Improving a Website’s User Experience Through Metrics
As the digital world becomes more widespread and competitive, a brand’s web user experience (UX) is no longer an afterthought––it’s a necessity. User experience has become an integral part of your brand’s marketing sustainability, which is why learning how to improve the UX of your website is imperative to your marketing team’s success.
But What is User Experience and Why is Website UX Important?
Have you ever encountered that spinning wheel on websites when it’s lagging? Don’t you just hate those? It not only ruins your experience, but it also distracts and delays you from what you intended to do on the site in the first place.
Just like a well-oiled machine, your website should function flawlessly. With 5.35 billion internet users worldwide, your brand has the opportunity to leverage and cater to those users and lead them to your website. With a positive UX, these users can have a smooth and frustration-free experience that potentially leads to their conversion and engagements, become your brand advocates, and reduce your bounce rate.
So, how do you know if your website is delivering an exceptional user experience? This is where UX metrics come into play. Speeding up your website is one thing. There are still other key factors that can influence the overall satisfaction of your customers when using your website.
Key Elements of a Good UX Design
Before jumping into UX metrics, let’s first talk about what makes for a good website design.
1. User-Centric Design
When creating a website, you always have to think about your users’ preferences and behaviors throughout its design process.
- Use the color theory to establish a palette that reflects your brand all while pleasing to the eyes. While loud and contrasting colors can be effective when grabbing attention, it has to be complemented by muted tones to not strain the eyes. You can use tools like Adobe Color or even Pinterest to research the perfect palette for your web design.
- Choose the right fonts for your site that are both clear and in line with your brand guidelines. While a mix and match of serif and sans-serif fonts can be effective, make sure the ones you choose perfectly highlight your message. The purpose of the font is to communicate. If your users can’t read the text, they are likely to abandon your webpage. Try using Google Fonts to check for different styles and combinations.
- Create a clear visual hierarchy on all your web elements to avoid cluttered viewing. Use basic design principles like the golden ratio, focal point, balance, movement, white space, rule of thirds, or any of the other visual rules. Doing so can effectively direct your reader to understand your message with how you intended it to be received.
2. Intuitive Navigation
Streamline your website’s navigation paths and menu structures to guide users effortlessly through your website.
For example, if your website is used as a portfolio of your company’s experience, the home page should serve as an introduction to your business. This can be followed by a separate page discussing your products and services, then another one to provide in-depth information on your projects, and another page dedicated to how your visitors can contact you.
By organizing your website’s navigation, you can clearly showcase how your business can add value to potential clients. It can contribute to increases in leads and engagements.
3. Optimized for Search Engines
Aside from designing a visually appealing and user-friendly website, it’s important to implement the best practices in search engine optimization (SEO) to improve your page ranking in search engines, especially if you are an SEO agency.
- Do keyword research to identify the right words to target and use in your messaging.
- Practice technical optimization to ensure that your pages load quickly, are mobile-friendly, and don’t have broken links.
- Optimize your content and publish keyword-rich posts to improve the credibility of your website. This can make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your pages.
- Build high-quality backlinks from other reputable websites to improve your brand’s authority in your respective industry.
These three elements are the basic practices that make good and dynamic websites. Ultimately, the goal is to positively impact your customers’ experience as they get to know your business. Paying attention to these details is an important part of establishing your company’s digital representation.
User Experience Metrics to Analyze
Once you’ve established your brand’s website, tracking its performance is the next step. Using the data points from key UX metrics can provide you with valuable insights into how users interact with your pages and identify areas for improvement.
UX metrics can be classified into four groups:
- Quantitative Metrics: These are the numerical data points that give you insights into user behavior and interactions with your website. An example of this would be data on how long your users spend time browsing through your page.
- Qualitative Metrics: By the word itself, qualitative data isn’t represented by numbers. This information captures your users’ feelings and experiences through testimonials, interviews, or reviews.
- Behavioral Metrics: Measuring user behavior refers to their actions and engagement with your website. They answer questions like “What do my users click on?” or “How far do they scroll per page?”
- Attitudinal Metrics: Like qualitative data, this metric captures how your users feel about your products or services. These can be measured through surveys and interviews as well.
Now, with these main groups, there are more specific factors you can focus on as you analyze your website’s performance:
- Engagement: This metric refers to how actively users interact with your website. Measuring this data includes the length of their session, interaction rate, and return rate.
- Usability: The usability of your website dictates the overall experience of your users. It refers to how easy it is for them to browse through your pages and understand your services.
- Task Success Rate: This data tracks how successful users are in completing their desired actions on your page. Were the buttons clickable? Did they encounter errors? How long did it take them to finish their task?
- Conversion Rate: Aside from user satisfaction, it’s also important for you to know if your website’s marketing strategies work. Tracking the percentage of users who completed their desired action like making a purchase or signing up a form lets you know the effectiveness of your pages.
- Loading Time: The fast-paced environment of the internet means that every second counts. If your website takes too long to load, your users are more likely to abandon it––negatively affecting your retention rate.
The goal of tracking these metrics is to achieve customer satisfaction through UX. By closely monitoring them and conceptualizing strategies for improving your website, you build on your brand’s reputation and potentially increase your awareness, engagement, and conversion.
How to Improve the User Experience on Your Website
Now that you know how to improve the UX of a website, it’s time to take action! Here are some steps you can take to elevate your brand’s web user experience:
- Focus on User Needs: One of the most important rules in design is that it’s human-centered. When you create, be sure to take a step back and consider your target audience. Think about their needs, their pain points, and how you can use your product or service to address them.
- Conduct User Testing: Naturally, the next step after strategizing and designing is to test its functionality. Get a group of customers or internal team members to test your website. Observe how they interact with it and adjust your pages based on their review.
- A/B Testing: Performing A/B tests allows you to compare different versions of your websites to see which one performs better with users. Test out layouts, headings, calls to action, and images to identify which ones resonate the most with your brand’s market.
- Prioritize Content Quality: Building a full-functioning and visually appealing website is great. However, it has to be backed up by engaging and credible content. Provide valuable information to your audience that addresses their search intent. Doing so can help your brand become a thought leader in your industry.
Prioritizing your user experience and utilizing UX metrics can transform your website into a powerful leads and conversion machine. Remember, a happy user is a loyal user––and they are your brand’s biggest champion.
Ready to Improve Your Website’s User Experience?
Creating websites with optimized UX designs can be difficult especially if you’re brand is managing multiple systems and platforms. Remaining consistent with your marketing communications is challenging as it is, and the continuous innovations in technology make it more difficult to keep up.
At Truelogic, we’re passionate about crafting exceptional user experiences. And with our expertise in digital marketing and web design, we can help you leverage the power of UX metrics to understand your audience and design websites that can generate more leads, engagements, and conversions.
Contact us today for a digital marketing consultation and let’s discuss how we can help you achieve your brand goals!