to areas of importance. They help website visitors engage with your website, and get to the next step in the funnel.

I’m pretty sure you’ve seen them before because they’re pretty obvious: arrows pointing at specific page elements, or people’s hands showing your something, or a person looking in a certain direction, etc.

Let’s take a look at the example below. “200 tools” gets highlighted in yellow, because it’s an important product feature. Also, there’s an arrow near “Explore marketplace” that lets you know that you can further investigate the topic.

Source: Livechat.com

3. Core Web Vitals 

Web Vitals is an initiative by Google to provide quality guidance for delivering a great user experience on the web. Core Web Vitals are a subset of Web Vitals that apply to all web pages and will become the official ranking factor in May 2021. This means that user experience will be at the core of organic ranking.

What do the Core Web Vitals measure?

LCP – loading speed of the main content (Largest Contentful Paint);

• Good: less than 2.5 seconds
• Needs improvement: between 2.5 and 4 seconds
• Poor: longer than 4 seconds

FID – waiting time before the first interaction with the content (First Input Delay);

• Good: less than 100 milliseconds
• Needs improvement: up to 300 milliseconds
• Poor: longer than 300 milliseconds

CLS – stability of layout and elements that do not interfere with interaction with content (Cumulative Layout Shift).

• Good: less than 100 milliseconds
• Needs improvement: between 100 and 250 milliseconds
• Poor: longer than 250 milliseconds

To get started, Google recommends doing the following:

• Conduct a large-scale audit of site pages to see possible improvements. The Search Console report for Core Web Vitals provides a complete picture of site performance and details metrics.
• Page Speed Insights and Lighthouse will help you iterate through any issues you find.
• With web.dev/vitals-tools, you can get full information to get started.
• Use the potential of AMP technology. 

4. User intent

When developing a website, you need to consider the user intent as well. It is far from always that users can accurately express in words what exactly they are looking for.

You should optimize the content on your site in such a way that your site matches the user’s intent. For example, if a user types the word “pizza”, they will see hundreds of thousands of search results. Google strives to give such a user the most accurate answer to his request, so the search engine will try to guess what exactly the person is looking for.

Roughly, the intention of users can be divided into three groups of requests:

• informational (“what is pizza”);
• navigational (“where is the nearest pizzeria”);
• transactional (“pizza delivery”, “pizza price”).

Your goal is to show Google what type of request your particular web and blog pages belong to and take into account more options for such requests. The design, images, text inside a specific URL should be optimized around specific search queries on Google. To get more ideas for keywords that match user intent, you can use the SE Ranking Keywords Research tool.

5. Internal linking

Another important aspect is the internal linking on the site. With it, users have the opportunity to familiarize themselves with other pages on your site, which will extend their stay. However, there are also external links that you should take into consideration.

Internal links are also used to improve website navigability. They are needed not only for users but also for search robots. This way, they can determine which pages on your site are the most valuable.

 Internal links can have a positive effect on the optimization process, namely:

• accelerate a new page’s entry into the search engine index;
• they are an element of resource navigation and help users navigate the site;
• structure the site not only for visitors but also for search engines.

For search robots, such links work as guides to new non-indexed pages and also indicate which ones are more significant. For users, linking plays the role of an assistant in finding necessary materials, as a navigation element. Just keep cool and try to maintain logical coherence with the page you link to. As we can see, internal linking is a real catch for search robots and users. 

Summary

SEO and design are extremely tight-knit. This article lists the main points that are important to consider when creating a website for its subsequent promotion in search engines. A high-quality study of the site at the initial stages will help to avoid common mistakes and significantly save the budget for website promotion. User-friendly design with SEO in mind will significantly accelerate the promotion of your site to the very top of the search results.

The post Web Design Elements: 5 Important SEO Factors appeared first on ColibriWP Blog.

Exactly, the header.

If that’s not appealing enough, if it doesn’t bring clarity, your users might just go away, and maybe never come back.

We don’t want that, do we?

Website headers are a central part of designing a website. They play a key role in grabbing the users’ attention and establishing a connection with the website’s visitors.

This is why, in the following lines, we’ll tackle some header design principles you should be aware of when designing a website header.

