Enhancing User Experience Through Modern Web Design Techniques
Stop right there.
If you haven’t thought about modern web design in a while, it might be time to start.
Web design is the single most overlooked investment any business can make.
Without an excellent website, all that marketing time and ad spend just pours right down the drain. And let me throw another thing in here…
Web design and development for your business is:
- Free to start doing better right now
- Easy to get going with some expert guidance
…and can have an immediate impact on the site’s visitors’ experiences.
And if done correctly, it can help businesses reach their goals faster.
Today, we will discuss:
- Why user experience is more important than ever
- The 3 elements of modern web design
- The impact of speed and performance on your results
- 3 steps to improve the experience on any website
Why User Experience is More Important Than Ever
User experience or UX for short, is the process of creating websites that the visitors love to use.
If successful, UX helps improve customer conversion rates.
It can be divided into two parts, both of which impact the website performance:
- Visual appeal — the look of the website that should inspire trust and professionalism with a single glance.
- Functional design — making sure everything on the page works like clockwork and nudges the visitors towards their goal.
Fun fact…
Studies suggest 75% of people form an opinion about a company’s credibility from their website design alone. In other words, three-quarters of customers form an instant judgment without reading even a single word of content.
This is precisely the reason why investing in bold website design has become the way to go for web design and development for your business. A jaw-dropping first impression can make or break a user’s decision to bounce or stay.
Now you are probably asking yourself: what’s in it for me when it comes to modern web design?
The best part about the UX/UI design is that you, as a business owner, have complete control over the website.
Everything that happens on a site: from the layout to the menus to how quickly the pages load, you can influence.
Ensuring the website is in top-notch shape is the smartest move that any business can make before getting into any other marketing moves.
The 3 Elements of Modern Web Design
If you’re serious about wanting to improve your web design result, you first need to know what you’re working with.
Search engines and visitors assess websites every single day based on certain elements.
Search engines and visitors see if:
- The design is valuable
- The experience is seamless
What exactly do they look for?
- The design is valuable is to have important website elements like headings, content, images, intuitive menus, and mobile optimization.
- The experience is seamless means having a site that loads quickly, has a logical layout, and is generally easy to find information.
Website owners who optimize their sites in each of these three elements and make them as high-quality as possible will notice a significant difference in the engagement rate and conversions.
Ok, no big deal, right?
To make things more straightforward, here’s what the practice looks like:
Modern Website Design That Converts
The website’s visual appearance is more than meets the eye.
The website design creates trust, professionalism, and a sense of brand in a matter of seconds. Modern web design includes the following things.
- Clean layouts that are more logical and aesthetically pleasing
- Colour schemes that are on-brand and consistent throughout
- Typography that is readable, professional, and consistent with branding
- Proper use of white space to avoid overwhelming visitors
One of the most significant website design mistakes I’ve seen is putting way too much information on one page. Keeping things as simple, clean, and focused as possible makes it all easier to read.
Avoid any cluttered layouts and generally keep each section of the page on one specific idea.
In other words, modern web design provides plenty of breathing room in your website design so that the visitors can consume information with ease.
Navigating Around Your Website, Like a Pro
Nobody wants to hunt down the information.
Good website navigation means helping the visitor find what they need within seconds.
Bad navigation equals one thing: customers driving to the next website. The difference between success and a slip-up often comes down to the menu structure and the pages’ organization.
Think about what kinds of pages visitors need to access immediately. The main navigation should include the most important areas of your business while keeping options as simple and clear as possible.
How about sub-navigation? What about menus that keep opening and closing in sidebars as the page scrolls? Do you really need a mega menu?
Not only is modern web design simple to navigate around, but it also doesn’t confuse the heck out of you.
Menu structures are made apparent and deliberately chosen so that the website visitors will never have a hard time finding exactly what they need.
As an added bonus, simple navigation will improve the overall user experience.
Site Speed and Performance
Guess what…
Website speed matters almost as much as the website looks like.
Research suggests that 88% of users will leave a website after a poor experience and not return in the future. And the most significant factor of all? Slow loading times.
Why is website speed so important?
- Search engines rank websites with faster speeds better.
- Visitors expect a website to load in under three seconds.
- Slow sites are frustrating and lead to a lack of trust.
- Mobile users are particularly impatient.
What to do? Optimize images, delete all the code visitors don’t need, and choose quality hosting. Technical optimization isn’t particularly sexy, but it does deliver results.
3 Steps to Improve Any Website
Ok, but what does all this gibberish actually mean?
If you’re wondering how you can implement modern web design to improve the customer experience, here are three actionable steps any business can take.
1. Mobile-First, Always
More than 50% of all website traffic now comes from mobile devices.
This means that any site that isn’t working flawlessly on mobile devices is missing out on an entire group of potential customers every single day.
Test out the site on different phones and tablets. Make sure all buttons are easy to press, that the text is large enough to read without zooming in and that navigation works effortlessly on small screens.
2. Simplify the Journey
Map out the journey that website visitors take, starting with landing on the page and ending with taking a specific action you’d like them to take.
Every extra click and frustrating moment creates friction that decreases conversions.
The aim is to make everything as intuitive as possible. When a user is unsure of how to get to the information they are looking for, they get frustrated, and actions are put on hold.
3. Test, Test, Test
Web design and development for your business isn’t a one-off project.
The best results will come from ongoing testing and measuring.
You need to track how visitors behave on your pages and identify where they stop. Change some things and measure. Change more things and measure again. This is the long game of optimization that will set your website apart from the competition.
To Conclude
In a nutshell, modern web design is the process of making the sites enjoyable to use for the visitors and lucrative for your business.
UX is significantly affected by:
- The website’s visual appearance
- Navigation structure
- Website’s speed and performance
- Mobile optimization
A no-brainer way of thinking about modern web design is to focus on two factors: speed and simplicity.
The less bloat on a website, and the quicker it loads, the better it will be at providing an enjoyable experience for visitors.
But for a real game-changer, the best results come from understanding the actual needs of the site visitors and structuring your site so that you can give them exactly that with minimal friction.
In short, if you want to make the most out of your marketing and sales activities, you need to make the most out of your web design and development for your business.