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.

Visual / Content Trends

Clean-lines and simple designs are still being used across several industries, but the use of shapes in web designs will be used more in the future. From a design perspective, this will help draw a consumer’s attention, as it is unexpected and differentiates the brand, given typical design aesthetics we are used to seeing. In the coming year, a rise in animated content, bold colors and fonts, and video will dominate website marketing trends.

Bold Colors & Serif Fonts

Bold colors are on the palette: offering marketers a way to brand their company in a way that sticks out to consumers.

Large, chunky fonts seen in decades past are resurfacing, providing a way for marketers to differentiate themselves and their brand. Serifs, or decorative stroke that finishes off a letter, are trending upwards in web marketing. As screen resolutions rise across mobile devices and desktop screens, serif fonts are becoming more popular. Sans-serif (no serifs) fonts were the trend of years past when screen resolutions were not as high, and these fonts looked better on lower-resolution displays (making them cleaner and easier to read).

Animation / 3D View

Animations on your homepage create visual interest that can attract and engage consumers. Besides the resurgence of animated gifs, micro-animations will continue to grow in importance: especially for e-commerce websites and the fashion and décor industries. For example, consumers may want to see a 360 degree view of clothing, jewelry, or home décor. Consumers want to see the entire look of a piece they are buying. Augmented reality apps are on the rise, allowing users to visually see paint colors, furniture or other items placed in their home by overlaying the product using a smartphone and its camera.

Raising Engagement with Video

We know that everyone’s attention span is directed towards animated visuals and video, as animation is a great way to capture attention. Videos provide a source of information and guidance that lead to higher conversion when done appropriately. Video content needs to be part of your marketing strategy in order to capture consumer’s attention, while providing rich, engaging content. Typically, less than one-minute videos are recommended across both website and social channels to get a message across efficiently.

Security and Performance Metrics

Data Security

Google Chrome, the most-used browser, will notify users when a website is not secured with an SSL certificate. These requirements will continue to tighten, notifying users when they visit a website that is not fully secured. Just having an SSL certificate is no longer enough – all resources on a web page (images, form data, etc.) need to be transmitted securely in order to pass muster. 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.

If you have a website or plan to launch one soon, be sure that every page on your website is secured using SSL. Not securing your website will not only negatively impact the user experience, but will also lower search rankings for the website. In this day and age, consumers are concerned about privacy issues. Maintaining a secure site is important so that consumers feel that they can browse and purchase items from your site without compromising their privacy. According to CA Technologies, 86% of those surveyed value security over convenience when purchasing a product. 78% of those interviewed felt that high security of their personal information was of primary concern. Privacy is a requirement for customer loyalty: making security of critical importance.

Mobile-First Design

Mobile visitors have already surpassed desktop visitors across the web, making it even more important for your website to be responsive: available to users on both platforms. Responsive design allows content to scale and lay-out differently based upon the size of the screen in which the content is being viewed. This trend towards mobile will continue , making a mobile-optimized website a necessity.

Website Performance / Speed

These two items are the most important when it comes to SEO, page ranking and usability. Research provided by Google earlier this year outlined that sites that appear on page one of Google display their primary 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 your website speed are Website Grader by HubSpot (shown above), Google PageSpeed Insights, and Pingdom Website Speed Test.

Search Trends

As previously mentioned, website speed is important not only for the user experience, but also for search rankings. Besides page speed, voice search, and a trend towards user-friendly content, will be seen as search algorithms are better able to process human language.

Voice Search

Voice Search will see an increased share of search queries on search engines such as Google. With the increased usage of bots and intelligent devices in the home, people will use technologies like Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant to look up information. This preference will raise the rates of search queries using more natural language, as opposed to keywords. For example, a traditional search for “Chicago weather” might be replaced with “What is the current weather in Chicago?”, and could yield different search results depending on the algorithm and website SEO.

ComScore put out a study in 2019 that half of all online searches will be voice-based by 2020. Anticipate that Google will be changing with the times and changing their search algorithms, which will impact your search campaign strategies that you go to market with today.