Header Design Principles to Follow

Research studies have found that the users’ eyes move on a webpage by following one of the 3 patterns:

• The Gutenberg pattern

Image Source: https://vanseodesign.comThe Gutenberg pattern can be applied to text-heavy content. It suggests the readers’ eyes sweep across and down the page in a series of horizontal movements.

Example:

• The Z-shaped pattern

Image Source: https://vanseodesign.com

The Z-pattern defines the path the users’ eyes follow when scanning a page, a path that takes the shape of a Z letter. It is recommended for the design of landing pages, that readers quickly scan.

Example:

• The F-shaped pattern

Image Source: https://vanseodesign.com

This pattern describes the most commonly used style of reading blocks of content in the online medium. Users quickly scan a webpage, and their eyes follow an F-pattern.

Example:

Without going into further details about these patterns, we’d like to strengthen that for any of these models, the upper horizontal line is where the visitors begin scanning a page.

What to integrate into a website header?

These patterns show why a web designer must carefully decide what users should see first. The header should serve as a hook that will catch their attention and invite them to explore the rest of the page.

There’s no chance to make a second impression. So, you should think twice about what to include in the header:

• Strong hero image

A hero image is a very large banner image that is shown above the fold on a webpage. It is included in the header section and is the first thing the users see when arriving on a website. Hero images also have the purpose of attracting visitors’ attention to the unique selling point (USP) of the business. A best-case practice states that using faces of real people in the hero images can help visitors relate better to the brand. Communication gets more humane and personal.

Source: Drift.com

• Unique selling point (USP)

The USP is a phrase that explains the reason a business exists. It should reveal what the business does, why, and for whom. It should also emphasize unique features and benefits, that make the brand stand out among its competitors. A strong USP is vital in conveying the right message to the website visitors, and, ultimately, in converting them into customers.

Source: miro.com

• Brand name

The brand name gets people accustomed to the site identity or reinforces the image people have of your business identity.

The image should reflect your brand personality and ensure your brand voice is consistent throughout the whole website. It should be easily recognizable even if cut out from the website header. And when placed into the website header, it should play a key role in establishing a personal connection with every user.

Source: carolinaherrera.com

• Product video

Because it only takes 50 milliseconds for users to form an opinion about a website, it means that you should have the most important messages in the header. This is why many businesses don’t wait for their users to scroll down and get to the features of their product/service, but they’re using the power of video marketing to convey their message better. Also, let’s not forget that 78% of people watch online videos every week, and 55% view online videos every day.

Source: wistia.com

• Call to action (CTA)

A CTA is a message (usually on a button), that triggers a certain response from the website visitors. The Call-to-action should be clearly defined and easy to understand by the website visitors. Naturally, a CTA placed in the header, right where visitors start their journey into the website, increases the chances to get the wanted action from the respective users.

Source: creatopy.com

• Product featuring 

In case you run an eCommerce store, you will want to emphasize the quality and convenience of a certain product, and the best way to do it is to include that product in the header. The users’ attention will be driven towards that best deal, and they will be prone to step into the buying process.

Source: amazon.com

In any of the above cases, the general rule of thumb is: keep it simple, keep it clear, make the header engaging! Research shows that “the average difference in how users treat info above vs. below the fold is 84%.” So, it is best to focus your efforts on reducing those numbers as much as possible. And you’ll do it best if you’ve set yourself some goals as to what you want to transmit.

Large websites, like www.youtube.com, limit the space dedicated to the header to only a small amount. This is done on purpose, as the intention is to let the users’ attention be directed to something of more importance, like products, or services, or videos (e.g. YouTube).

Sometimes you don’t even need a header, or if you do, you need just a small one.

It all depends on the website’s particularities. Think about it and give your website the personality it needs, no matter what the web design trends are “telling” you now and then.

What Does Your Website Header Inspire?

Besides transmitting certain messages, you can also consider instilling certain emotions in the readers. Depending on the purpose you give to the header, it may inspire in the readers one of the following:

• Curiosity

For certain websites, it would be suitable to set up a header that inspires curiosity in the readers. They will want to find out more, they will long for more, they will rush into exploring the rest of the story.

It’s how I feel about this header from Canva. They make a huge promise right there: “Design anything”. And you’re invited to test this. Can you resist?

• Action

In some cases, it’s better to stir action directly from the header. With a call-to-action, you can invite users to click on a button, or perform some other interaction with the website, right off the bat. In the case of Planable, their USP is directly connected to the CTA below. also, if you’re not quite ready to buy, there’s an option to schedule a demo as well.

