Have you ever had the frustrating experience of visiting a website that won’t load, or is hard to navigate? No one likes to click on a website and discover that it doesn’t work. User experience, or UX, is an essential part of eCommerce and your conversion rates. How your website flows will help to determine the number of users you have and how many actions they take on your website.

Brands that succeed in eCommerce often succeed in design-led strategy, as well. Design matters, because it’s a form of communication. Design is a part of user experience, and conversion rates are heavily impacted by it. This impact is so significant that your website design and your conversion rates typically change in direct correlation with one another. So, if you upgrade your website design, you will likely see an uptick in your conversation rates, whereas, if you ignore website design, your conversion rates will probably slowly plummet. In fact, 58% of customers say that a good website design will make them more likely to purchase from the website.

For many companies, the goal of eCommerce is to get as many sales as possible. To reach this goal, one key thing you can do as a business owner is to make your website as simple and as smooth as possible. A focus on user experience is one of the best ways to achieve this (we’ll refer to this as UX from here on out).

What Is UX Design and Why Does It Matter?

So, what is this magical UX? Simply put, UX is the tools and the items that make a given customer’s experience on your website better. Its purpose is simple. If you want customers to return, you should give them what they want. UX will help you do that. 

UX encompasses everything that helps you optimize your site for visitors and bring them to your website in the first place. This includes transitions, navigation, loading speed, and everything in between. Effective UX matters because it will make your visitor’s experience on your website much smoother and more positive. Especially effective UX will answer your visitors’ questions before they’ve even left the website, and will answer ones they didn’t even know they had. The best UX will draw visitors in based only on their brief understanding of your website in their search results. As a diverse and multi-faceted tool, UX should cover every aspect of your website and its outreach.

The most essential thing about UX is how it can affect your conversion rate optimization (CRO). There are many types of CRO, but UX is most concerned with how you optimize the user’s experience to make your completion rates better. UX has so many benefits and so much potential, and one of the biggest areas where this comes in clutch is in giving your visitors an optimal experience.

What About UI?

Chances are, if you’ve heard of UX, you’ve also heard of UI. Since both relate to your website’s design and productivity, it’s sometimes easy to confuse the two. UX is the tool that transforms how your website functions. It covers your website’s loading speed, how customers can navigate through it (flow), and other things like how customers interact overall with your website. UI, on the other hand, is the tool that transforms how your website looks. UI is mainly related to design. It works to add images, place pieces of text in a logical place, and complete other tasks like where you put your dropdown menu. 

Although these two parts of website optimization often work together, we’ll focus mainly on UX in this article. Having good UX will ensure that customers can also enjoy the excellent UI experience of your website.

What Is the Impact of UX Design on Website Conversions?

Because the ultimate goal of UX is to increase your conversion rates, good UX will push up your conversion rate optimization. Through the power of UX, you can revitalize your website and transform it into something fresh and user-friendly.

What UX Changes Will Increase Website Conversions?

More specifically, UX impacts your website conversions through a variety of techniques. These techniques are what will make your website’s UX stand out. One is to change the flow of your website so it’s easier to use. For example, if you mention a topic or product, make sure to include a link to it. This will help customers be able to find that product without searching high and low across your whole website. Spending time searching for something is often a purchasing deterrent for customers; they are more likely to buy your product if it is only one click away. 

Another way you can implement UX to increase your conversion rates is by making your website flow intuitive. Fill your homepage with relevant information by including your newest products or blog posts and adding basic information like who you are or your contact information, depending on what kind of site you run. Customers should not have to search your website to know who you are or to find what they came for. Instead, it should be right in front of them.

Since UX is all about making website navigation seamless while simultaneously providing valuable information, giving your visitors a smooth and memorable visit is essential. If users can find everything easily and follow your business’s message, they will remember your website as a reliable and positive source. These kinds of changes can make a massive impact on your conversion rate. And it’s all done through UX!

