It doesn’t matter how much money you spent on your website if people aren’t able to use it. If you have a design that you think looks good, that doesn’t mean that your users are going to think that it looks good. You have to test everything to make sure that you are doing the best to provide a great user experience, which is why it’s sometimes easier to hire a company such as Clay, who will do the hard work for you. But, we do realize our readers prefer a DIY web design, which is why we decided to put this post together.
Providing a great user experience is more than just looks so make sure you pay close attention to all of the details throughout your site so you can make sure that you are doing the best that you can in all areas.
Competition Analysis
If you don’t look around outside of your site, it is easy to get lost in your own virtual world and think that you’ve got the best functioning and best looking site around. This is why it is important that you do competitor analysis.
Go to Google and type in a term that brings up your company and your competition. Go through the top 5 and get ready to comb through their sites to see what they are doing and what they are not doing.
Make sure you are not just looking at the sites and navigating away. You should put a list of things from each site that you like and a list that you don’t. This will help you understand more how your visitors feel when they are coming to your site. They have their wants and needs as well and when you can understand them better, you can design your sight for them better.
Analysis of Your Own Site
Once you have gone through your competition’s sites, it is time to see how you stack up against the competition. You probably learned some things from the other sites that you visited that you might want to implement on your own site.
Look through the list of things that you put about your competition’s site and see if you’ve implanted them yourself and if there are things that you need to take away.
As you are looking through your site, you need to look for things like bounce rate, time on page, page loading time, etc. You may also notice that you conversion rate could do with some improvement. If you need to improve WordPress site speed, this is an important step to take since people’s attention span has greatly decreased over the years and if you want to keep it, you’ve got to be fast.
Analyze Task People May Be Trying to Accomplish
People are trying to achieve something when they come to your site. Do you know what it is? You most likely have some idea about what people want to accomplish when they come to your site. Whether it is requesting a free quote or estimate, buying a product or subscribing to a service, write down everything they could possibly be trying to do when they come on your site.
Once you write down the list, go to your site and try to do each of these tasks and count how many clicks it takes you to get from the home page to the places where you can take the action that you want to take. If it takes 3, 5 or 10 clicks then you are going to lose people before they actually get to take the action.
Test Website Navigation Intuitiveness
You may have set up your navigation in a way that makes sense to you, but does it make sense to your visitors? If people are familiar with your topic, they might not understand which category something goes in or how to get where they want to go through your navigation.
You can ask people that are not familiar with your industry which category they would think your given topic would go into and see if they match the category to the same one as you have it set to. You may find that you are right on point or you might find that you need to change everything around so that people are able to find what they want quicker and easier.
Watch Users Navigate Through Your Site
Instead of guessing how people use your site, get some friends and family or a test group and have them visit your site from their normal viewing device. Ask them to perform a task and see how they go about using your site to get it done. You will learn a lot about how your users and interacting with your site when you watch a few people on your site.
It may be tempting to catch them or guide them through the process, but it is important to allow them to navigate on their own even if they look to you for help so you can see how they figure out the site when you aren’t there with them.
Conclusion
Taking the time to make sure that you are giving your users a good experience is going to pay off. While it may seem a little tedious and boring to get through the process, everyone that visits your site will be glad that you optimized your site to give them a good experience.
Giving people a good user experience can mean the difference between a conversion and a bounce back from your website so if you are thinking about skipping this part of the process, make sure that you sit down and get it done.
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