Why You Watch: User-Friendly Website Design Tips

• Menu navigation: Make it effortless for users to find what they need through well-organized, easy-to-understand menus on your website.
• Content placement: Optimize your layout to guide visitors with ease to content that they are looking for.
• User journey: Ensure every interaction is intuitive, and there are not too many steps to find content of relevance.

Learn how to create a website that keeps your audience coming back. A user-friendly website is key to creating a simple and intuitive user experience. Don’t miss this opportunity to elevate your digital presence!

Free Resource: Get a free review of the user experience (UX) of your website by requesting a free marketing and UX analysis from CueCamp today. You will receive a report with recommendations for your website.

About the Speaker: Michel Ann Sharritt

Cue Camp, Founder and Vice President

Michel Sharritt, a leader in playability and usability, has over a decade of experience helping Fortune 100/500 companies like Microsoft, Disney, and Sony create engaging, accessible, and successful products. An expert in game design and user experience, Michel has presented globally and published extensively on usability, accessibility, and design methodologies.

The post User-Friendly Website Design Tips (Webinar) appeared first on CueCamp.

1. Make Navigation Simple and Intuitive

Navigation is a critical component of UX. Visitors should be able to find what they are looking for quickly and easily. A well-designed navigation menu should be simple, clear, and intuitive. Consider using clear and concise language, organized categories, and a hierarchical structure that guides visitors to the information they need. Want a research-driven report on your website for free? Ask CueCamp for a free UX analysis of your website.

2. Use High-Quality Visual Content

Visual content, such as images and videos, can be extremely impactful in engaging visitors and improving UX. High-quality visual content can help visitors better understand the information being presented and can break up large blocks of text, making it easier to read. When selecting images and videos, be sure to choose high-quality, relevant content that supports your message.

3. Provide Relevant and Valuable Content

The content of your website is one of the most important aspects of UX. Make sure your content is relevant to your target audience and provides value to them. This can include information about your products or services, blog posts, and resources such as how-to guides or eBooks. Keep your content updated and consider using a content management system to make it easy to manage and update your website’s content.

4. Make Sure Your Website is Mobile-Friendly

With the increasing use of mobile devices, it is more important than ever to make sure your website is mobile-friendly. A mobile-friendly website should be optimized for smaller screens, with easy-to-use navigation and clear, concise content. Consider using responsive design to ensure that your website looks great on any device.

5. Optimize for Speed

Website speed is a critical component of UX. Visitors expect websites to load quickly and will quickly become frustrated if a website takes too long to load. Make sure your website is optimized for speed by using a fast hosting service, compressing images and other media, and using a content delivery network (CDN) if necessary.

6. Consider User Feedback

Finally, it’s important to consider user feedback when designing and improving your website. Ask for feedback from your customers, friends, and family and use this feedback to make changes to your website that will improve the user experience. You can also use analytics tools to track how visitors are using your website and make changes based on the data.

In conclusion, improving the user experience for your website can have a significant impact on the success of your business. Free tools are available to review your website’s UX, such as CueCamp’s free user experience analysis. By following these tips, small business owners can create a website that is user-friendly, visually appealing, and provides value to their visitors. In doing so, they can increase website traffic, customer loyalty, and overall business growth.

The post User Experience Tips for Websites appeared first on CueCamp.

1. Find Your Best-Selling Products

First, conduct a bit of research on your business to find out what sells the best. You may already know this intuitively, but research into actual sales figures and profit margins will be of use. In certain cases, great-selling products or services may not generate income for your business due to slim profit margins. Alternatively, you may wish to prioritize other products / services with less traffic, but higher margins.

Additionally, consult your website and social media analytics to see what actually interests your audience. Particular landing pages or social media posts may receive more traffic than you realize, which is worth noting. You might start by examining a subset of products or services, focusing efforts to generate powerful landing pages that convert. Certain businesses (such as an e-commerce clothing store) may have hundreds of products with a different type of sales cycle. Understanding how and why your customers buy from you will help in the design of good landing pages. For example, an online clothing store with $20 items will have a shorter sales cycle than stores selling $1000+ items.

Finally, to help refine your list, a business SWOT analysis can highlight both successful and problematic areas to change. A SWOT analysis looks at Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats: serving as a lens to examine your business. A brief analysis of these four categories reveals products or services that need attention and a marketing redesign. In addition, opportunities for growth are typically revealed that can help improve your digital marketing efforts.

2. Design Attention-Grabbing Landing Pages

Following the analysis done in step 1, you can focus on designing landing pages that grab the attention of your customers. The SWOT analysis (from step 1) will clarify the unique value proposition of your business. Leveraging what sets you apart from your competitors will dramatically improve your marketing. Drawing the attention of your clients to these unique properties will show why they should buy your product or service. Focusing on what it can do for clients (from their perspective) supplies a compelling reason to make a purchase. Be sure to present a powerful, unique value proposition.

For example, when Apple, Inc. releases a new product, they market it clearly with their users in mind. Rather than listing out technical specs first, Apple makes use of vibrant imagery from actual product usage, showing us what the product can do. For instance, iPhone marketing will headline how it is capable of low-light photography, and show crisp images taken in low-light. These may include someone blowing out birthday candles in the dark or sitting around a campfire at night. These contextual examples help people imagine what owning the new product might be like. Concrete examples show users what they can do themselves with the product.

