Good Online User Experience Matters

Customer online experience has attained the centre stage in the field of online businesses. Online businesses are not only competing with each other in terms of price wars but also in delivering good customer online experience through their websites. They want their customer to be loyal and spread the word about their good online experiences with the brand. Ultimately a good customer online experience results in more sales.

Usability vs User experience

User experience is a much broader concept than usability. Usability is about reducing pain points. If the colour of the image is difficult to see then it is the concern of usability. User experience is about appeal. It carries the emotional point of view and is concerned with the aesthetic part of the website.

Usability is about making the website as convenient by taking care of many dimensions. To make a website improve usability many parameters need to be optimised.

White space

White spaces increase the visibility of your content and user can easily focus on elements surrounding the text as well. White space increases the attention of the user by adding an aspect of modernity in your website.

Hyperlink differentiation

If you are placing any link on the website for the user to click on it then it should be easily identifiable. Using coloured text is a good strategy and lets user know where to click.

Consistency

Consistency means in the context that everything should match in website. Various features of the website like heading sizes, font sizes and other design elements should present a good impression altogether. All the pages of the website should present a theme which should be coherent with each other. Visitors like fast sites, people are impatient and don’t like to waste a millisecond in waiting for something to load. For the same reasons they want intelligent headings so that they can scan through the website rather than read word by word.

Wise use of Images

Images help make first impression and give visible cues about what will be communicated in those para. Images should complement the content and help reading the paragraph with a positive frame of mind. Some website are so content heavy that person has to recall his will power to start reading the web page.

Other usability dimensions: bullet points and differentiated ‘ call to action’.

Use bullet points extensively. They are easy to read and they don’t scare away visitors with too much text. Make call to action in bold differentiated colours so it is clear to the visitor what is the next step in the process.

Importance of Navigation, visitor flow through the site and content

Site should use the conventional navigation so that visitors don’t have to break their head in moving through your site due to non-standard navigation. Doing any activity or reading through multiple pages gives an impression of momentum and convenience, for an instance this may indicate that they are in second step of four stages. It also indicates what to do next and in how much time, thus encouraging them about closing their activity shortly. Content is an important aspect of site user experience. Content should be friendly and useful from visitor point of view.

The above aspects only have taken care of usability. In order to enhance user experience more aspects need to be optimised.

Mobile friendly website

Websites are not untouched by the evolution. People are using smart phone more extensively and website should be mobile responsive. The fact that Google penalizes website for not being website friendly puts enough weight on the need to be mobile responsive website.

Feedback

Feedback paves the way to communication between the website owner and the visitor. Feedback system helps monitor the progress you have made in terms of user experience. You can update your website as per the feedback received by the visitors. Feedback comes as a living document which guides about methods to be adopted to improve user experience.

Find-ability

You should know how to keep balance between human and technology. Content should be user friendly and relevant to the user at the same time. This demands for proper labelling, organising and formatting so that when the human scans your website they can make sense of it quickly.

Perceived download time

Little psychology goes into it. You tend to regard the download time longer when you don’t get the relevant answers to your questions on the website. You perceive lesser download time for a useful and relevant website.

Alertra is a leading provider of website monitoring and alerting services. We monitoring service uptime and check availability and performance of Internet-connected devices.