Search Algorithm Changes

Google search algorithm changes can have a major impact on the SEO of websites, and the ranking achieved on Google. In the past, websites would focus on adding as many keywords as possible (for example, listing towns in a page footer) to attract as much traffic as possible. However, Google search algorithms are getting better and better at ‘reading’ content in a fashion similar to users, and interpreting what your content actually says. This reinforces good copywriting practices, and creates a better user experience (UX) for your users.

Conclusion

With a new decade upon us, we will see the rise of new technologies and a continuation of some existing trends within digital marketing. Unfortunately, the days are gone where a sole webmaster can handle the wide variety of expertise involved in creating a well-designed website. A combination of overlapping skills is required: in addition to programming, graphic design, SEO, security, social media marketing, content writing and user-experience expertise is needed.

To gauge how your website currently measures up, a great way to measure its effectiveness is to request a free usability 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 and Matt Sharritt, Ph.D. (CueCamp)

The post Website Trends: Marketing Opportunities to Maximize Growth appeared first on CueCamp.

Consider the ease of simply clicking a button within an attractive user interface, following the vehicle as it comes to your door and enjoying a smooth ride. For all the talk about their technology, their business model and their strategy, experience is what ensures customers continue to use the service. This idea has brought me to the concept of UX as strategy. It’s the idea that today, more than anything else, your UX will determine the success or failure of your software and your business.

A killer UX creates deeper customer engagement and loyalty.

A powerful and engaging UX doesn’t just make your product easier to use — it helps you engage more deeply with your customers, ensuring they stay loyal to you rather than looking to your competition. It builds brand loyalty and increases the chances that your customers will become your most effective advocates. Your UX also plays a key role in enrichment, ensuring your customers purchase additional products and services.

Your UX now forms the heart of your competitive differentiation.

I don’t believe I’m writing anything new in highlighting the importance of UX for software and applications. What is new, however, is how your UX can form the basis of your competitive differentiation. Building long-term, sustainable, competitive differentiation is one of the toughest objectives that executives face. In today’s digital world, the UX of your products and services plays a fundamental role. People engage with brands and companies via their software, and thus via their UX.

It is your brand, plus highly satisfied customers and fans, that will result not just in your business growing, but in building competitive differentiation. For example, it’s incredibly hard for other companies to match the loyalty of people who love Apple’s products and services. Even when other manufacturers build products that can compete on a technical and functional level, and that may even sell at lower price points, people remain loyal to the brand. Apple has been at the forefront of blending the concept of a brand with people’s identity, their image of who they are as individuals. Apple’s UX is at the very heart of this.

Making UX Your Strategy

At a high level, I recommend the following actions as you make UX your business strategy:

• Link your design metrics to your business metrics.

Those individuals responsible for the design of your software are now at the heart of the success of your business. As a result, we also need to ensure that their success, and that of your design, becomes linked to your business’s key performance indicators.

• Use the latest technology to build hyperpersonalized services.

Increasingly, in order to build these powerful experiences, organizations will need to use the latest technologies, from automation to machine learning. Customers now consider such personalization the norm, part of the overall experience of using your software. Airbnb’s personalized travel recommendations after you book a trip, such as offering a tour of Boston’s live music scene just after you reserve a stay in the city, is one such example.

• Build design systems.

Leading organizations such as Adobe and Salesforce have increasingly spoken about the need to create “design systems” to build these powerful user experiences. These are the systems and processes that enable them to scale their design best practices, rather than constantly reinventing the wheel. Forrester analyst Gina Bhawalkar points out that they also play a key role in linking your design team to your development team. She mentions that design systems should “also include the reusable code behind those design elements, and for this reason they should be created as a partnership between design and development teams.”

• Foster a product-centric culture and mindset.

If you listen to any of the founders of the UX-centric companies I’ve mentioned before, you will realize that they obsess about their products and the experiences their customers have with them. I would argue that if it’s not their top priority, it probably ranks very high. This is something easy to achieve as a startup, but much harder when you are, for example, a large financial institution that is used to thinking that your “product” is a checking account or a home loan, instead of the app or website your customers use to buy and manage those financial solutions. I often wonder whether the top executives at large firms even use their software products because some of them are so bad.

The democratization of technology helps drive better UX.

Ultimately, this is all part of what many people have referred to as the “democratization of technology.” This is because, fueled by cloud computing and new open-source technologies, it’s not just large companies or tech giants that can create these compelling user experiences.