Other phone manufacturers may try to tout superior hardware in their product (such as the camera’s F-stop or shutter speed; or more powerful hardware specifications). However, Apple creates a compelling reason to buy through examples of use, using storytelling and vibrant imagery. Finally, a clear call-to-action is presented: a button to ‘buy’ the product. This enables users to enjoy the described benefits of ownership, as conveyed by their marketing and storytelling.

3. Create a Powerful Call-to-Action for Lead Generation

A good strategy for designing landing pages is to place yourself in the shoes of a typical customer. Make sure that marketing content speaks to your customer’s goals and desires. Do not communicate from your own perspective. Tell a story or show an example of a client using the product or service to communicate from their perspective. Rather than starting with what you offer, addresses how you meet their wants and needs first. This helps prospective clients imagine themselves using your product or service while raising social capital.

Once you’ve created compelling landing pages for your top products or services, what can you do to raise conversion rates? Analyzing your marketing for clear calls to action will shed light on whether you are compelling your audience to take further action. Frequently, we want customers to make a purchase. However, most business models and sales cycles are not this straightforward. Often, businesses want their prospects to ‘take the next step’ and reach out. This may be requesting users to send a message or call the business. If this is the case, the call-to-action should be as straightforward and simple as possible.

What is the End Goal for Lead Generation?

For each landing page, decide on the best ‘next step’ for your sales cycle and for lead generation. Then, focus on making that process as simple as possible. In other words, analyze the landing page at a macro and micro level to be sure the process is easy. Want users to reach out? If so, a short form at the bottom of the page may be best for lead generation. Asking users to fill out a long form will probably cause many of them to fall off the bandwagon. Too many form fields can cause users to question why so much of their personal information is needed. Or it may simply annoy them by having to spend too much time filling out the form.

To conclude, this step should focus on compelling your prospects to act and making that action as easy as possible. Analyzing the user experience (UX) of the landing page is an excellent way to see what needs improvement. Streamlining your landing page UX and fixing issues will result in better lead generation. Business processes might be considered as well, including how transactions are managed. If users fill out a form, who gets it? Integrating forms with a CRM tool (software for customer-relationship management) could be a smart decision. A good place to start might be with a free UX audit from CueCamp.

4. Analyze & Create Resources of Interest

Take a multi-pronged approach to your digital marketing and create interest by offering resources to potential customers. Using the list generated in step 1, think about any resources that might help your customers engage with your business. For instance, a marketing company might realize that their audience often wants to learn about email marketing basics. In this example, creating a short guide as a downloadable PDF will capture prospects. Asking users to fill out a short form (name, company, email address) will capture leads for future prospecting.

Downloadable guides, e-books, blog posts, interactive workshops, and how-to videos are a handful of resources that you can use to generate interest. These efforts support a digital marketing strategy that makes an effective use of your website as a lead generation machine.

5. Newsletters and Social Media Posts

A monthly newsletter with valuable information or discounts may be a way to stay connected with customers, without overwhelming them with too many messages. A proper balance of touchpoints, with high quality information, is key. Email newsletters can offer resources of interest, upcoming sales, or industry news. In cases, segmenting your email marketing list will allow more personalized, customized email marketing to your audience. For instance, if you own an online clothing store, emails might be personalized based on gender, shopping habits, or other interests. As shown above, emails can be sent to customers that did not complete their purchase with an incentive to do so. An analysis of your marketing strategy and business objectives will clarify the type of resources you can offer for the highest impact.

Similarly, social media can be an effective way to draw people to engage with your brand. Like newsletters, a suitable amount of content for your business will help generate quality conversions. Posting low-quality content daily can overwhelm those following your brand, causing users to unfollow you on social media. Alternatively, posting too infrequently can cause a loss of interest. Analyzing your business objectives and designing a social media strategy to create a buzz for your business will draw prospective clients to your website. Additionally, hashtag research can separate your audience by interest, demographics, and location: enabling you to deliver personalized content to their social media feed.

6. Use Paid Ads & SEO for Lead Generation

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is concerned with optimizing landing pages (and websites) to rank highly on Google search. According to Google, the first five organic search results capture over 67% of all clicks. If your website ranks below the first page or search results, SEO can help improve your search rank to capture more traffic, which leads to more sales. Further, SEO drives 1000%+ more traffic than organic social media, according to BrightEdge. Optimizing your website for keywords of high relevancy has a drastic impact on the traffic driven to your business website from search engines like Google.

The steps outlined above support an overall content marketing strategy, which aims to drive quality traffic to your website and drive business growth. Besides organic search rank, you can place ads on Google to get to the top of search results. Likewise, social media ads on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn will generate prospects and drive traffic to your website. Enabling retargeting / remarketing on your paid ads will push ads to users that previously interacted with your brand. Retargeting users is based on their analytics data. These users are more likely to convert based on their earlier interest in your brand.

Summary

Digital marketing efforts are driven by both quantity and quality. Focusing on both the quality (your website / landing page user-experience) and quantity of leads (your inbound marketing efforts) will generate success. To make your website a lead generation machine, the six steps described in this article will help you reach that goal.

Incorporating a multi-pronged marketing approach across social media, search engines, and paid ads will drive new prospects to your website. What happens once they reach your landing page is up to you, and the user experience provided on your website. For a user experience analysis of your website, you can request a free audit from CueCamp.

Depending on your business, a range of marketing touch points are needed before a prospect becomes a qualified sales lead. When possible, personalized content of high relevancy is more likely to convert a prospect. High-quality content, delivered on a regular cadence, results in a website that will engage your prospects. Crafting a content marketing strategy to achieve this goal will turn your website into a lead generation machine.

