Are you looking forward to bringing more traffic to your website? Do you wish to retain them for the long term to convert the leads into sales? Are you looking to thrive among competitors with one edge that will set you apart? The answer to all these questions lies in usability, aka the user-friendly experience that your website provides.
Humans today thrive on ease and convenience in performing every task. This exact concept also applies to websites, where the better the usability, the higher the website’s success rate. User-friendly means that the user is able to browse and locate the information they need quickly and efficiently without hassle.
Moreover, it focuses on delivering a comfortable, intuitive, and entertaining experience that brings them back for more. However, before we dive into the specifics of what makes a website user-friendly, let’s understand its significance.
Page Contents
Significance of a user-friendly website
A user considers websites as the portrayal of the quality and reputation of the business. Therefore, encountering a poorly performing website and apps can garner negative emotions about the particular brand.
The user-friendly component of your website instills confidence among the users, which inspires them to come back and even brings more traffic to your site.
When your web design misses this essential component, the following emotions lay heavy on the user:
- Annoyance
- Frustration
- Anger
- No trust
- Disrespect and disappointment
Therefore, if you wish to reverse or avoid these feelings and stay on the positive side of your user, make sure to follow the tips mentioned below.
Must-have characteristics to make a user-friendly website
Let’s take a look at what you need to establish a user-friendly website:
Responsiveness and compatibility
Today, users aren’t just accessing your website through a one-size fit desktop or screen. They have phones, tablets, and other electronic devices of different shapes and sizes to view your site. Therefore, your website needs to fit each of these screens properly without showing errors, overwriting, etc.
Optimize your website for mobiles and other devices. Responsible and compatible websites involve:
- Easily resize for navigation in different devices, ranging from laptops to small-screen phones.
- Apt readability and spacing with automatic reformatting and resizing of texts and images
- Receive high marks from search engines to rank well.
Scannable content
Presenting your content in condensed paragraphs can lead to the burial of essential and relevant information. Users do not like spending hours looking for little points in big paragraphs. Instead, pointers, heading tags, bold, italic texts, and related ways help the user satisfy their needs easily.
Content broken into pieces is easily digestible and predictable throughout the site. To implement this characteristic, you can do the following:
- A style guide or content formatting techniques can help frame your content accordingly.
- Incorporate lists, bullet points, headings, small paragraphs, etc. that break things up and make it easy to navigate the page.
- Describe the topic and its essentials first and then give room to the secondary information.
- Let the white space embrace your content properly.
Quick loading speed
There’s nothing more frustrating than a website page taking forever to load. By forever, it means anything that takes more than six seconds. Users today are pretty impatient and need quick results, or they’ll leave. This enhances your bounce rate and creates a negative impression in the user’s mind about your website. Therefore, you need to focus on fastening the site speed.
Several tools are available online for you to check your site and server speed. Ensure to maintain a three to six-second or even lesser loading speed.
You can compress your images and use limited plugins and widgets to increase the page speed. Optimizing images can not only improve website load speed but also can increase website engagement and improve conversions.
If the navigation on your page isn’t clutter-free, it will affect your website’s usability. Therefore, ensure that moving through your page isn’t a Herculean task for the user. If abundant information is available on your site, use a limited numbered menu and drop-downs and categories to put the content.
You can create innovative navigation systems through advanced DHTML and JavaScript libraries. Not just the menu, you should also consider things like:
- A search field for users to look for the exact information on your site
- Creative ways for content exploration in the site, for instance- creating categories of top 10s, most popular, etc.
- Forming a custom 404 page.
- Practice strong internal linking to keep the user interested and give them as much information as possible.
The clarity in Calls-to-Actions (CTAs)
Your calls to action must be placed logically and clearly. They should compel the user to take action without being a hassle. A noticeable button, highlighting in the navigation, featuring in the side menu, etc., are a few ways to make it easy to locate.
These CTAs should clarify what the next step will look like if the user decides to proceed. For instance, if they click on a certain CTA to register for an event, they shouldn’t be directed to a donation page. Also, you need to place only one CTA per page so that the user isn’t overwhelmed.
Simplify your forms
You can collect information from your website visitors using simple and easy-to-navigate forms. However, you are also at risk of losing several leads by making a complex form-filling procedure. User-friendly designs make it quick and simplified for people to submit complete details. Therefore, use the following accessibility tips to ensure user-friendliness:
- Only ask for crucial information and no unnecessary fields
- Maintain a logical sequence in your questions
- An obvious button to submit the form
- Put accurate labels for every field
- Follow good design principles for your form
- Provide suggestions and tooltips
- A clear message on the screen once completed
- Ensure accurate validation
Incorporating all these elements and components in your form can help extract essential information from the visitors and also keep their trust intact.
Bottom line
A user-friendly website complements your web design and layout and ensures that your end user doesn’t face any trouble. By emphasizing the characteristics mentioned above, you can gain your visitor’s trust and ensure that they return to you when needed.
BuzzInfoMedia is an all in one spot to bring you the latest and trending blogs on Marketing, Health, Business, Technology, and more. We give our best to provide you with fresh and accurate information on different topics.