So while effective UX design is one of the hardest aspects of product development, new technologies, tools and approaches are making it possible even for startup teams on a budget to build these compelling digital experiences. We’re seeing organizations take advantage of this to move nimbly and build light, attractive, mobile-first experiences. This is what it means to make UX your strategy, and in 2019, I believe it is the only way your organization will achieve success.

Written by: Alex Robbio (Co-founder of Belatrix Software and Member of Forbes Technology Council)
Posted by: CueCamp

The post User Experience (UX) Is Now Your Business Strategy 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.

Engagement is, without question, a complicated subject matter – and practice – thanks in part to the variety of definitions that could be, and often are, applied to it. By creating unique and memorable digital experiences, however, it is possible to develop productive and profitable relationships with customers.

One enterprise, for example, might define engagement as repeat visits with purchase amounts over a certain level, while another might be laser-focused on those moments along the user’s journey when activity reaches a certain level – X number of pages viewed, Y number of items shared on social or Z number of friends referred as the indicator of a genuine level of engagement. In each of these instances it is easy to see how deeper connections and greater revenue can be achieved from engagement.

Essentially, Web businesses (all businesses really) will measure engagement in different ways based on enterprise objectives. Regardless of how an enterprise defines and plans to increase engagement among its users, however, one thing should be certain – it is essential to success.

Customer Engagement Today Starts with Tech

While an incredible amount of investment (time and financial resources) is required to achieve true improvements to the state of user engagement, there are plenty of technologies and techniques that can be leveraged to get enterprises where they need to be.

Authentication solution LogMeIn, for example, recently acquired Nanorep, a company that provides a self-service chatbot and virtual assistant. The Nanorep products use artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) technologies to create solutions (bots) that make self-service more engaging and intuitive (see image). Brands including Intuit, FedEx, Toys“R”Us and Vodafone are just a few of the companies currently using Nanorep for some of their key customer service initiatives.

LogMeIn also recently released a new customer relationship (or engagement) management platform, Bold360, and many will see the Nanorep acquisition as another opportunity to deliver more human, more personalized and more intelligent customer engagement solutions. LogMeIn seems to be headed toward developing digital experiences that enable them to establish better ’Net relationships with consumers, but what about you?

The reason that engagement is such a tricky subject to discuss (besides the fact that it can be defined in so many different ways) is that the factors and elements we are dealing with here (emotions and data) are so wildly different for each user.

The Secret to Customer Engagement

When users feel a connection with a brand, a bond or rapport with the experience that has been presented, what ultimately ensues is familiarity (the precursor to customer engagement).

The secret to engaging users therefore is actually quite simple: know the user.

Knowing users’ wants, desires and ultimately their emotions provides an opportunity to spark their interest. Engagement only grows when users are confident that businesses actually care about their well-being and meet their expectations – or, at least to care more than taking their money alone.

Despite loads of evidence that personalized digital experiences outperform those that are not tailored to a person’s history, behaviors and attributes, Web retailers have been relatively slow to adopt technology to make it happen. Omnichannel commerce platform Kibo and Astound Commerce have released a joint study that assessed the current personalization and omnichannel sophistication of retailers testing metrics across desktop, mobile and in-store buying touchpoints; and the results are disheartening to say the least.

Seventy percent of personalization experiences on an e-commerce site, for example, only happened when the shopper was logged into an account. What is even worse is that just 4 in 10 retailers did not send an email following an abandoned cart on a website. Of those retailers that did send an email, zero offered an incentive to purchase. And here is another: 4 in 10 retailers did not even display recently visited items on a website upon a consumer’s return visit.

How can e-commerce merchants, or any ’Net professional, expect to develop a productive relationship with that level of effort?

The point is there is more that can be done to improve the experience of users and truly engage them – which can only be achieved by creating unique,dynamic and interesting experiences.

Creating & Crafting Experiences

Now that the secret to customer engagement is known (remember, it is to have an emotional connection with the user) – enterprises are ready to create and craft experiences that truly engage users.

Step 1: Identify why users are not engaging currently If current rates of conversion and rates of interaction are known, enterprises can compare participation levels among audience groups and content categories to position their products and offers in a way that delivers an experience that is in-demand. Analytics help track and collect data about user profiles, which is the only sound way to develop an engagement strategy.