• Trust

It might be useful to start by inspiring trust in your visitors. You want them to take some action later on, and for doing that, they have to feel fully confident that they make the right decision.

Let’s see how Salesforce does it. They state that they are the world’s largest CRM. Okay, you might say that 99% of the companies out there aren’t the first in their field. And you’d be right. But, if you read below, there’s definitely something that you can use. There’s a case study that shows how efficient the product is. You can leverage such a case study yourself.

• Pain

Why on earth would you want to inspire pain in the readers, especially from the header? Well, many companies have their marketing based on the FUD principle (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt). At an early stage of the conversion process, fear/pain will trigger the decision to immediately apply a solution and make that pain fade out.

This can be an approach for cybersecurity services, physical security services, but also in healthcare or pension funds.

Such an approach can be leveraged in campaigns that want to make people aware that you need to vaccinate against COVID, or to wear a seatbelt.

• Laughter

Maybe you want to emotionally connect with the visitors, from the very beginning. And there’s no better way to do this than make them laugh. And laugh loud. A sense of complicity is being formed and you’ll have your users stand by your side, while they’re exploring the website.

• Familiarity

Connecting the users’ situation with a similar situation presented in the header can create a certain degree of familiarity.

Types of Headers for Different Types of Websites

Depending on the website specificities, a header will fit better the overall design than another. Accordingly, you should have a clear idea of what type of header will best suit your own website (be it eCommerce, blog, portfolio, online newspaper, etc.).

• CTA-focused header

In the case of Blue Apron, the website header uses a large video, instead of a large hero image. It transmits a sense of coziness, familiarity, appetite.

Next, we have a CTA that invites the user to take action to benefit from the same cozy and yummy experience.

The CrazyEgg website comes with a header that invites users to take their product for a live demonstration. Their product is just a perfect fit for such real-time demonstrations. And it proves instantly the benefits of the product. Their are also using a visual cue, pointing out to the CTA: the hand of the man in the balloon is directing the eye towards the button.

• Brand-focused header

This is a beautiful example of a website with a header focusing on brand identity and branding elements. It includes the logo, a replication of the brand logo colors in the upper part, as well as their slogan.

• Content-focused header

This is very suitable for blogs, and magazines, which promote articles and stories.

But, I also found some exceptions.

Patagonia is not promoting their shop on the homepage, but, they push stories that show their commitment to making a change in the world. This current story, featured in the website’s header, is about slavery and activism.

In the case of Ikea, the left-hand side of the screen prompts visitors to one of the online stores, while the other half prompts users to read the story of Ikea.

• Video background-focused header

BUKWILD integrated 3 different videos in the website header. Each of the videos can be played by placing the mouse over the corresponding section. What’s interesting in this is the creative way they use videos as parts of a bigger “picture”, one that represents their brand.

• Product-focused header

In the case of Cropp, an online fashion store, the latest collections are being featured in the header.

Threadless.com puts wall-art in a context and features a CMYK Squad. The header also includes a clear CTA, for all those who feel they belong in a way to that scenario presented in the header by the “squad”.

• Personal branding-focused header

In the case of the travel blog Alex in Wanderland, in the website header, apart from a photo of Alex, users can see the beginning of a story in this header: “Five years and counting on the road…”. This is an invitation for the readers to want to explore more stories.

To wrap up…

Headers greatly contribute to a website’s success or failure. Technically speaking, this upper part is naturally the first thing on the website that people interact with.

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The post 15+ Beautiful Website Headers and Why They Work So Well (UPDATE 2021) appeared first on ColibriWP Blog.

Behind every advancement, some things are still yet ever-green: the design principles. The design principles dig deep into human psychology and the way human brains are bound to respond to certain visual stimuli. This is why every web designer (amateur or professional) should know them and apply them. 

This means that a web designer’s job can be quite daunting: how can he balance remarkable design and proper user experience (UX). More than 88% of online shoppers don’t return to a website after having a bad user experience. So, to get them to return, you need to enhance the UX.

Now, let’s understand how you can leverage UX design principles on your website. 

What role does UX play in your website? 

User experience essentially connects the dots between a person and a product, digital or not. The primary goal of any website or business is to attract potential leads and increase its sales. And there is no doubt UX design plays an essential role in achieving these goals. 