Written by: Matt Sharritt, Ph.D., Founder, CueCamp

The post 6 Easy Steps That Will Make Your Website a Lead Generation Machine appeared first on CueCamp.

A considerable amount of that success derives from the ongoing effort of Airbnb’s design team to create a user experience for its booking platform which surpasses that of other similar services.

Airbnb’s Landing Page design (above the fold) as I am typing this

As a designer, I was always astonished of how Airbnb approaches their product design challenges and delivers a product that converts, for years now. So in this article, I’ll try to identify what makes their landing page design different and why it is successful.

Visual Clarity and Minimalism

I strive for two things in design: simplicity and clarity. Great design is born of those things.” — Lindon Leader

Using colour contrast and shadows, the user interface is basically structured as two layers: The card, which contains the explanatory text and the Call-to-Action (CTA) button, forms the upper layer, while the rest of the page is perceived as the background layer.

Perceived layers of user interface

With little to no cognitive effort, users can identify the upper layer (card) as the area with which they can interact. The page as a whole does not overload the users with information, hence framing a clear interaction path for users who land on it.

Reducing the cognitive load the user needs for achieving his goals is of the utmost importance when designing for humans.

Let’s see how it compares to Booking’s landing page design, in terms of visual clarity, by using predictive technology:

Measuring optical clarity of the landing pages (above the fold) for Booking.com and Airbnb via VisualEyes plugin

More clarity contributes to easier and driven scanning of information. Two metrics that can determine how an interface is efficiently designed for human interaction is Visual Complexity and Prototypicality. The conjunction of those two metrics affects the aesthetics processing of the user significantly and, thus, defines how he will interact with the interface.

More complexity requires more cognitive load. More cognitive load means less user engagement and, sequentially, less conversion and profitability.

Key Takeaway:

Airbnb has set an interaction focal point; therefore users have already determined where they will have to “lay their eyes” in order to forage information.

The Double Z-Pattern

The Z-Pattern (for people that read from left to right)

Humans have a natural reading pattern, which is applied when visual stimuli are present. Following the natural flow of eye-scanning a layout, the Z-Pattern complements better single-purpose webpages that contain only one CTA.

This specific pattern “traces” eye movement of the users, thus allowing for strategic placement of visual elements.

So, Airbnb used the Z-Pattern.

Twice.

Airbnb is setting focal points for their users, using the Z-Pattern

By utilising this layout, Airbnb’s designers achieved to establish a concise visual hierarchy. Areas of interest that convey some kind of message are pinpointed and brought up to the user’s attention. Below you can view how Airbnb’s Z-layout translates into attention heatmaps:

Attention Heatmaps generated in Figma, using the VisualEyes plugin.

Attention heatmaps suggest that the selected areas are drawing the most of the user’s attention in this particular instance.

As it is shown on the right image, the Area of Interest, in which the Card is placed, stands out three times more than the focal point of the hero image, while the CTA Button on the bottom right of the white card is almost three times more prominent than the card itself.

Key Takeaway

Airbnb augments, even more, the pre-established interaction path, by driving most of the attention to the single action -clicking the button- needed in order to “dive deeper” into their product.

Read more on the Z-Pattern here.

Priming

“Priming is a technique whereby exposure to one stimulus influences a response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention.”

In other words, priming takes place when taking one’s memories or mental associations and using them to influence his future behaviour towards an upcoming matter.

The first image (Hero) someone views when interacting with Airbnb’s website

Almost all websites/products apply the “priming” effect to their audience in some way. In our case, the Airbnb landing page design, visitors are subject to associative priming with the use of imagery. The design team is doing an excellent job in finding images that fit the company’s target group perfectly, so they can ensure that the desired emotions will be triggered.

Different target audiences, different hero images.

Which words pop in your mind when viewing the house on the left image? Maybe something like soothing, peaceful, refreshing, unique, care-free or even vacation-material?

Key Takeaway:

By “priming” their target audience, Airbnb’s designers use carefully-picked images to spark the emotions that could be associated with the subsequent expected experience: Staying in an awesome place for their vacation.

Read more on Priming from NN/g here.

Simple, strong and effective language

The text serves two purposes:

1. Validate the reason a user visited the website in the first place — “I’m where I was supposed to.”
2. Set a user goal — “Now I should search for places I want to visit.”

Using simple and clear language when communicating messages is essential in web design, as it establishes that your audience will not misinterpret your offering. Remember that communication is a “two-way street”:

“How well we communicate is determined not by how well we say things, but how well we are understood.” — Andrew Grove

Airbnb avoids unnecessary jargon, while choosing a set of words that their target audience will comfortably understand.

Key Takeaway:

Text content was carefully selected to disclose a specific message and the value of the product as quickly as possible, with few words in the play. All that without endangering that their audience will not understand the offering.

Conclusion

Insightful design is human-oriented and drives human actions and emotions. Airbnb’s design team found a very subtle -almost transparent- way to direct users’ actions on their website. The framing of the experience was so delicately designed that it accelerates interaction while keeping the primary user goal in mind.

Thanks for tuning in!

Written by: Thanos Dimitriou (via Medium)
Posted by: CueCamp

The post How Airbnb drives users’ actions with their landing page design — a UX analysis appeared first on CueCamp.

