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Delivering a good user experience can make or break a website. The good news is that UX isn’t a mystery. We know what works, and so can you! The bad news is that shoddy UX can tank a website’s reputation as well as its ranking.
This article defines UX, explains why UX matters, and offers four helpful tools for assessing your own site’s performance.
What is UX and what does user experience mean?
User experience (abbreviated as UX) is about designing experiences that are useful and enjoyable for users. It is a design philosophy and discipline that can be applied to any industry, but it is commonly used to refer to the user experience of websites and digital products.
A user’s experience is made up of many different elements. It includes usability, accessibility, credibility, value, and enjoyment. How easy is it for a user to find the Contact Us page? How enjoyable is it to scroll through the attorney profile page? How valuable is the content on your blog?
The best user experience provides the user with what they need in the simplest and most enjoyable manner. Empathy for the user is a key design principle.
Why does UX matter?
From a user perspective, good UX matters because a happy user is more likely to take positive action such as booking a call or purchasing a product.
UX is the technical and emotional background that is present during a user’s interaction with your website. Good design facilitates an easy online experience—and when a user feels confident navigating your website, they are more likely to come away with a positive impression of your firm.
Another important reason that UX matters is search engine ranking. What is good for your user is generally good for the search engines, too.
Gone are the days when you could dupe Google into ranking your website by simply stuffing keywords. Google values websites that provide useful experiences to visitors. This criterion includes things like load time, bounce rate, and accessibility features like alt text.
In other words, it is well worth investing in a good user experience for your website. A good user experience means more value for users, more business for you, and a better ranking in the search engine results page.
4 helpful tools to find out how your site is performing
So, how can you find out whether or not your website offers a good user experience? Remember, you are not your user. It is critical to get data from real users.
Here are four tools that anyone can use to assess the UX of their website.
PageSpeed Insights is a tool that helps you see how quickly your site loads on desktop and mobile. These are Core Web Vitals, and good load speeds on both desktops and mobile devices will seriously improve the UX of your website.
Mobile-Friendly Test from Google can help you understand how your website performs for mobile visitors (aka someone accessing your website from a smartphone). Good UX means that the experience is consistent across devices.
Google Analytics is a rich source of data for your website. This treasure trove of information can produce reports on user behavior, the success of specific content, acquisition of site traffic, and more. You can examine specific data points and then improve. For instance, is the time on site really low for certain pages? Do you see large chunks of visitors leaving your website from one page? Spend some time reviewing these metrics to gain insight into how visitors are interacting with your website.
Behavior analytics tools, like Hotjar and Mouseflow, can help you record visitor sessions and produce heat maps of engagement. While most of these tools are not free, their results can be extremely enlightening.
Review and next steps
UX is the way that a user experiences your website. The way someone feels when using your site could be impacted by many different factors, from how long a page takes to load to the color of a button.
UX matters because it affects how a user perceives your brand—and what actions they do or do not take on your website. UX can also impact your site’s ranking on Google.
There are free tools that anyone can use to learn more about how users interact with a website. However, the best strategy for delivering a top-notch user experience is to build a website from the ground up with experienced designers who value, and are trained in, UX best practices. Start a conversation with Omnizant to learn how a cohesive digital experience could kickstart your growth.