Good UX design helps corporate websites, online stores, blogs, online newspapers, to perform well. But, let’s go a bit deeper into the role UX plays on a website.

Understanding user behavior

To thoroughly understand what drives users to specific products, it is necessary to dig into human psychology. Persuading people to perform a suitable action like signing up or buying a product can be quite challenging in every industry.

But how can you persuade them?

Well, Robert Cialdini figured it out in his book called…”Persuasion”. In his research, he realized that in a chaotic world, full of information, our brains just love shortcuts. He managed to identify 6 universal shortcuts that guide our behavior. They can be applied to any aspect of our lives…thus, to website design as well. These shortcuts are:

• Reciprocity – meaning that we feel obliged something in return when a gift is received. But this can go far beyond gifts. For example, on a website, you might be willing to exchange your email address for an interesting ebook.
• Scarcity – people want to have more of the things that seem few. Let’s see if you recognize this tactic: “Only 2 tickets left”. Seems familiar? Would you hurry into buying the ticket having this information?
• Authority – people trust authority figures. When a dentist comes along and recommends a certain toothpaste, you’re more like it to buy it, right?
• Consistency – people tend to stick to commitments. But this can go beyond this, it can expand to consistent communication is social media, on your website, etc.
• Liking – it’s hard to say “no” to people we like. This is why, before starting a negotiation, it might be better to exchange some personal information with the person in front of you. It will break the ice a bit, create familiarity, thus increase the chances of a fruitful outcome. 
• Consensus – people are paying attention to the behavior of similar people, people from the same tribe. This is why recommendations work so well. This is why you will see reviews and testimonials on a website.

Now, UX researchers, UX designers, and marketers should always collaborate on applying these principles when designing a website.

Boosting conversions

Accountant concept in flat style. Financial balance calculation scene. Business accounting and audit, annual statement and taxes banner. Vector illustration with people characters in work situation.

Conversions are actions that users take on your website that you consider valuable: from newsletter subscriptions, seeing a demo, filling up a form, getting into a free trial, to buying a product or a service.

According to The Guardian Report, it only takes 0.1 seconds to form a person’s first impression. Now, to make that 0.1-second count, you need to power your website with a marvelous user experience that will further enhance conversions.

Let me give you just two examples of how certain website elements can help you boost conversions.

• Adding images of real people might lead to an increase in conversions. For instance, Medalia Art saw a 95% boost in conversions when they replaced painting images with pictures of artists.

Source: neilpatel.com

• Making changes to the position of the CTA or its copy can also lead to a boost in conversions. Matchoffice.com changed the copy of their CTA and saw a boost of 14.79% in conversions. Switching from “order” to “get”, made users see more value in what they will receive. Also, “order” can have some negative connotations, “get” seems more friendly and mild. See? It’s all about psychology.

Source: beemdigital.com

The folks a CXL have great resources on how to design such tests. How to formulate a hypothesis, and how to make sure you draw the right conclusion using the right statistical tools.

UX design of your website is a critical element that defines the whole of your sales, visitor, and customers’ experience as they navigate and interact with your site on each page and its element.

Improving SEO

Team of happy employees winning award and celebrating success. Business people enjoying victory, getting gold cup trophy. Vector illustration for reward, prize, champions concepts

Way back, the main SEO strategy meant stuffing keywords on each page of your website and getting the number one rank in search engines. But the scenario has changed, and now search engines consider UX data-driven factors for ranking. Here are some of them:

1. Mobile responsiveness – in case you didn’t know by now, Google established mobile-first indexing as a default for all websites back in 2019. This means that Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for ranking. If you do not provide a good mobile experience for your users, your chances of showing up in the search results will go down.
2. Bounce rate – it is a measure of website engagement, it shows the percentage of web users that exit your website after only viewing only one page. If users don’t visit more pages, this is a bad signal for the search engines. This means that the users haven’t found what they need on your site. There might be tons of reasons here: bad design, poor navigability, slow website speed, etc. In the end, there’s a correlation between high bounce rates and bad UX. There can also be another reason, maybe your marketing efforts are not driving the right traffic on your site, so beware!
3. Page dwell time – this is a metric that reveals time spent on site by your users. The longer the dwell time, the longer the user engagement or at least this is how search engines perceive it.
4. Page speed – with each second that passes and your site does not load, users will abandon your site. There are some things that you can do in order to improve these metrics such as: using minified versions of various libraries, optimizing your images and videos, etc.
5. Navigability – having a proper site structure with clean URLs helps SEO a lot. Users should be able to find the answer to a question in a matter of 4-5 clicks. If you own a large site, filters and site search options will help navigation, as well as a clear menu.