Step 2: Foster collaboration People have some weird, human and internal need to share their stories, struggles, victories and losses. They also love to talk about themselves and will “love” businesses that provide them an opportunity to do that. When users are able to send messages to one another, post videos/images, share their opinions and expertise with others, they will be delighted by the opportunity and the chance of return increases dramatically.

Step 3: Develop memorable experiences The experiences that brands create must be memorable and lead to some pre-defined performance gain.

Loyalty software provider OfferCraft, for example, defines engagement as “motivation.” In other words, how can brands use digital outreach and digital experiences to incite action?

OfferCraft’s VP of Marketing Dan Grech suggested it comes down to getting people to do what it is the enterprise wants them to do. And how do they do that exactly?

Enterprises may want to consider approaching that question through the prism of science (specifically behavioral economics and decision theory).

“One of the ways we do that is through games,” said Grech. “Games are tremendously motivating to people. If you take any promotion and you gamify it, you accelerate it – you get more people to do what you want them to do.”

In practice, OfferCraft teamed up with Swinomish Casino & Lodge in Anacortes, Washington, to launch weekly gamified offers that customers can play on the new website SwinBig.com, in email and via social media. And each week, the Swinomish Team offers a live look at each game on Facebook.

The games, themed around a movie series, summer holidays, and casino amenities and anniversaries, have been received enthusiastically by more than 10,000 people, and the prizes have driven hundreds of players each week to visit the property. Since initially launching in May 2017, the weekly gamified offers have driven 6.97 times the number of redemptions compared to similar offers on Facebook and email made a year earlier.

Promotions using Facebook Live videos and SwinBig.com have led to a 15 percentage point increase (from 10 percent to 25 percent) in the reward redemption rate in the 2017 summer movie campaigns compared to 2016.

Understanding the barrier to engagement, fostering community and collaboration among users, and making the experience memorable and enjoyable are all important to the success of engagement initiatives, but there are many other elements that must be considered as well.

The Role of Design in Engagement

It cannot be said enough; everything impacts the level of engagement that consumers will experience. And that everything, of course, includes digital design.

Unfortunately for many enterprises, design can have a deeply negative affect on their consumers’ experience. How often, for example, are the long-term ramifications of digital design decisions made at your company (recently or long in the past) considered in relation to levels of engagement?

Design trends emerge routinely and they often immediately capture the attention of everyone involved in the digital experience, but it is difficult – even among the most data-driven and industry experienced – to understand the result and broader impact of implementing specific elements or leveraging entirely new styles. Such is the case, it appears, with the trend of flat design.

Some research made available recently from nngroup revealed that flat interfaces often use weak signifiers. The eye tracking experiment compared different kinds of clickability clues, and found that user interfaces with weak signifiers require more user effort than strong ones. Essentially, flat user interface (UI) elements attract less attention and cause greater uncertainty – and that is obviously not the ideal scenario.

nngroup investigated how strong clickability signifiers (traditional UI design clues such as underlined, blue text or a glossy 3-D button) and weak or absent signifiers (for example, linked text styled as static text or a ghost button) impact the ways users process and understand Web pages. The results, as you might imagine, are anything but encouraging. The average amount of time was significantly higher on the weak-signifier versions than the strong signifier versions. On average, participants spent 22 percent more time (which means slower task performance) looking at the pages with weak signifiers.

What’s more, the average number of fixations was significantly higher on the weak-signifier versions than the strong-signifier versions. On average, people had 25 percent more fixations on the pages with weak signifiers. nngroup suggested that since their experiment used targeted findability tasks, more time and effort spent looking around the page is not good.

There is no reason to forgo design modifications because of concerns over what might happen to engagement, but it is something to monitor closely. As always, a marketer using his or her best digital judgment is always a good decision. When all else fails, they should follow their digital heart.

Emotional Intelligence & Engagement

It turns out that a high-level of emotional intelligence could greatly benefit brands – particularly those that primarily service the millennial generation.

