The single most important element of your site design is: USABILITY
When you’re creating a website, there’s nothing more important than making your user’s experience as easy as possible. The simpler your site is to use, the more likely they will get the information they need and contact you. But clutter up your pages or create a confusing path to info, and you’ll lose them – fast.
So how do you ensure you site has good usability? Use these six strategies to connect better with your customers online:
Keep it clean. If your site is busy or cluttered, users won’t know where to look first – or how they can easily find what they need. And few will have the patience to search around. The more digging they have to do, the faster they’ll leave your site.
Keep the navigation simple. A clear, intuitive structure makes it easy to get around, get back to the home page or section landing pages, and access important information. Put things where users would expect to find them; fewer clicks equal higher conversions and lower bounce rates.
Tell users what you want them to do. Clearly invite them to call, read, click, email, fill out a form, and make sure your contact info is front and centre and always easy to find.
Leave plenty of white space. Studies show that big margins, room between paragraphs, space around headlines improve legibility help comprehension and reading speed. And having lots of space adds to that clean, uncluttered feel that users find so appealing. (Think Apple.) And white space doesn’t actually have to be white. Black is great too. And yellow. And pale blue.
Keep content concise. Walls of text are scary, so make your content short, sweet and easily skimmable. Make sure it’s well-written, comes in easy-to-digest chunks, and is broken up with plenty of descriptive headers and callouts.
Include plenty of visuals. Minimize text with infographics, charts and graphs. They enhance readability and convey relevant information in an appealing, different way. But please stay away from cheesy stock photos. Eye-tracking studies show that they actually add zero value because users tend to ignore them.
Want to know more about how a more user-friendly site can help you reach your customers better? Talk to us.