User-friendly Experience + Simplified Buying Journey = More Sales

For the business owner, a well-designed e-commerce platform allows them to run their business easily, and can help streamline daily operations and customer service calls. Following are some tips and best practices to follow to help grow both organic traffic and sales conversions.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and UX

User Experience and SEO are critical components of any e-commerce site, especially as industry verticals are becoming more competitive. Digital advertising prices continue to rise and generating organic traffic is essential. In addition, cross-functional expertise is required to build a website that has good UX and SEO, as these fields continue to overlap. Google algorithms are becoming better at reading page content, placing priority on well-designed content that is not artificial. Prior black-hat tactics to raise search rank, like loading page footers with keyword-dense text, are now causing page ranks in search engines (like Google or Bing) to drop. Driving organic traffic can feel daunting and will take time, but will pay-off in the end with good SEO practices.

Website Sitemap

Part of good UX and SEO involves a well-designed sitemap. A sitemap reflects the website page and navigation structure, and hierarchically organizes website content. Adding a sitemap to Google Search Console is important for any e-commerce site, so that search engines crawl and understand product information. Google will be notified to any changes that you make to your site, which should happen on a frequent basis so content does not become stale. A sitemap not only makes the new content you post discovered quickly by search engines, but is reflected in the website navigation to users (helping tell them about the content on your website).

Simplify Page Content (and Clutter)

Clear, simple to understand content can raise engagement with your audience. In many instances, “less is more” – as said by Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, a German-American architect that pioneered the minimalist movement. Your website visitors appreciate you communicating your message in a simple, yet efficient manner.

Similar to a cluttered advertisement, websites with distracting content, too much text, or an unclear message will lose their effectiveness. Over time, more and more things fight for our attention, and the average user has a shorter attention span. Users are willing to spend less time figuring out what you’re trying to get across, so get the job done with simple, clear messaging on your website. Design each page using proper keyword research and ensure landing pages have a clear engagement goal in mind so that your content has a purpose.

Optimizing Website Structure and User Journey

Supporting the intentions of website visitors is critical to raising conversion rates. Whether the goal is to sell a product or communicate an important piece of information, users should be able to fulfill their needs as efficiently as possible when using your website. If a product is difficult to find or a message becomes muddled, conversion rates will fall.

Part of optimizing the user experience (UX) of a website is to ensure that different types of users (personas) are able to achieve their goals efficiently: whether it be completing an action or finding information. A well-designed navigation structure will help the user journey, so that users can find what they want in the least amount of clicks (and with less confusion along the way).

Make Sure Your Site is Responsive

More people are becoming accustomed to purchasing groceries, clothing, home décor, and vehicles in the comfort of their homes. According to Forbes, Cyber Week had 62% of traffic coming from mobile in 2018, and fifteen percent of orders of were placed on mobile phones over the Thanksgiving holiday. Other sources place over 60% of website visitors (and climbing) using a mobile device like a phone or tablet. With this in mind, websites need to use a responsive design to be sure that content is optimized for mobile devices. The lack of an intuitive UX can result in user frustration, causing visitors to leave before completing a purchase on a website.

Website speed

Website performance contributes heavily to page rank and SEO, as well as usability. Research by Google describes how sites appearing on page one of Google display content in 1.19 seconds on average, while those on page two display primary content in 1.29 seconds. Some tools that can help you gauge and improve your website speed are Website Grader by HubSpot, Google PageSpeed Insights, and Pingdom Website Speed Test.

SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate

An SSL certificate authenticates your website to encrypt data that is being transferred from a website to users. SSL certificates ensure that a website is secure when visitors make purchases, which is important is the growing age of e-commerce. An SSL certificate encrypts sensitive user data, such as personal bank information, phone numbers and addresses.

Google Chrome, the most-used browser, has begun notifying users when a website is not fully secured with an SSL certificate. Fully encrypting data using SSL will provide users the best, most secure experience: ensuring that sensitive data is transmitted securely between the browser and web server. In a world where data breaches and security are becoming commonplace, users will trust and show loyalty to brands that value their privacy and sensitive information: highlighting the need for SSL certificates on websites.

Conclusion

Optimizing your website has a powerful effect on your marketing effectiveness, as well as your bottom line. Increasing conversions on your website, whether serving a goal of purchasing products or communicating information about your business (in a clear, efficient manner) will attract new customers and build loyalty. By optimizing the user journey for your website, different types of users can be served in a more effective manner.

The skill sets involved in designing a website continue to broaden and overlap. Experts in development, graphic design, SEO, UX, marketing and content writing need to know how their design decisions impact other areas of design. For example, designing a page around a keyword (SEO) impacts the website structure (UX), written content, and image content on the page (which can also impact website speed). A working knowledge of these fields is required to balance design decision trade-offs to make websites more effective, and this expertise can yield powerful improvements. In many instances, a simple analysis of a website by an expert can present some low-hanging fruit, which can have a huge impact on results.

To gauge how your website currently measures up, and identify some low-hanging fruit that can improve your website, request a free website marketing analysis from CueCamp. This report is in video form, generated by CueCamp’s team of experts to show the user-friendliness and marketing effectiveness of your website. Start out on the right foot, and reach out today.

Authors: Shannon Olear & Matt Sharritt, Ph.D. (CueCamp)

The post Boost Store Profits: E-commerce Experience Optimization appeared first on CueCamp.