According to recent consumer research from Klarna UK, millennials experience higher levels of anxiety, impulsiveness and impatience than their older counterparts. The research indicates that two thirds (68 percent) of millennials reported feeling excitement when adding items to their online basket, compared to less than a quarter (24 percent) of people over 55. Other highlights of the study include:

+ 20 percent of millennials would feel less guilty if they were offered deferred payment options, and 1 in 5 would be more likely to complete a purchase if they knew they could spread the cost over time.

+ 89 percent of millennials use the basket as a tool to review costs, while more than three quarters often use their basket as a wish list, compared with only 29 percent of over 55s. Meanwhile, nearly three quarters (74 percent) admit to indulging in ‘buzz browsing’ – adding items to a basket with no clear intention to buy.

+ 58 percent of millennials are more likely to complete a purchase if an online offer is going to expire, so tapping into this fear of missing out by offering time-bound incentives and educating shoppers about pay after delivery or consumer finance options can encourage customers to complete their purchase.

At the core of every data-driven engagement strategy is the ability to target individual customers with precision, in real-time. Knowing how often customers interact with a brand, where they encounter a brand and how much they spend across all channels allows marketers to drive intelligent interactions based on data, not conjecture.

Website owners need to target users with customer lifetime value (CLV) in mind and there is no shortage of solutions emerging to help them do just that.

Customer engagement platform SessionM, for example, recently launched an interesting enhancement to its Audiences Module to enable marketers to go beyond the traditional method of defining and creating customer segments using generic demographics or attribute data filters and target using more specific data such as which items were purchased, spend thresholds, etc.

The update also enables marketers to calculate RFM (recency of purchase, frequency of purchases, monetary value of purchases) data about each customer, which can be aligned with guidance from SessionM’s product recommendation engine to deliver the next-best offer based on individuals’ preferences and past purchasing behaviors.

In (Constant) Pursuit of Customer Engagement

There is no one way to define engagement and no one engaging experience that will apply to every brand. Many elements and processes must be in place to establish genuine connections with consumers and motivate them to take the action desired by the enterprise. Only by focusing on creating technology-driven, unique and memorable digital experiences is it possible to win the hearts, minds and wallets of today’s consumers.

Written by: Peter Prestipino, via Website Magazine
Posted by: CueCamp

The post Customer Engagement, Relationships, and Unique Experiences Matter 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.

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.

You need more than top rankings on Google. People have to be able to navigate to the product they want and trust you enough to buy. Your website’s user experience (UX) should focus on building your visitor’s confidence by helping them complete their goals. 

Home Page UX Tips That Build Trust On A Quick Glance

Your home page gets the most traffic. Make it obvious that you sell products. Think of your home page as the window to your store. Think Macy’s on Magnificent Mile. Dress your home page with your best products and images. One thing you never see at Macy’s is different dresses swooping by one by one in the window. I’m talking about sliders here. If you have to use them, make sure they are user friendly.

Hero Area Best Practices

Your hero area (also called featured area) is the most prominent real-estate on your home page. You only have 50 milliseconds to leave a good impression, here is how to make it count.

Hero Area Do’s

1. Use simple, uncluttered design. Use as few words as possible.
2. Eliminate everything that does not make an impact. For example, your recent blog posts.
3. Use visual queues like color or arrows to focus attention on a single call to action.
4. Make it easy for people to self identify. Do you sell pricy jackets for women?

Hero Area Dont’s

1. Decorate. Swirls, sparkles, and other meaningless symbols add to the cognitive load and distract your customers.
2. Have outdated content like promotions from last week or even last month. You will instantly lose credibility.
3. Clutter the area with too many messages or promotions.
4. Have an automatically advancing slider or carousel.
5. Emphasize a product that is not representative of your overall mix.

Home Page Navigation

When people visit your site, you want to help them find what they came for. According to conversion expert, Tim Ash, the main focus of your home page is to provide category level navigation. Follow these pointers to help visitors find what they are looking for.

Home Page Navigation Do’s

1. Give visitors a “30,000 foot view” of what your site sells so they can drill down to specific categories.
2. Add your most used tools or buying guides.
3. Provide links to return policy, customer service, shipping and privacy pages.

Home Page Navigation Dont’s

1. Assume you know what people are looking for.
2. Jam every category and subcategory on your home page.
3. Push product level promotions. If you only have a few products, you can ignore this.
4. Use generic stock photos. This screams inauthenticity.

