What is Website User Experience (UX) & How to Improve It

Key takeaways:

• Website user experience (UX) refers to the overall experience a user has when visiting a particular website.
• Website UX plays a crucial role in shaping the brand’s perception in the public eye and has a direct impact on achieving business goals.
• Many elements, such as overall content quality, visual outlook, ease of navigation, and others, comprise website UX.
• It can be measured by collecting feedback and tracking various metrics, such as bounce and conversion rate.
• Improving website UX involves fixing errors, updating content, improving navigation, and other enhancements.

Businesses in the digital age depend on their internet presence, particularly their official website. The user experience on that website can make or break a brand’s perception. It might also be the differentiating factor in whether a sale is made or not.

Website user experience (UX) is, therefore, one of the key concerns of business owners trying to make a name for themselves. For up-and-coming brands, minor changes and best practices available to most can make a huge difference. So, we’ll cover the ins and outs of website user experience and how you can improve it.

What is website user experience (UX)?

User experience, or UX for short, refers to the overall experience of the user when interacting with a product, service, or any other aspect of a company’s offerings that requires user interaction. 

Whether it is a software app, a car-washing service, or the queuing system at the post office, we talk about user experience as one of the major factors in evaluating a brand or organization.

Naturally, websites are also subject to user experience. Website user experience refers to the overall experience a user has when engaging with an organization’s website, navigating through its webpages, finding information, making purchases, or performing any other actions. 

The web user experience (UX) design process aims to create the best possible online experience for users, hopefully, turning them into loyal and engaged customers.

UX is related to, but distinct from, two other important concepts: user interface (UI) and customer experience (CX). UI refers to all the design elements through which the user interacts with the product, such as buttons, and as such is part of UX. 

And UX itself is part of CX, which is the overall customer experience when interacting with a particular brand, including everything from getting information about it to buying and using its products.

Why is website user experience important?

People research brands online when deciding whether to become a customer. Along with social media pages, the official website is the most important digital asset representing the brand.

Their experience interacting with the website affects conversion rates, especially when orders are made online. When web users experience unnecessary delays while completing an order or finding information that matters to them, they become irritated.

Friction when navigating the website, poor design, or accessibility issues might ruin your brand image for the user in a way that is very hard to fix. They will not buy from you, they will not try you again, and they will not recommend you to their friends. Most they may do is write you a bad review. 

Great user experience, on the other hand, can make them not only a customer but a brand promoter as well. Thus, improving website UX is one of the major ways to advance overall business goals.

Elements of great website user experience

UX improvements come from understanding the basic elements of user experience. The key aspects of website user experience include:

• User interface, meaning all the interactive elements on the website, such as buttons and text boxes.
• Visual design, including the webpage’s overall layout and visual elements.
• Accessibility, meaning how easy it is to access and navigate the website on different devices or for those with particular disabilities.
• Performance, referring to how fast the website loads, its uptime, and everything else that tells the user it’s working as it’s supposed to.
• Content quality, starting with simple grammar and including the overall value of the content provided.

These are just a few examples of what makes for a bad or great user experience on your website. And each of them can be broken down into even smaller elements. 

Analyzing and measuring website UX success

To improve website UX, one first needs to understand where it stands as is and where it could go. As we have seen, website UX comprises many aspects of the user’s experience. How do we know if the UX on our website is poor, adequate, or exceptional? 

The short answer is, you measure it.

Align UX goals with business goals

Firstly, you can tell how well your website is doing by whether it achieves its goals. 

If it is a major sales channel for you, ask yourself if you are happy with the conversion rate. On the other hand, if you want to build brand recognition through the website, consider how much time visitors spend on it. When such metrics don’t match your expectations, you probably have website UX issues.

Collect feedback

Listen to your actual users and supplement the information you get from them with additional testing. First, gather feedback from users via surveys, online reviews, social media, and everything you can find online. Then, conduct user testing to gather additional data about the usability of your website. Put yourself in the shoes of the user or hire UX professionals to check:

• How long does it take to complete a particular task (find important information, put an item into the basket, etc).
• Display errors, broken down links, hard-to-read text, or visuals that won’t load.
• Bad grammar or low-quality design elements.

The feedback you get from surveys, user testing, or conducting the usability testing yourself will point you clearly in the right direction.

