As technology nerds at heart, our team has spent an exorbitant amount of time analyzing the user experience on all of our custom software platforms, apps, and websites so that we can continue to improve.
In this article, we’ll be going over some actionable user experience (UX) tips that you can implement to improve your conversion rates, all based on the data we’ve received and analyzed on previous projects.
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What is UX?
UX is an acronym for “User Experience.” When it comes to keeping traffic on your website for extended periods, and then encouraging them to take action by calling or filling out a form, the user experience quite often plays an integral role. For example, if your website design is littered with links and bombards your user with too much information at once, your user may become overwhelmed and not know what kind of action they should take next.
More specifically, the UX design and layout of your website should prioritize simple navigation, be very easy to use, portray clear, scannable text about your brand, and have calls to action in multiple places throughout.
Metrics That Matter for UX
It can be hard to tell if you have issues with the UX of your website initially because low contact form submissions could be the result of several kinds of issues. However, there are several metrics your team can use that, when combined, often highlight UX design issues.
Pageviews: When a user visits multiple pages on your website, it’s counted under the pageviews metric. Having multiple pageviews per user is a great indication that users are liking what they see and exploring a bit.
Dwell Time: This refers to the amount of time a user spends on your website in total. High dwell time not only helps boost your SEO, but it’s a major indicator of UX issues or successes. If a user is spending only a short amount of time on your site, it could mean there is a UX problem to address.
Bounce Rate: Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors that leave your website (or “bounce” back to the search results or referring website) after viewing only one page on your site.
Conversion Rate: This is the metric that might have started your investigating in the first place. It has to do with how many users took action on your website. A conversion could be a phone call, a contact form submission, initiating a chat, or making a purchase.
Shopping Cart Abandonment: The UX layout of your shopping cart can often play a major role in whether a customer finishes their online order. The simpler the shopping cart, the better when it comes to reducing bounce rates. If you have a high abandoned cart rate, there’s almost certainly a UX problem that should be investigated.
5 Ways to Improve Your UX
Once you’ve had a chance to evaluate the metrics above, your first actionable step to improving your UX should be to pinpoint the areas for improvement. You should never look at the above metrics and immediately jump to redesign your website. Certainly, a fresh site design could very well be in order, but you must spend more time investigating before doing anything.
After you’ve done a little more research, you can then make some of the most common and straightforward changes toward UX improvement.
Believe it or not, you can visually see how users are navigating your website by installing heat map and scroll tracking services. Heat maps record your users’ mouse movements on the page, then mark parts of the screen in various colors to indicate the buttons and links that are clicked most often. Similarly, scroll tracking can live record your users’ mouse actions so you can follow along with them during a session. With this technology, the guesswork is eliminated when it comes to what UX changes you should implement.
2.Include professional videos on landing pages.
Studies indicate that websites with quality informational videos have high conversion rates than those that don’t. High-end marketing videos not only add credibility to your brand, but users are more likely to watch a video than read a long string of text. Think about how you can implement strategic video content on your key landing pages to boost dwell time and push conversions!
If you aren’t sure where to start when it comes to professional photos or video, just give us a call! We’re happy to help!
3.Pay attention to the placement and color of call-to-action buttons.
Remember that your call-to-action button is the most important part of your website. Users are on your website because they have a need, and your business is hopefully the solution they’ve been looking for. Our research shows that multiple, similar calls to action work best. In other words, if you want users to fill out a form, tell them that in multiple places. You should also try not to split your users’ attention in multiple directions. Avoid directing them to your blog or linking to additional information on key sales or landing pages. Instead, work toward providing all the information they need on that specific page and let your action button link only to a form or contact page.
You can also test various colors for your action buttons. Studies have indicated that certain colors convert better than others. For example, people instinctively see green as “go” and red as “stop”. Be strategic about your button colors remaining bright and inviting.
4.Less is always more when it comes to driving conversions.
Keep the end goal in mind when you’re placing content on your website and navigation menu. We’ve seen that simple navigation menus work better than ones packed with too many links to internal pages. Consider what your website is designed to do, and keep all decisions driven toward that purpose. While internal service pages and blogs are great to help your website’s search engine visibility and organic traffic volume, they aren’t necessarily meant to convert users. Instead, let your main landing pages and sales pages do their job by pushing conversions with clear, quickly scannable brand messaging.
Consider placing extra content pages in your footer navigation menu whenever possible to limit distractions within the body of your pages.
5.Set up goal tracking in Google Analytics.
Similar to how the heat map and scroll tracking technology works, Google Analytics allows you to set up performance goals that add another dimension to UX functionality. With goal tracking, you keep tabs of how many times various buttons are being clicked on your website. Whether you have 5 form submissions or 100, those conversions don’t reveal any insights into how your users navigated to your form. With advanced goal tracking in Google Analytics, you can carefully track most of the actions users are taking, and then eliminate unused buttons and links that aren’t performing well.
If you’d like help optimizing your Google Analytics account and setting up goal tracking, feel free to drop us a line!
John has over 20 years of web and software development experience, including building robust platforms for financial exchanges. He founded Wide Open Technologies 18 years ago to bring his enterprise-level software experience to small and medium-sized businesses. Since inception, the company has grown to not only include software and web development, but also a full suite of digital marketing services offered to businesses nationwide. As a technology consultant, entrepreneur, and investor, John continues to help others bring great ideas to life through technology that synergizes with results-based marketing.