What Is User Experience?
User Experience (UX) is centered around how a visitor feels when interacting with a website or a product. It goes behind the scenes, past the visual elements to strategically design how your audience will interact with your website to accomplish desired outcomes, for example gaining information or making a purchase. The ultimate goal is an experience that is intuitive, valuable, and enjoyable to drive engagement, conversions, and repeat visitors.
When you design without usability in mind, you risk missing out on opportunities by not considering the unique needs of your audience and the core purpose of your website. “Design” in this sense isn’t as much about beauty and the visual elements as it is about how a person is empowered to interact with your website. In fact, for every moment a user spends on a page, the design impacts their overall opinion of your business through their experience. Ultimately, it can create or lose conversions.
What Impacts User Experience?
Some factors that impact UX include usability, human computer interaction, accessibility, utility and performance, branding, information architecture, and content strategy; essentially how easy, efficient, and enjoyable it is for a user to find information and complete tasks.
Why Is User Experience Important?
1. UX KEEPS YOUR AUDIENCE FRONT AND CENTRE
Whether you are creating a brand new site or revamping your old site, it is so easy to get caught up with adding more and doing more. Soon enough you can lose track of the reasoning behind adding in additional content and functionality.
UX design is all about purposeful structure and content. By keeping the user experience in mind you are designing for your audience and your targeted goals, rather than just taking a shot in the dark and designing a website that may look beautiful, but isn’t optimized for your audience and the value your website is intended to provide to them.
2. UX HELPS YOU GET TO THE TOP OF SEARCH ENGINE RESULTS
Google’s main priority are their users and how they interact with search results. Google now interprets analytics such as time spent on pages and navigation behaviours as how easy to use, relevant, and well designed and built your website is. Google interprets this data as the type of experience a user is having on your website, therefore by paying attention to these factors, the stronger you could potentially rank. It’s one of the many inches you can use to improve your site’s performance.
3. UX CONVERTS – IT’S FUNNELLING WITHOUT FUNNELLING
The big picture outcome is a conversion of some sort. What you’re trying to do is make an initial statement, prove it, and recap it. UX has a lot to do with how a user moves through that experience, which directly equates to their impression of the brand. It’s about empowering a user to choose their path to conversion based on their needs and preferences.
4. USER EXPERIENCE BUILDS TRUST AND CREDIBILITY
People almost universally research a business online before trusting them with a task they have set out to complete, whether it is making a purchase, contracting a service, or seeking information. It is important to reinforce your content with authenticity, expertise, and a human touch. We are all competing for our audiences’ limited time and attention. If a visitor has to work too hard to figure out what your site is offering or whether it is genuine and credible, they may jump to a competitor’s site without much hesitation.
5. BUILD A SOLID FRAMEWORK FOR YOUR CONTENT
If you’ve got a poorly framed house, it’s hard to make it stable no matter what you fill it with or how nice you make it look. In this case, the user experience is the framework, while design and content are the decor. Think of UX as a form of brand personification. It doesn’t matter what your site looks like if people are confused or displeased by the interaction.
Why Does User Experience Matter?
Because at the root, a website has a purpose. When you are dealing with business marketing sites, that purpose is to create leads, convert sales, and provide informative content.
UX connects the dots between a person and digital product while providing an understanding of how content needs to be managed. Without it, don’t expect to keep anyone’s attention for long.
Source https://forgeandsmith.com/why-user-experience-important-site/