Solid Ecommerce User Experience Boils Down To Simple Primary Navigation

Navigation is critical when you have a lot of categories, variable products or products with many options. Nothing is more frustrating than a cumbersome menu. The quicker people can find what they want, the quicker you can move them through to the checkout process.

The purpose of a navigation menu is to get people where they want to go. Here is a breakdown of what you should address:

Primary Navigation Menu Do’s

1. Limit top menu to 7 choices.
2. Use a secondary navigation at the top right for items like “Contact Us”
3. Use a multi column menu that organizes categories and sub categories.
4. Show high quality images of your product.
5. Make your navigation menu prominent with contrasting colors.
6. Cross reference products into multiple categories. Someone looking for a USB drive may look under Laptop, Accessories, or Computers.

Primary Navigation Menu Dont’s

1. Have a single drop down that takes up a long column.
2. Show link empty category pages to main nav.
3. Over-classify products. If there is only one product in a (sub)category, remove the category and reclassify the product.
4. Don’t use vague options like “more.”

Cart Menus

A cart menu is likely the last button a user will click before taking out the credit card. Don’t over look this tiny icon.

Cart Menu Do’s

1. Show total price and number of items in cart.
2. Link to the cart page where they can see details of their contents

Cart Menu Dont’s

1. Substitute a “mini cart” for a full cart. Your ecommerce site, needs a cart page, not just a cart widget.
2. Link directly to a checkout page that doesn’t show every detail of the products in the cart.

Search

Many users skip the navigation menu altogether and rely on search/faceted search to drill down further. Faceted search can get complicated quickly. From a development and cost perspective, but also a user perspective.  Follow these guidelines to keep things simple and helpful.

Search Do’s

1. Use an open text field box at the top of every page.
2. Use faceted search when there are over 20 products within a category.
3. Filter by price, color, size are basic faceted search options.

Search Dont’s

1. Use filler text on search input. Leave it blank, or say “Search.”
2. Use subjective filtering options such as “heavy-duty” or “light-duty.”

Ecommerce UX Tips For Product Pages

Full product details are critical. For SEO and for user experience. Internal links boost SEO and help the user navigate back to the product listings page. A user friendly layout will have essential product information above the fold.

Product pages are the meat of your site, they need to convert. If  your customer has to select an option before adding to cart, display an error message when the “Add to Cart” button is clicked.

Product Page Content Layering

Your product page can quickly suffer from information overload. You want the right level of product information for people that already know what they want to buy, but also cater to shoppers that need every last product detail. By layering your information, you can cater to both types of buyers.

Product Page Content Layering Do’s

1. Provide a short product summary at the top of the page or next to the photo.
2. Add a border or shaded background to your “action area” – where people select options and click your button.
3. Present the ordering options near the top in the action area
4. Have breadcrumbs on the product pages.
5. Put product details, reviews, data, etc. below the product image and CTA area.

Product Page Content Layering Dont’s

1. Put a large block of copy near or above the CTA button.
2. Hide your add to cart button until someone makes a selection.
3. Make availability information an extra click away.
4. Have a subtle change when someone clicks your add to cart button. People will miss your “Successfully added” message.

A common mistake with many WordPress ecommerce themes was hidden “Add To Cart” buttons.

Product Page Images

Large photos and zoom is about the closest your buyer can get without physically touching the product. Fuzzy, poor quality images make the products look poor quality too. Check out this case study, where bigger, better product images increased conversions by over 300%.

Product Page Images Do’s

1. Use large, high res photos on a white background.
2. Use zoom features to let users see details for themselves.
3. Allow users to scroll to back and forth between images.
4. Provide clear instructions that additional images or zoom features are enabled.

Product Page Images Dont’s

1. Show “lifestyle” images or your product. Show just the product.
2. Don’t muddy up your photos with logos, watermarks or backgrounds.
3. Force an image pop-up to see more details or additional photos.

Build Trust With Buyer Friendly Checkout Process

Your checkout process needs to be simple, logical and distraction free. Don’t complicate it. Macy’s cart page hits many of the main points. The cart shows product details with images, pricing, tax and links back to individual product pages.

Cart Page

The first page in your checkout process is your cart page. You never want to send a user past this page. This page reaffirms what they have purchased in detail. This helps them build confidence and trust in your store.

