The Importance of User Experience

If you are looking to create a successful website for your business, it is crucial to think about user experience throughout the design process. Commonly abbreviated as UX, user experience focuses on the quality of the experience and the overall response that a user has when they interact with a website, application, system, product, or service. This means that it is important to take the time to truly understand your target audience, what they are looking for, their values, their abilities, and their limitations to create the best user experience possible.

When executed the right way, user experience can help fulfill the users’ needs and your business’ online goals by creating a fast, easy-to-use website that improves user engagement, drives conversions, and encourages repeat visitors. Great UX goes beyond the visual elements of web design to plan out how users will interact with the website and encourage them to convert by making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, filling out a quote form, or performing another desired action.

As experts in web design and internet marketing, the team at FirstPage Marketing understands the importance of user experience. That is why our team has compiled some information on the benefits of investing in a quality user experience to demonstrate why it is always well worth the effort.

Learn about 5 components of great website design.

5 Reasons Why User Experience Should Never be Overlooked

While you may be tempted to view your website as a simple means of advertising your business and promoting your products/services, you should always think about how people will use your site and whether their experience will be positive or negative. User experience should never be overlooked because it:

1. Puts Your Audience First

When creating a brand-new website or completely revamping your current website, it can be easy to get caught up in the design elements and lose sight of how the website will function. Keeping UX in mind when working on the website’s new design makes it much easier to focus on creating content and a structure that will appeal to your target audience while allowing them to navigate the website with ease. Aiming for a great user experience on your website will also help you optimize the following elements, making it well worth your time:

• Accessibility
• Branding
• Content
• Human-device interaction
• Information architecture
• Usability
• Utility and performance

Of these elements, accessibility is particularly important as it ensures that your website can be viewed, navigated, and effectively used by people of varying abilities. Accessibility has also become an area of focus for leading search engines, further demonstrating how important user experience is for search rankings and website traffic.

2. Enhances SEO Rankings

Most leading search engines will use information from a website—time spent on a page, loading speed, site navigation, content relevancy, and website design—to determine how well that website ranks against the user experience of competitor websites. The better a website’s UX and its overall relevancy to the user’s search query, the greater the chance that the website will rank better in search results.

3. Increases Conversions

The overall user experience of a website directly affects how a user will navigate the site and whether they will convert into an actual customer. Since UX focuses on creating a strong first impression with users, UX is an important part of encouraging users to choose the best path in the sales funnel for their needs and preferences.

4. Reduces Future Development Costs

Taking the time to perform in-depth UX research before fully designing, developing, and launching a new website can help minimize the risk of potential problems and the potential need to pay for future development costs. It is also important to keep in mind that it is often cheaper to prevent potential issues before a website is developed than it is to fix the problems once the website is live.

5. Creates Trust and Credibility

Great UX can help reinforce a brand’s credibility by ensuring that users are able to easily find what they are looking for and engage with it. This, in turn, helps create trust and improves the odds that a user will make a purchase, contact the company, or spend more time on the website interacting with the content.

If you would like to learn more about user experience or need assistance optimizing UX for your business, give the team at FirstPage Marketing a call at 604-866-2230 or reach out through our online contact form. We will be happy to help you develop the perfect strategy for your business.

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