How To Conduct a UX Audit of Your Website

Improving your conversion rates correlates with improving your UX. If your UX is good, customers can buy products without running into major technical issues or getting lost on their way to the shopping cart. So how do you figure out where customers are having trouble?

If you want to conduct a UX audit on your website, you should check things like

• The conversion funnel. This is the process from when a customer enters your website to when they either purchase something or leave it behind in the cart. If you can find the moments when customers tend to abandon products, then you know where to begin improving your UX. For example, if you find that most customers are leaving the website without even adding something to the cart, you may want to explore making your brand’s reliability more obvious or making website navigation as a whole simpler.
• The website design. Sometimes the problem isn’t that customers are abandoning products halfway to the purchase button, it’s that the website design is so unconventional that they have a hard time even beginning to look for products. In this case, the best option is to give your website a makeover. Try a new layout, new color scheme, new homepage, or all of the above. This is a task relegated to UI, so if you struggle with this, you might want to try the UI branch of website overhauls. 
• The site navigation. If your customers are having a hard time finding what they want on your website, then you may need to improve your website navigation. Whether it means adding a dropdown menu or making your website optimized for mobile devices, there are plenty of ways to improve this feature of your business through UX. Sometimes all you need is something intuitive like a search bar. That way customers can simply search for what they want.
• The checkout experience. Customers may become frustrated and leave products in the cart if they are having a hard time checking out. We’ve all had that annoying moment when we put in all our information, but something is wrong and the order won’t submit. Often, customers who don’t have luck the first time around won’t give the purchase a second try. Instead of losing a customer at the last second, improving your shopping experience and checkout process will guide customers to make that purchase. You can also eliminate any confusing buttons or unneeded steps. Make the checkout process as simple as possible and request as little information as possible. The easier the checkout, the more customers will choose to purchase from you.

A simple audit of your website can help you identify these problematic areas. After you’ve completed your audit and improved your website, the next step is to watch and see the difference in your conversion rates. With better UX, customers will begin to find what a resource you offer theme! After this, you can continue making improvements based on the new customer data that you glean.

Analyzing User Behavior and Identifying Pain Points

Once you’ve completed the audit of your website, you may be wondering how to know exactly if your user is running into other difficulties. Your audit will reveal some of the main problems in your UX, but are there others that customers consistently meet? Even if your conversion rates go up, that doesn’t mean that your website is perfect. Where, you might ask, are customers across the board running into problems? What you’re wondering about is called a pain point. 

So, what is a pain point? For a user, a pain point is anything that causes frustration or negative emotions when using your website. It might be something simple like the loading speed of your homepage, or something more complex like having trouble finding specific products. So how can you identify and overcome these pains so that your website doesn’t cause customers frustration?

To identify a pain point, you can look at some different areas. For example, one way to start figuring out where your customers run into trouble on your website is to take surveys and ask questions. Make sure that you ask people from different demographics, age groups, and product preferences. Look over your interviews and surveys more than once. Get fresh opinions on what the interviewee might have meant. Ask questions that imply as little bias as possible, and be ready to take the hit if you get negative responses back. Finally, give all of your data a fair look. If you don’t examine the data in detail, you probably won’t get the answers you want from it.

These steps will guide you to finding the common pain points that your customers experience. But now that you know what they are, how do you overcome them?

Overcoming Consumer Pain Points,

Fortunately, these problems meet their solution in UX. They may seem overwhelming, but there are several simple steps you can take to make the process of UX changes on your website manageable. 

So, now that you know which problems you face, it’s time to form a plan to defeat them. However, it can be overwhelming to even know where to start, especially if you are dealing with multiple problems at once. First, you should choose only one or two problems to tackle at once. Rank them in order of importance, and start with the top two.

Then, take your top problem and break it down into manageable steps. For example, if you are dealing with problems in how fast your website loads, you can break it down first into figuring out what slows your loading, and then correcting that first on the home page, then on the next most commonly visited page, and so forth until you have finished your number one problem. And your tool for fixing slow loading? UX, of course!