With 1.3 billion websites on the internet, there is competition aplenty in nearly every industry. If your site doesn’t provide the best experience, users will simply find another. A user-centered design is going to be highly usable. Everything will function perfectly and without error. Here are nine simple things you can focus on to create a usable site:

1. Get Right to the Point

If you have targeted the right audience, they are already interested in your service or product when they land on your page. Instead of adding in unrelated things, simply get to the point. People are quite busy and don’t have time to wade through a lot of information to get to what they want. Add prominent call to action (CTA) buttons that are easy for the consumer to find.

Note how Grace gets right to the point about why you’ve come to their site. They give a quick explanation of how their box subscription kits work and offer a CTA in green that says, “Get Started.” They also offer half-off your first box to entice you a bit further.

2. Visible Navigation Structure

Your navigation structure is the backbone of your website. It guides the user through your pages almost from the first minute they arrive. Among visitors referred to your website, on average, 50 percent of them will use the site’s navigation to get themselves oriented. But navigation isn’t simply your nav bar across the top of your page — it’s also the sales funnel you guide the user through from the landing page, plus minor details such as linking your logo to the home page to serve as a breadcrumb for visitors to find their way back to start.

3. Actionable CTAs

Your call to action invites your site visitor to take a specific action and to convert from simple site visitor to subscriber or customer. A lot of factors come into play when creating the perfect CTA. The language you use, the color of the button and even page placement can make a difference. You also aren’t limited to a single CTA on a page, but you do need to make sure each one has a clear direction.

HydroWorx offers very clear CTAs on their landing page so site visitors know exactly what action to take and when. The CTAs are a bright orange, which stands out against the white background and complementary dark blue design. The placement is smart because it lines up with each section and helps answer questions the user might have. The wording is clear and includes, “Request a consultation,” “Estimate profit” and “Get a profitability analysis.”

4. Instant Feedback

Have you ever filled out a contact form, hit submit and then weren’t sure if it was sent to the company or not? This is very frustrating for users. Site visitors should receive feedback for any action they take. If the visitor clicks on a submit button, a message should pop up that the form has been received and what the visitor can expect next. Look at the different actions a visitor can take on your site and make sure each one has a response appropriate to that action, such as loading a new page that says, “Welcome!” or “Thank you for us.”

5. Customer Service

The way your company interacts with site visitors has an impact on their overall experience. Do you have a customer service philosophy in place? Is it effective? Around 86 percent of consumers say they will pay more for a product if the overall customer experience is better.

Even though the entire customer experience is about more than just service, the way you handle complaints and questions plays a big role in the overall impression the customer has of your brand. Take the time to get a customer service philosophy in place.

Trader Joe’s has a reputation for excellent customer service. Walk into any brick-and-mortar store and you’ll be treated like royalty. One example of them going above and beyond for a customer was reported on Reddit. In this example, the company went out of their way to deliver food to an elderly man who was snowed-in. Not only did they deliver the food, but they also gave him the food for free. That’s a brand that cares about their customers.

6. Use Heatmaps

Figure out which areas of your site are most attractive to your site visitors and limit choices to those main links. You can, of course, add other elements within the overall structure of your site, but when it comes to where to focus, you want the main elements people are looking for to be front and center. You may also want to move these sections higher up on your landing page so visitors can find them quickly.

7. Offer Valuable Information

One way you can engage users is by educating them on what you sell. The person may or may not have tried your product before, so offering in-depth information allows the user to make an informed decision about whether or not they want to try your product. You can offer this information in the form of guides, articles or a comparison chart. Try offering it in a variety of ways, remembering that visuals are well received by site visitors. You can even conduct some split testing to see which elements work the best for conversions.

The Whiskey Exchange does a good job of educating their site visitors. They offer different topics the user might be interested in along with a CTA to “Learn More.” The topics rotate from time to time, so those who visit the site regularly can still learn new things. For example, some topics featured include popular products from New Zealand and winter drinks.

8. Social Media Integration

Some of us have multiple social media accounts, but 81 percent of Americans have one at least. The public loves social media because it’s an easy platform to grab information and then share it. There are several ways your site can integrate with social media. Allowing users to share photos and blog posts is one simple way. However, you can also add apps that allow a user to log into your site with Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Start with the basics of allowing users to share your information and then see what else might be viable.

9. Integrating Video

The statistics on using video in your online marketing is something you can’t ignore — 87 percent of those who market for a living use online video content to drive conversions. Video is a way to get your message across in a way that sticks with the consumer. Videos add information to your website for the user who prefers to watch a video rather than read text or even an infographic.

Bellroy uses a video that highlights some of their products and what they do. If the shopper doesn’t want to read through descriptions, they can view the video and learn a little more quite easily. On the Bellroy site, the video is located under the header, but for the purpose of this case study, we’ve moved the video up so you can see it easily.

Last Thoughts

UX strategies shouldn’t be one of the last things you implement on your site — it should be the first. This will help you avoid frustration on the part of site visitors and retain more of the traffic you drive to your page. Take the time to conduct A/B testing to see which elements work best with your target audience. You should also go through your site step-by-step as though you are a first-time visitor and look for possible issues.

Written by: Lexie Lu, Design Roast (via Website Magazine)
Posted by: CueCamp

The post Make UX Strategies Less Complex & More Functional appeared first on CueCamp.

#6: Company Website Pages Take Forever to Load

If your website does not load in an expected amount of time, users will leave. It may sound like an unreasonable ultimatum, but it’s true: 47 percent of customers on e-commerce websites expect their site to load in two seconds or less, and 40 percent will abandon a site that takes more than three seconds to load.

