A user-friendly website boosts engagement and conversions. Key features: fast loading, clear navigation, structured layout, mobile-friendly, and strong calls-to-action.
Do users love your website? Check out these straightforward and effective strategies for making it more user-friendly.
Let’s assume you’re browsing a site. What’s that one thing that’ll make you close a tab quickly? For many, the first answer is if the site takes forever to load. The next checkpoint is often how well a user can navigate the site.
Usability - that’s it! It’s the key foundation stone on which web development should be built. Developing a website using this approach falls well within the design thinking principles. The process entails putting yourself in the users’ shoes, defining what matters most to them, and developing a site that’ll tick most if not all, the boxes on their checklist.
Making your website more user-friendly isn’t just a fancy addition. It is critical because user-friendly websites keep visitors engaged. This helps reduce the bounce rate and ensures the traffic gets the message. This helps you generate leads and ultimately convert them into active buyers.
We agree it’s a big deal. So, what does user-friendly website design entail? The simplest answer as to what makes a website user-friendly includes:
Now, the question you need to answer is, how do you develop such a website? Below is a quick breakdown of how to make a website user-friendly.
Do you have an experienced website development team? How about time and resources? The process can be costly, and in such instances, it would be easier to focus website development on what works best for your team. You’ll still have a website at the end of the process. However, it will most likely fail to meet user expectations.
Failure to meet potential user expectations is a surefire way to lose them, so adopting a process that prioritizes users’ needs is highly recommended. The user-centric approach puts you in their shoes. This enables you to spot areas that could cause issues, a strategy that allows you to develop a website designed for users, not merely what works best for your development team.
In the early days, websites were mainly focused on aesthetics to capture users' attention. This then evolved to striving to impress search engine crawlers to rank higher on search results. Today, this still counts, but the process is now dominated by simplicity.
A simple and neat layout makes everything more accessible for users regardless of the device used. This is mainly regarding user interface website design because if the interface is cluttered, users can hardly find anything, let alone navigate from one page or section to the next. A simplistic design eliminates all the chaos, ensuring the website is functional and user-friendly.
There was a time when accessibility was mainly focused on optimizing websites for mobile devices. While mobile optimization is still critical, it isn’t the only accessibility element you must consider. Some of the key accessibility elements that help enhance user-friendliness include:
You’ve embraced a unified visual style, which works well for your branding. There’s no need to alter this approach, but you should be creative. Ask design-thinking speakers, who will tell you how powerful creativity is in any successful endeavor.
From this perspective, design thinking acknowledges what human brains associate with certain colors. For instance, while your logo might have a playful red shade, it wouldn’t be very effective if it were the dominating color on your website focused on healthy living. That’s because red is often associated with danger or anger, which don’t align well with health.
Be creative when picking your brand colors and using them on the website to ensure they appeal to the right emotions for each segment. You’d be amazed by how well a playful and creative approach can help you integrate even those seemingly challenging brand colors into your website and elevate user experience.
Modern users understand the many dangers online activities could expose them to due to the ever-rising cyber threats. They consider how safe a website is before engaging with it, especially if they have to input some information, such as when purchasing or subscribing.
The check means secure websites offer users a sense of safety. This enhances their experience, encouraging them to keep interacting with your website. The best part is that the security measures also help mitigate data breaches that could taint your reputation or cause notable financial losses. Among the top and must-have security measures that make a website more user-friendly include:
Security may not be a top item when considering what makes a website user-friendly, but the credibility, trust, and sense of security it delivers make it a vital consideration. After all, you want a website that people willingly and confidently use, not one that appears fishy.
Imagine we are still talking about speed in today’s fast-paced world. It’s still a notable mention since it can easily skip your thoughts. Among the simple yet effective ways to ensure your website is fast include:
These measures can make your website and all its contents load fast, which modern users crave as they navigate their busy lives.
Do users have a clear action path when interacting with your website? Visible, clear, and direct CTAs enhance engagement and help eliminate the confusion about what comes next. Besides CTAs, consider other actions like optimized error messages, which make them helpful, such as explaining what a user needs to do to correct errors, such as when filing forms.
Another useful aspect to consider is the feedback on buttons and links. For example, you can creatively design links or buttons that change color when a user clicks or hovers, helping the user know the action taken was recognized.
You’ve done a lot and made your website more user-friendly, but the process never ends. There’s always room for improvement; the best or only practical way to identify this is to keep track of the website’s performance. You can use tools like Google Analytics to track user behavior, which will help you identify and proactively fix potential issues.
Implementing the above design-thinking strategies can help you make your website more accessible, intuitive, and enjoyable. These are all signs of a user-friendly website, and such an impact enhances the chances of keeping visitors glued on the site long enough for your message to be passed, allowing you to achieve the website’s goals.
Are you ready to inspire your website development team to embrace design thinking? Let design-thinking speakers ignite that spark and bring creativity to your team. It’ll help them unlock their potential and design a user-friendly website that keeps delivering.