5 Principles of UX web design

Great design is a combination of function and aesthetics. In order to nail the proper combination and create a UX- first website, you will need to follow these 5 principles:

1. Focus on the user

How can you do this? Via proper user research. Your design will need to meet the users’ needs. If you have the budget you can hire a UX researcher to help you with insights, or, you can set up a proper user feedback loop.

User research will help you get insight into shaping your products and defining proper guidelines for delivering a good experience for your users. If you are not spending time on research, you will make a blunder for yourself and your users.

There are two types of research you can conduct to know your users:

Qualitative Research: This research is used to understand the underlying reasons, opinions, and motivations of your users. It offers insights into the problem or helps to develop ideas or outlines for potential quantitative research.

User interviews, surveys, website heatmaps, and usability tests are examples of qualitative research. 

Quantitative Research: It is mainly used to quantify the problem by way of creating or generating numerical data that can be transferred into usable statistics. Mostly qualitative research is used to quantify attitudes, behaviors, opinions, and other defined variables and generalize results for a wide range of the population. 

 A powerful quantitative research tool is Google Analytics, which can help you identify how visitors are navigating your site, how much time they spend on it, which are their exit points, etc. But the answer to “why” they are navigating as they do, why do they spend so much time, is brought by qualitative tools.

2. Use well-established patterns

UX design is actually a work of art. You need to have a perfect blend of efficient content structure and logical navigation while also managing looks for the website. Design patterns allow the designers to create every single piece of functionality effectively, whether it is a shopping cart or a sign-in form.

The main categories of design patterns include data input, content structure, navigation, and hierarchy. During the UX designing process, pay attention while placing each element and section on your website pages. It should not confuse your users to find a particular section like FAQs, eCommerce filters, Contact, etc.

Some of the most used UX design patterns are: 

• Logo: it is usually shown top left or top-center. Clicking on the logo always takes the user to the homepage. Use this as well.
• Breadcrumbs: use linked labels to provide secondary navigation that shows the way from the beginning to the current site pages in the hierarchy.
• Lazy registration: this pattern allows users to access a limited set of features, functionality, or content before or without registering. This something that you can use on sitesLet users interact enough with your system so that an actual registration is just another small step in a larger process: a small step, not an obligation.
• Forgiving format: users are only human are prone to making mistakes. Mistakes might lead to a bad user experience, even if it might be the website’s fault. Now, in order to prevent such errors from happening, designers can have a proactive approach. such an example would be making suggestions in the site search when someone is looking starting to type a query. Just look at Google autosuggest.
• Clear primary actions: make buttons stand out with colors, so users know what to do. You have to decide which actions take priority.
• Progressive disclosure: show only relevant features for the users to reduce confusion. 
• Navigation patterns: such examples can be drop-down menus, mobile hamburger menus, etc.
• To make the eCommerce website design better, do add filters in it. You can go truncated filters, scroll features in the filter, filter headers, etc. You can also include batch filtering and allow multiple selections to make UX better.

3. Stick to hierarchy principles

For a great UX design, website hierarchy matters a lot, which is a great way to be successful in terms of SEO. People take hierarchy for granted, but it is an essential UX principle that ensures smooth navigation throughout a design.

At the most superficial level, a hierarchical method to design involves thinking through all of your website’s functionality and data and then mapping this into a tree-like structure. You should make sure that every section of your website flows naturally throughout the end.

There are two types of hierarchies in a UX design; first, hierarchy is associated with how the content or information is organized throughout the design. 

The second hierarchy is a Visual hierarchy. This hierarchy makes it easy for your site users to navigate your website. Also, this refers to how you arrange and present various design elements on a web page. It is necessary to choose the right size and scale of the icons and images. Also, make the color contrast of the website stand out and keep in mind the viewing patterns such as Z-pattern and an F-pattern.