Do yourself a favor – check out Google’s Page Speed tools to make sure your website is as quick as it needs to be. If it’s not, consider either upgrading your hosting or cutting content that takes to long to load from your website’s pages. A variety of things like interactive ads, uncompressed images, and JavaScript can negatively impact page load times.

#7: Unnecessary Content

It’s incredible how some people have a knack for talking your ear off without saying anything remotely useful. That’s not a good talent to have, especially online where users are bombarded with information.

From a Web design perspective, that means that if your website is loaded with unnecessary information, or the sitemap is filled with too many bells and whistles, people are likely to get frustrated and ditch out for a competitor. Be succinct and keep it simple. Lengthy text should be shortened, making use of headings and subheadings to break up the text and help users scan through page content.

#8: Neglecting Mobile Users

It’s somewhat baffling how many webmasters still don’t see the importance of mobile. After all, mobile searches now outrank desktop searches, and smartphones are quickly supplanting computers as the browsing device of choice. If you haven’t taken active measures to support mobile – for instance, through the implementation of responsive web design – you need to pull yourself out of the past immediately. Mobile-optimized content is vital for good usability on the mobile devices that your visitors use to visit your website. Mobile website visitors should be able to easily scan and read important content, as well as complete basic tasks like finding your contact information.

#9: Missing Your Target

As a web marketer, you understand how important it is to know your target audience. You’ve probably spent hours creating customer profiles and figuring out how to attract consumer attention. This is just as significant in web design. The way your website looks and “feels” will naturally attract a certain type of visitor. Some websites are highly professional; some are trendy and hip, while others are fun and bubbly. Sometimes, a website tries to speak to too many audiences. If you try to please too many types of customers, you can end up with a confusing website that appeals to none of them. Identify and profile your target audience, and cater to their needs.

#10: Poor Navigation

Navigation issues will kill your website’s popularity fast. We live in an age where everything is delivered to us in an instant, and anything longer will make visitors abandon your site. Making your navigation menu difficult to find or use are common web design mistakes. Have you ever been to a website and you can’t find the menu or a search bar? It’s quite frustrating. Make sure the navigational aspects of your website are easily understood and even easier to notice.

Conclusion

If you want to avoid frustrated users that abandon your website, you need the following features:

• Support for mobile users
• A clean, crisp interface
• No excess information; provide users only what you know they’ll want to see
• Fast load times
• A clear and consistent brand message throughout
• Professional, high-quality content that is free of mistakes (e.g. broken links, spelling errors)

To get started fixing up your website, you can check out our top 5 tips for creating a powerful homepage for your website. In addition, if you would like your website reviewed by one of our experts for free, please visit CueCamp and request your free marketing analysis video. You will receive a 5-10 minute video that analyzes the usability and marketing effectiveness of your website, delivered within 48 hours.

Written by: Michel Ann Sharritt
Posted by: CueCamp

The post Part 2: Are You Making the Biggest Web Design Mistakes on Your Company Website? appeared first on CueCamp.

What happens when you visit a site like this? In most cases, you end up leaving the site within a few seconds of arrival. The frustration makes it unbearable to stay on the website. However, websites like this exist because web designers made typical usability or web design mistakes.

So far this year, CueCamp has conducted over 1500 website reviews. Our team sees several common usability mistakes made time and again. We want to share with you a short list of the top errors we see in hopes that you can learn from others mistakes.

Web Design Mistakes

#1: Too Much Stuff

Imagine a new user arriving on your website for the first time, and consider the first impression they’ll get when visiting the homepage. The homepage should contain a few lines of content telling users what the site is all about. Visitors who can’t readily understand the purpose of your website within a few seconds will leave.

One of the biggest mistakes we see is cramming way too much information above the fold. Websites with tons of images, text, ads, and animations will take a while to load, and they’ll confuse your visitors. Your website will look crowded and confusing to users: so avoid busy designs and keep it simple.

#2: No Style Guide

The confused website is one which features a variety of typefaces, images, colors, and themes, none of which relate to each other. This occurs for a number of reasons. It can happen when you don’t have a good handle on your branding. You can easily fall into this trap when you like too many design templates and want to use them all. It can also happen when you’re trying to convey too many ideas at once. When designing a website, choose one theme, one logo, and one typeface. Create a style guide and stay with it across all aspects of your website.

#3: Inconsistent Layout

Consistency is one of the most powerful usability principles. When things always behave the same, users don’t have to worry (or spend valuable resources thinking) about what will happen. This allows them to focus on your content instead. Users should know what to expect based on earlier experience. For example, each internal page of your website should maintain the same location of the main menu on each page, and the content of the main menu navigation should be kept consistent.

Our team runs into this issue frequently. We visit a few internal pages and see that the main menu might move from the top of the page to the left side of the page, or the page content might move to a different location. This confuses users by forcing them to reorient themselves, finding where items are now located on each page. This is distracting attention away from the page content itself. Users expect common things on websites and expect to see those items on your website: such as a company logo and main navigation menu at the top of the page. Users form their expectations for your website based on what’s commonly found on sites all over the web. If you deviate far from common practices, your site can be harder to use and users may leave.

#4: No Call to Action

Your call to action is the gateway to your business. It guides your visitors to act: Click here! Get a coupon! Learn more about this product! Obviously, it’s very important that your call to action clearly tells visitors what they need to do to take the next step. There should be enough information that visitors know what they’re going to get from taking action, and what information they need to provide.