Cart Page Do’s

1. Confirm everything. Product, size, color, quantity, availability, ship date, estimated delivery.
2. Allow users to navigate directly back to products in their cart.
3. Make it easy to change quantity or delete products. Let users change qty to 0 to remove products or click a “remove” button.
4. Show a picture of the product, in the color it was ordered in. If your customer orders a black jacket and sees a blue one at checkout, they lose confidence.
5. Make the continue checkout button prominent, but allow people to continue shopping.
6. Show the total out the door price.

Cart Page Presentation Dont’s

1. Prematurely ask for a credit card or email address. Let people confirm what they are buying.
2. Don’t use an “Update” button to remove products.

Checkout Page

After buyers feel confident that they are ordering the right product from the right company (yours), it is time to get the party started.

Once users start the checkout process, they want to complete the purchase as quick as possible. Help them help you. Remove distractions and make the process as easy as possible. Don’t make them re-enter their address or guess how to complete the form.

Checkout Page Do’s

1. Ask for only the minimal required information.
2. Replace the main navigation with a “contact” navigation.
3. Keep your checkout process short and your steps clear and logical.
4. Show progress during the checkout process.

Checkout Page Dont’s

1. Present new information or choices.
2. Force people to “join” or “become a member.”
3. Make people re-enter the same information twice.
4. Let users use billing address as shipping address with a single click.

How Does Your Site Stack Up?

You don’t have to have a million dollars to create a positive user experience. Nail these basics and you will get Google and customers to love your site and buy from you.

Interested in learning more about mobile shopping guidelines? Join our webinar on February 10, on “Mobile Shopping: Key Features Users Want” hosted by Michel Sharritt, VP of CueCamp and Situated Research.

Written by: Darren Dematas, Intertwine
Posted by: CueCamp

The post User Experience Tips: How to Seduce Ecommerce Visitors to Buy appeared first on CueCamp.

When we review main menu navigation on websites, the first thing we examine is the menu location. Users want to see the main menu navigation at the top of the page versus the page footer as observed on the Standard Market website. Why? Users are used to seeing the menu navigation on most websites at the top of the page. Additionally, users do not want to have to scroll through a site to find what they are looking for, or to start a search query.

The next thing we look at is labeling. We asked users to find out what beer was on tap at the Naperville Standard Market location. Users first looked at the top of the site to find the main menu navigation, and when they didn’t find it, they scrolled down. Many users said they will leave a website and give up on their search when navigation is missing, or they simply find the contact information and give them a call to ask their question.

Next our users were confused with the labeling of the menu options that they found. Under DEPARTMENTS they found a label named Beer. But then under the label THE CUBE, they found wine/beer/cheese bar. This is an example of poor labeling, as ‘Beer’ is located under two different menus. This confuses users and makes them unsure of what to click on to find the information they want. It also makes the search process longer and more difficult for the user.

It took users several minutes to navigate through the website to find the information they wanted, which caused frustration, confusion, and lowered the likelihood that they would return to the site in the future.

CueCamp helps clients alleviate these kind of frustrations users by carefully organizing web content and creating clear, distinct labels for good website navigation. CueCamp offers a free usability report that reviews 20 different areas of usability in your website, including menu navigation. The report is straightforward and easy to follow, and includes a one-on-one review to ensure any follow-up questions are fully answered.

To request your free usability report, visit www.cuecamp.com and simply fill out the short form. You will have your report within 48 hours. If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to leave them in the comments below.

Written / Posted by: CueCamp

The post Is Your Website Navigation Easy to Use? appeared first on CueCamp.

Many usability problems are quickly being addressed and fixed: for example, a recent post by Nielsen-Norman Group discussed the primary call to action (apply button) displayed below the fold, requiring users with typical screens to have to scroll down to find the apply button. As can be seen in the above screenshot, this problem has been addressed. However, the overall user-experience of shopping for health insurance is still flawed – with basic pricing information being difficult to find, and changing information as users go through the registration process. The new HealthCare.gov website highlights the difference between usability and user-experience: while usability could use improvement, the overall experience of the website is quite complicated, hindering users from shopping for insurance coverage.