4. Use a mobile-first approach

Mobile responsive design has become necessary for usability and SEO because more than 50% of traffic is now driven by mobile search. Sites that don’t use a mobile-first approach hardly achieve the desired goals. And, as mentioned before, this is an important ranking factor as well.

Keep this UX principle in mind because if your website is less mobile-friendly, you will likely see your users’ engagement metric performing poorly for these devices. 

5. Be consistent

This principle overlaps a bit with our second principle on pattern-using.

Consistency means that designs and functionality remain unchanged across all of your web pages. Users land on your site having some pre-existing design biases on how a menu should like, where the sidebar should lay, where can he find the filter. This reminds you of the patterns we talked about a bit earlier, doesn’t it?

However, it’s also important to be consistent in the font and color choices, in the tone of the copy, you see where I’m going, right?

Conclusion

Good UX web design has an essential role in developing a long-lasting relationship with prospects and customers. It needs to connect the dots between an aesthetically pleasing, financially rewarding, and useful website.

You can connect the dots applying these UX design principles:

1. Focus on the user
2. Use well-established patterns
3. Stick to hierarchy principles
4. Use a mobile-first approach
5. Be consistent

Now, in order to verify that you got it right, user research and AB testing can come in handy.

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Looking for these issues and identifying new opportunities can be complicated, time-consuming, and expensive to do, with lots of testing and research needed along the way. However, this is where Google Analytics enters the fray to provide intuitive insights into how to improve your UX design. 

(Image: Nielsen Norman Group)

The importance of conducting healthy levels of quantitative research is apparent to 27% of businesses. However, a further 27% rarely or never conduct research ahead of their UX design projects. This presents an opportunity for companies to outmanoeuvre their competitors with more fine-tuned user experience models. 

(Image: Nielsen Norman Group)

When it comes to UX research methodologies, analytics engines are heavily relied upon by businesses, with 67% using the method to cater more strategically to customers. 

With its first-hand data sets and intelligent insights, Google Analytics has become widely favoured by businesses, and although there are plenty of premium features built into the platform, a strong level of UX research can be conducted using the free version of Analytics. 

Let’s take a deeper look into how the insights offered by Google Analytics can be used to improve the UX design of online businesses: 

How Google Analytics Can Help With UX

User experience and conversions are heavily intertwined concepts. Successful businesses understand that even the best digital marketing campaigns will struggle to win over leads and hit their targets if their website UX model is lacking in performance.

Business owners and marketers need to take a moment to ask themselves some simple questions before running a marketing campaign:

• How usable is our website?
• Can visitors easily navigate through our pages?
• Does our website make it easy for visitors to get in touch with us?
• Is the website effective in communicating how our brand helps customers?

Keeping track of specific key metrics can help UX designers to learn from the behaviour of a user from the first moment they land on a page right up to the point where they convert by signing up to a service or buying a product. 

Although there are no one-size-fits-all metrics to analyse your UX design, Google Analytics is excellent at providing insights into how a website is performing and can help users to optimize their pages with better UX for sales and conversions. 

There are two key areas that you’ll need to focus on when it comes to improving UX design. Firstly, user behaviour enables businesses what people are actually doing when on their website. This information can help to reveal potential problem areas which can be prioritised and tweaked to ensure a better experience for traffic arriving on-site. 

Secondly, behavioural flow can help to chart a user’s journey from the moment they arrive on-site right up to the moment they exit. This form of insight is ideal if you’re having trouble visualising information. 

 With the help of Google Analytics behaviour reports, it’s possible to identify pages that achieve the highest volume of traffic and the paths that they typically take. However, it can also help to indicate other paths that could be better optimised. 

The Power of Audience Insights

The Audience insights offered by Google Analytics can be the perfect tool for UX professionals. It provides a comprehensive breakdown of who your users are, offering vital insights surrounding demographics, interests, location, devices used, engagement times and frequency or recency of each user. 

Some notable actions that a UX professional can take based on the available Audience data from Google Analytics include: 

1. Developing on-site translation options if a large volume of audience members arrive from a non-English speaking nation. 
2. If more users are accessing the website at night, it could be worth implementing a dark/night time variation of the site or app. 
3. The devices data can help you to experiment with device-specific content and layout changes as well as creating ads for specific devices. For instance, if you’re noticing more visitors arriving through Mobile, it could be worth developing mobile-specific content, and even optimise the layout to fit smaller screens. 
4. Demographic data about age and gender can also offer insights into experimenting with content displayed on-site. 