The content on your website should be written in a way that gives useful information while drawing the user to some call to action.  Make sure your call to action is concise and leads customers where you want them to go: allowing them to take the next step in engaging your business. The biggest key is to keep form-filling to a minimum and be sure to give users time to become familiar with the benefits offered before a call to action appears.

#5: No Contact Information

Hard to find contact information is one of the most common yet critical of the web design mistakes. When visitors decide to make a purchase or use your services, lead capturing is crucial. It’s imperative they have the necessary contact information as soon as they decide you’re the right company for them. If a visitor has to search through your site for contact information, he or she will likely get frustrated and leave. Your “Contact Us” page should always be just one click away, or your information should be at the bottom (footer) of every page.

From a marketing perspective, you want to make sure that users who visit your site can easily get in touch with you. Your social media outlets should be listed on your website with your contact information to lend credibility and build trust. Your contact info (address, phone, email, etc.) should be easily accessible, such as in the footer of each page.

How to Fix Your Web Design Mistakes

Try to audit your website by imagining yourself as a new user that has never before visited the website. Your website is a representation of you and your business. If you present a trustworthy online image on your website, you will struggle to gain new leads. By giving your users multiple ways to engage the business, you are giving users options to interact and building trust by showing you have nothing to hide.

Check in with us next week when we reveal the next 5 common usability web design mistakes that businesses frequently make on their websites. In the meantime, if you would like your website reviewed, please visit CueCamp and request your free marketing analysis video. You will receive a 5-10 minute video that analyzes the usability and marketing effectiveness of your website, delivered within 48 hours.

Written by: Michel Ann Sharritt
Posted by: CueCamp

The post Part 1: Are You Making the Biggest Web Design Mistakes on Your Company Website? appeared first on CueCamp.

CueCamp has put a list together of the top five items a powerful homepage design should have in order to retain users.

#1 Include Sharp Imagery

The images that you use on your homepage should be crisp, clear, and showcase your company in a way that embodies your brand’s vision. The images should inspire your website visitors to learn more about your company. One should remember that a website is a highly visual experience. People react to graphics and visuals differently than they do to words.

TIP: It’s also important to avoid using obvious stock photos. While sometimes useful, generic images are a dead give away that your company didn’t spend time on design.

#2 Choosing Fonts

You might not realize it, but the font you choose for your homepage has a psychological effect on your visitors and greatly influences how they feel towards your brand. Understanding your product or service is key to figuring out what font to choose for your website. Always choose a font that is simple, easy to read, and reflects the personality of your business culture.

TIP: Avoid using too many different fonts on your homepage; you want the homepage to have a feel of cohesion and uniformity.

#3 Use of Color

In the same way that your fonts have a psychological effect on your users, your color scheme affects how users interpret and engage with your website. Not only can a poor choice of color send users away, it affects how you communicate your brand to the public. Incorporating too many colors will confuse your branding, while the wrong colors will make the wrong impression.

TIP: Always choose colors for your website that are welcoming and true to your brand. It is always best to start with the colors that are used within your company logo. It helps to keep branding consistent throughout the website.

#4 Keep it Simple

Whenever our team designs a homepage we always look at the design like we are the user coming to the website for the first time. What impression do you want to give? What items need to be front and center?

The mistake that many designers make is adding tons of widgets, calls-to-action, links and other clutter that can distract or overwhelm the user. Ultimately the user is going to get confused and leave the website.

Here are a few design tips for keeping your homepage simple:

• Use easy-to-read text
• Provide plenty of white space
• Clearly label the different sections of your website (don’t make users hunt for info)
• Do not clutter up your homepage with ads, links, calls-to-action, or pop-up chat boxes

#5 Establish Your Identity

You want your website to make a statement about what your company is all about. This is probably the #1 most important part of your homepage design. Too many times, your homepage is designed with too many goals in mind. Creating a unique design, including an interesting logo and memorable look for your homepage, is important in retaining users and encouraging them to return to your site in the future.

Your homepage should:

• Introduce your company to your website’s visitors
• Provide them with clear paths to other pages on your site
• Give them a strong sense of your company’s brand and identity

Your homepage design is undoubtedly an important part of both your website and your company’s success. From immediately appealing to your visitors, to providing them with a user-friendly navigation experience, your homepage is the portal through which they can discover your company and ultimately, your brand.

We hope that this article helped to inspire your company to re-examine your company homepage. In the meantime, if you would like your website reviewed, please visit CueCamp and request your free marketing analysis video. You will receive a 5-10 minute video that analyzes the usability and marketing effectiveness of your website, delivered within 48 hours.

#cuecamptips

Written by: Michel Sharritt
Posted by: CueCamp

The post How to Create a Powerful Homepage for Your Website appeared first on CueCamp.

The biggest user-experience question is not a matter of any individual design issue, such as whether to use mega menus or some other form of navigation menu. The bigger picture requires you to first decide on the overriding UX strategy: to shoot for a big bang and change everything in one go, or to rely in incremental quality improvements, one step at a time.

Since user experience is a quality discipline, there is much to be said for incremental design changes, since we know from extensive QA research that continuous improvement is known to lead to high-quality products. On the other hand, there’s also much to be said for improving everything at once and potentially achieve a much higher quality boost than would result from any one incremental quality tweak.

So how to pick a UX strategy: one big revolution, or many small steps?

Website Overhaul for the Right Reasons

Site redesigns often require a tremendous amount of coordination and resources. Sometimes, a redesign project can be a purely visual reskinning of the entire site, with new styles, layouts, and treatments. Other times, serious taxonomy, information architecture, content, or usability issues are being addressed. Either way, make sure that your redesign project is based on user data and has clear goals and measures of success. Make incremental changes to reach these goals and only resort to a complete redesign if the data tells you to do so.