Analyze users’ behaviour

Some of the most important UX metrics are measured by analyzing actual user behavior. There are various tools on the market, ranging from well-known Google Analytics to specialized tools that measure UX by analyzing what customers actually do on your website. Some of the UX metrics and factors to track are:

• Bounce rate, which is the percentage of people who leave without moving past the first webpage.
• User navigation through the website, what they click most, where they stop crawling, and what they ignore completely.
• The point at which users usually abandon the website or the process.

With information from actual interactions, you will be better prepared to improve the user interface.

Utilize HEART framework

The HEART framework, developed by Google, provides a useful toolkit for analyzing UX. HEART tracks five crucial categories: 

• happiness, 
• engagement, 
• adoption,
• retention, 
• task success

The framework combines various qualitative and quantitative data collected through methods outlined above, such as direct customer feedback or bounce rates. Other important metrics include the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which measures how likely a customer is to recommend the product or service.

7 ways to improve website User Experience

Improving user experience involves refining UX design to address all the issues identified during user research. Best practices that lead to UX improvements are available to businesses of all sizes as well as solopreneurs. They are even more powerful when UX metrics have been tracked and can guide very precise action.

Improve basic quality

Minor quality improvements are something you can do with minimal resources. 

Start by fixing all the grammatical errors, unreadable or hard-to-read fonts, color clashes, and similar issues that can annoy the user or make your website less usable. When you have done your basic hygiene tasks, you will be much better-positioned to think about overall UX design and content quality improvements.

Update content constantly

Fix all the broken links and outdated information. Inviting users to take advantage of a sales event when that happened three years ago screams unprofessional. When users visit a webpage, they need to know you are still in business and moving forward, so use recent images whenever possible.

Fit UX design elements to capacity

After doing your user and usability testing, you will be able to better understand what the server and hosting services you are using can handle. Some elements won’t load as quickly as they should, so it might be a good idea to remove them. 

It is better to have a simpler design that works than to pay for elements that appear too slowly or even not at all. 

Simplify navigation

Make sure that users can reach everything they want to as easily as possible. Instructions should be brief and clear. Buttons need to be visible and easy to click. Avoid confusing elements that might seem clickable when they are not.

Improve accessibility

The rise of mobile device usage for browsing and shopping online has been rising for years. Small businesses can no longer afford to neglect user experience on mobile. Ensure that your website’s UX design provides the same ease of access on mobile devices as on personal computers.

Utilize A/B testing

To maintain a top-level UX, you will need to continue monitoring for feedback and identifying potential areas for improvement. One powerful tactic is A/B testing, which gives two different versions of the website to the user base to see which one performs better. Copy, visuals, clickable calls to action, and other website UX  design elements can be tested this way to constantly improve user experience.

Ensure Mobile-First Design 

A growing number of users browse with mobile devices. If your UX design is not optimized for mobile users, you risk losing the lion’s share of your potential customers. Mobile-first design means that every element loads correctly on a mobile screen, and the layout makes it easy for the user to reach and press all the buttons. 

How Jimdo improves website User Experience

Jimdo builds and enhances great website UX by utilizing years of experience and the newest AI-based technology. Created with the goal of making website building accessible to everyone, Jimdo offers built-in design features and automatic mobile optimization. All Jimdo tools and features are created to make providing the best user experience simple, whether you are looking for hands-off solutions or customizable resources.

Summing up

Website user experience is a crucial part of any modern business. Making UX improvements can go a long way in advancing your business goals. As usual, it all starts with analytical work to uncover major issues, which you can then easily fix.

FAQs

What is a website UX?

Website user experience (UX) is the overall experience the user has interacting with the website. 

How to measure the user experience?

Website UX is measured by a combination of qualitative and quantitative metrics, such as user evaluations, bounce rates, task completion rates, and many others. Website heatmaps and other analytical tools help track these metrics.

How to improve website user experience?

Follow website UX best practices, such as simple navigation, clear labels, content quality assurance, and incremental testing and feedback collection. Tools like website heatmaps or Jimdo products can help improve website UX.

How can AI improve website user experience?

AI can improve online user experience by automating some tasks of website building, which helps avoid design mistakes. AI can also be implemented within the website, for example, as a 24/7 responsive assistant that navigates the user through the website. However, in this case, AI should work well, as a bad tool can just as well worsen user experience.