Monitoring Bounce Rates

Bounce rates directly refer to the percentage of visitors who have entered your site and exited without clicking through somewhere else. Both high and low bounce rates can mean different things. For instance, a high bounce rate could tell marketers that there’s a broken opt-in or badly targeted offer. If your opt-in form isn’t working then it’s no surprise that the bounce rate is high – but fortunately, this is an issue that can easily be fixed. 

Overall, bounce rates are a strong indicator of a landing page’s performance, especially when it comes to PPC campaigns. 

It’s worth noting that high bounce rates aren’t necessarily a bad thing, especially if you’re also experiencing high conversion rates. Analytical data can display data relating to all of your traffic, which means it will also show bouncebacks from visitors who aren’t part of your target audience – which can be a good thing because it shows the page qualifies your leads efficiently.

But, let’s say you’re running an online store, and your bounce rates are in the clouds. What does this mean for you? Well, people aren’t navigating your store, and they exit right after ending up on your site. Here are some explanations for the issue:

• a campaign targeting issue (you are not targetting the right audience with your messaging),
• bad website design,
• technical glitches,
• product pages that are not optimized for conversions,
• not a great offer of products. 

Source: https://cxl.com/guides/bounce-rate/benchmarks/

When it comes to service-based landing pages, it can save money in the long run because you can then focus on further converting or serving qualified leads instead of wasting time vetting or dealing with unqualified leads. 

Depending on the goals of your website and webpages, a high bounce rate could indicate that people in fact quickly found the information they were looking for, but the page failed to keep them interested in wanting more or converting. 

This can be particularly true for blogs or informational sites. Visitors would have received the information that they were looking for but the page was a dead-end that’s lacking a CTA, no opt-in form or links to more content. In this case, it’s important to modify the page to capture more leads through links to relevant blog posts, offers, or sign-ups. 

Gain Insights Into How Long Visitors Spend on Your Pages

By default, after installing the Google Analytics pageview tag, users can access a metric called Avg. Session Duration. This is generally understood to equate to the amount of time that a visitor spends on each visit to your website. 

Despite its popularity, this metric can be inaccurate at times. Google Analytics only measures Avg. Session Duration based on timestamps of the data that it receives – which may go some way in explaining why most bounces – or visits on the website with one pageview or event documented – will have an Avg. Session Duration of 00:00:00.

However, it’s possible to get around this limitation by firing timing hits. These can help to calculate the time users spend on-site more accurately without recording another pageview or event. To do this, you simply need to send the timing hits by implementing the following code to fire at specific intervals on your website: 

So how would you get around this limitation? By firing timing hits. These can help accurately calculate the amount of time a user spends on a page without recording another pageview or event. You just need to send the timing hits by implementing this code to fire at specific intervals on your site:

(Image: Smashing Magazine)

Once it’s implemented, the hits will be visible in the Behaviour > Site Speed > User Timings section within Google Analytics. 

It’s important to differentiate between the session times of genuine traffic and bad traffic. Platforms like Finteza can help you determine that. The tool identifies the quality of incoming traffic and gives it a specific category (e.g. “Bot traffic”, “Clean Traffic”, “Cookie Manipulation”, “Spam”, and many more). Recently, Google Analytics has been registering sessions with a landing page of “/trafficbot.life” in traffic reports. That’s spammy traffic.

In UX design, this consideration is important to take into account because it stops businesses from changing strategy based on the flow of bot traffic that won’t influence the business’ bottom line. 

Because timing has a cap of 10,000 hits per day in Google Analytics, it’s possible to create custom events that fire at specific intervals instead. Like other recurring events, these would then be visible in the Behavior > Events > Top Events section.

However, it’s important to remember to set a ‘timeout’ on your hits to ensure that they won’t continuously fire for too long, bombarding Analytics in the process if pages were left open on unattended browsers. 

Final Thoughts

User experience is an important facet of building a successful website and optimising marketing strategies. With large volumes of businesses neglecting the research process of enhancing their UX models, it leaves competitors with a chance to steal more conversions. Modern marketing can be a war of attrition, and Google Analytics is the perfect tool to have to hand in fighting off your rivals from stealing your traffic. 

The post How to Use Google Analytics to Improve UX Design appeared first on ColibriWP Blog.