Next, you will need to make sure that your changes have fixed the problem. As frustrating as it can be, sometimes the changes don’t always make the problems go away as you anticipated. So, to make sure that your changes are doing their job, test them. If your customers are not experiencing any improvements in their experience, then it’s time to try a new solution. However, if your changes are making a big difference, then you can move to the third step.

This step is to measure your results. No solution is ever perfect. As you learn more about how customers respond to the changes you’ve made, you can continue to fix small problems until the whole system is working very smoothly.

Through this process, you can overcome pain points and make your website run smoothly. A UX audit will begin this process; beating pain points through UX will complete it. 

Key Elements of a High-Converting Landing Page

Another area where UX will be your best friend is in how you create your landing page. UX helps a landing page function so that it will meet your customers’ needs and give them an easy, smooth journey throughout your website. The most important thing to remember about UX is that it aims to give the customer a valuable experience. Your landing page is the place where you need to demonstrate this most clearly. 

There are multiple ways that you can make an excellent landing page. Some key aspects of one that UX specifically targets are:

• Aim for a fast loading speed. Your website needs to be able to load quickly not just on laptops and desktops, but especially on tablets and mobile phones. These are the most commonly used devices for website skimming. So, aim high and make loading speed one of your top UX priorities.
• Include stand-out CTAs. Your landing page should include stand-out CTAs that make a clear point. Often, people briefly glance through a webpage and then evaluate whether or not to continue taking action based on the landing page. So, your CTA is your main pitch to convince your audience to embrace your product or service. Remember to make  your CTA link to what it says it does: this link is what brings customers into your base. UX can help you perfect the flow of that link and make it easy for customers to keep engaging with your company.
• Provide all of your contact information. This one is huge to help customers trust you. If they see that they can contact you through email, phone, and an actual physical address, they are much more inclined to believe that you are a real company and trust you. Also, customers may need to contact you about your products. If you include contact information, this makes it much easier for them to have their questions answered.

These are just a few of the steps you can take to create a usable and logical landing page. If your customers’ first impressions of your page are that it is trustworthy and easy to use, then you can expect heightened conversion rates.

Best Practices for Mobile UX Design

Since one of the best ways to design an effective website is to optimize it for mobile use, there are a few steps you can take to make your mobile website succeed:

• Remember that most people have slow internet speeds. This means that you’ll need to have a website that will load fast on little data. One way that you can achieve this is to only load the essential portions of your content at first, and then let it continue to load other pages as the user navigates through your website.
• Keep any forms that customers will have to fill out short. Typing on a mobile device is a lot harder than typing on a laptop. We’ve all had to fill out forms on our phones, sighing as we do. Bless your customers by keeping your forms short!
• Make your website friendly to common gestures in phone usage. These include things like tapping, swiping, and pinching. If these are the easiest ways for customers to navigate through your website, then you will not need to instruct them on how to use your website.
• Set up your mobile website to be cohesive with your desktop version. Customers should be able to expect a uniform experience throughout the different versions of your website. You can do this by keeping the layout very similar to your desktop version and keeping your UI design aspects consistent. This also keeps your brand’s trustworthiness higher.

Making your webpage friendly to mobile users is a key step in increasing your conversion rates. Because so many users navigate websites on their phones, it’s very important to make mobile engagement easy and seamless. 

UX is one of the best ways to reach more customers and increase your conversion rates. By making your platform user-friendly, you will create a seamless experience that consumers find attractive. UX lets you do this through mobile optimization, landing page improvement, and resolving pain points. Overall, UX is an essential tool for any eager business developer to increase the function of their website.

Improve Your Website Conversions With Effective UX Design Strategies!

Here at Hit Your Mark, we harness the power of UX to improve your website conversions. By implementing effective strategies and marketing techniques, we will broaden your range of customers and increase your conversion rates. Our experts are trained extensively in digital marketing and have insight into even the most complex digital marketing challenges and needs. Through our attention to detail, we engage in comprehensive performance marketing, email marketing, content creation, and overall project management. Contact us today for a consultation and the opportunity to work with a company that executes plans with transparency and trust.