The HealthCare.gov homepage has a well-designed wireframe, with clear labels and an easy to understand navigation structure. There are clear calls to action, encouraging users to apply for coverage (the ‘Apply Online’ and ‘Apply by Phone’ buttons). For users looking to explore coverage options before applying, the ‘See Plans Now’ button, circled above, helps users to see plan options before registering. However, once plan options come up, more information to discriminate amongst plans is not available:

While the site states repeatedly that costs vary depending on factors such as income level, more information on the plans could be made available under each option. As shown above, 47 options were available, with little to discriminate between plans other than price.

Application Process

The initial screen for applying looks like the following:

While the above screen is simple, with a clear call to action (clicking ‘Get Started’), the icons representing the application process are not clear. While it appears that a three step process is involved, the icons do not convey meaning to the user as to what is involved. Following, users are asked to create an account:

As shown, the account creation screen is simple (creating a username and password), but the security process complicates things. Instructions on creating a username and password require special characters for increased security, which can frustrate the registration process. Password characters are hidden as dots, making it more difficult for users to see what they are typing for a password. The process indicator (lower-left dots) are not clear at communicating where exactly the user is at while registering, either.

Over-Blown Security Wrecks User Experience

We had a test user run through the application process on HealthCare.gov, and their experience highlights problems with the website’s heightened security requirements, as well as delays from the site being unavailable or too slow:

The entire application process took about 55 minutes, longer than what I would anticipate for filling out a simple application. Why? I was asked many security questions to ensure my identity. I was first asked to make an account, which required me to answer 10 security questions. It was scary to know the amount of information they knew about me. One of the questions was, ” What was the name of the dog that you bought pet insurance for in 2010?” How would they know that? Other questions asked about information on my taxes and credit report.

Once my identity was checked I then watched the wheel of death spin and spin with a message saying that they would email me a link in order to move forward. I went to my email where I waited for about 30 minutes before I received my special link.

Once I clicked on the link I was brought back to the website and asked to login. After logging in I was then asked several more security questions in order to ensure my identity yet again. This time I was asked to set up security questions. Normally on a website security questions that you set up are suggested to you as they were here. However the types of questions set up were much more detailed then I would have liked. As an example one question was,” What is your parents current mailing address?” Another question I could set up was,” What is the VIN number to your car?” I am sure if I ever could not log into my account and the VIN question came up I would not be able to remember the answer.

I then was able to fill out the application, which took me through my personal information, tax history, current income level, and what I expect my future income to be. The application process was then completed, so I had thought. I was then asked to review my application.

During the reviewing process you were supposed to be allowed to correct any information on the application. I made several attempts to change my address. I would click on the EDIT button and it would take me to a different section of the application. I spent about 5 minutes trying the edit process but never managed to change my address. I would be brought to a different section of the application and I would have to continue from that point on filling out the entire application again.

Security is paramount on a government website handling personal information and health records; however, the amount of verification seems to hurt the user experience. As discussed, users must create an account to obtain accurate pricing information and to shop health insurance plans. Users can see a list of plan names for their area with typical pricing, but pricing is inaccurate until an application has been filled out (based upon income and other factors).

Our test user above was emailed after the application was filed, and told that they had to wait to see coverage plans until further investigation could be completed. Our user expected to be ‘rewarded’ with useful information after completing the long application process. The early stages of application on HealthCare.gov look simple, and encourage users to begin an application; however, the reality is a long process with difficulties that waste users’ time and a delayed gratification of shopping for coverage.

Technical Problems and Error Messages

As stated in the news, HealthCare.gov frequently stalled or the system went down for our test users. Below is an example, with a ridiculous ‘reference ID’ code to phone in to customer service:

While surprising for such an important website launch, heavy traffic from initial use might be partially to blame, as is the lack of testing before the site was live. From a usability standpoint, improving user workflows through the site could also yield performance increases, reducing demand on precious system resources that are being shared by so many users seeking coverage before the mandatory deadline.

We cannot imagine the costs being incurred by the number of employees required to handle the phone calls and customer service. As the saying goes, ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure‘, which certainly applies to usability research and careful planning of a website this large and important.

If you have used HealthCare.gov, please tell us about your experience by leaving a comment below.

Written & Posted by: CueCamp

The post Flawed User Experience on HealthCare.gov appeared first on CueCamp.