Examine your site’s conversion rates and get customer feedback to determine what the issues are and whether a legitimate reason exists to take on a major project. Gathering the right data reduces the risk of delivering a design that users don’t want or that of compromising the return on your investment.

Don’t let panic or boredom lead you astray. When embarking on a site-redesign project, companies sometimes fall prey to “the grass is always greener” syndrome. That is, they believe that other people (or companies) have it better, even though this belief can be completely false.

When organizations ask me to help them with a redesign project, one of my first questions is WHY—why do you want to redesign? Frequently the response is, “We haven’t updated it in many years.” Or, “It looks old and amateurish.” The unspoken reason for many redesign projects is, “I’m bored with it.”

You may be bored with your current site, but customers likely aren’t: they usually don’t sit and stare at the site for extended periods every day. Most companies are lucky if customers visit their site once per month, and even in the case of more frequent visits, users tend to like designs that are safe and familiar.

Before you throw out the old and bring in the new, make sure you have solid evidence that doing so is necessary to achieve user-centered goals. Discuss solutions that address the root of the problem. Too often, designers approach solving problems by recommending trendy changes while ignoring less-glamorous aspects such as content, structure, or interaction design, which are often the source of the problems. Visitors don’t spend nearly as much time as you do staring at your own design, so they don’t have that burning desire for what’s in fashion. Customers are extremely task-oriented and care much more about a usable website than a pretty one.

Usually Choose Incremental Changes Over a Major Overhaul

Drastic website changes are jarring for users and risky for business. The cost and effort of getting an entire organization and senior stakeholders to agree on the new website is enormous. Organizations often launch a redesign project with an ambitious timeline, only to see it get stretched and stretched by endless debate. Some projects start and stop multiple times, while other projects fizzle completely. Teams start out excited, but soon become miserable.

The most successful redesign projects have clear, measurable objectives. Before you commit to a full site redesign, you need to define the problems you want to solve and the results you wish to obtain.

Never make radical changes when minimal adjustments will suffice. Too many websites undergo a major overhaul unnecessarily. While legitimate reasons exist for engaging in a redesign, the reality is that many problems you need to solve are isolated and can be fixed with smaller, incremental approaches. Look at the metrics rather than guess what needs to be changed. Allow data to help you determine the extent of the problem and apply the least amount of change necessary to solve it. Radical changes have a higher chance of inadvertently breaking something critical for users.

Be aware of your own cognitive biases. The human mind works in ways that cloud objectivity. The old saying goes, “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” The tools and technology available to website makers can divert their attention from the true issues and fog their judgment in taking the appropriate course of action. Visual designers may rely on visceral responses in justifying a redesign, and may be biased towards aesthetics-driven solutions. Good designers are aware of these biases and allow data to guide them in selecting the right solutions.

Consider the cost of switching users to a new interface. People don’t like change. Don’t be lured into thinking that a new site will attract customers. To reduce cognitive effort humans make assumptions on how to interact with interfaces based on previous experiences. Once people learn a way of doing things they expect the system to work the same way in the future.

Avoid disrupting the user experience with wild design changes without careful consideration. Customers balk at change, even when the new design is clearly better. Assess the impact of change on users before you decide to make the switch. Spending 1 or 2 days conducting a usability study of your existing site is invaluable.

Sometimes a Major Overhaul Is Best

Extensive changes are risky and generally should be avoided. However, good reasons exist for a major site overhaul at rare occasions. If the issues go beyond aesthetics or the problems are glaring and no longer can be remedied with band-aid fixes, sometimes it’s best to rip off the bandage and fix the problems. Below are some reasons for taking the plunge:

• The gains from making incremental changes are miniscule or nonexistent: For years you’ve attempted gradual fixes but now there’s not much more you can do to improve the site. You’ve performed many iterations and found yourself at the point of diminishing returns.
• The technology is severely outdated, making critical changes impossible: The backend system can’t support interactions and features necessary for critical user journeys. Customers can’t access your content well on mobile devices and social features are clunky. Third-party tools that worked well several years ago can’t keep up with the changing needs of your customers.
• Architecturally the site is a tangled mess: Your site is a big mess and doesn’t function the way visitors expect. The company brand strategy has changed significantly over the years. You’ve altered the site’s navigation structure incrementally to accommodate changes in the information architecture and shifting strategies. However, after several years of patchwork the site is incohesive and people can’t accomplish what they need.
• Severely low conversion rates site-wide: Data analysis reveals a bounty of issues that are impossible to fix to customers’ satisfaction. Conversion measurements indicate extremely high exit rates and bounce rates, and few page views. The issues are so tangled and enormous that no amount of incremental fixes can increase conversions to an acceptable level.

• Benchmarking research reveals your site is far inferior to the competition: You don’t want to change your site every time your competitors do. However, you must do so if research shows that you’re losing customers because other sites are doing a better job of supporting user needs.

Conclusion

The path you choose (incremental vs. major overhaul) should align user needs with business goals. Leverage information from conversion research (i.e., site analytics, user testing) to help you identify the issues and determine how to solve them. Solid numbers keep you focused on the right issues and prevent political arguments.

Written by: Hoa Loranger, Nielsen-Norman Group
Posted by: CueCamp

The post Radical Redesign or Incremental Change? appeared first on CueCamp.