UX Best Practices To Transform Your Website

With over 192 million active websites available today, the competition to attract, keep, and convert website visitors is steeper than ever. And if you’re thinking, “My website isn’t competing against 192 million websites,” you’re probably right. 

However, think about your industry competitors. 

That’s what you should be focusing on when it comes to your website’s design and how your target audience interacts with it. 

So, how can you stand out from your competitors and keep your website’s users engaged? It all comes down to user experience (UX) design. This article will discuss several tested and proven UX best practices you can incorporate into your website’s design and how to test for their effectiveness.

What Is User Experience Design?

UX design refers to all the aspects that a website or application incorporates in its user interface to ensure that users have a seamless and satisfactory experience while interacting with it.

It includes optimizing elements like navigation, layout, content presentation, visual design, and interactive features for the best website usability.

UX Best Practices

User experience design is important for several reasons, including enhancing user experience, engagement, and conversion rates. As such, you should incorporate the following UX best practices for the best results when designing or redesigning your website:

1. Understand User Needs and Preferences

As much as you may be designing a website to showcase your products or services, you should center its design around your target users. This means you must first and foremost understand the following:

• Who your target users are;
• What they need; and
• Their preferences when interacting with your website.

To do this, you must first create a user persona—a fictional representation of your ideal customer based on real data and user research. If you are doing a website redesign, the best way to get this information is to analyze website analytics and user feedback. Tools such as Google Analytics can provide information such as user demographics, behavior, which pages they visit most frequently, how long they stay on each page, and where they exit your site. 

If you’re setting up a new website, you can engage directly with potential users through market user research and surveys. Alternatively, you can leverage user testing sessions to collect feedback and validate your design choices for website usability.

2. Use Effective Navigation Layouts

If your users can’t easily find their way around your website or what they’re looking for, they’ll leave and probably never return. That’s why you must ensure that your website is easily navigable. To achieve this, your website should have:

• Clear and intuitive navigation menus: Design clear and intuitive navigation menus that prominently display your website’s main categories or sections. Use descriptive labels that accurately represent the content within each section, making it easy for users to understand what to expect.
• Consistent navigation across pages: Maintain consistency in navigation placement and layout across all pages of your website. Users should be able to easily locate the navigation menu regardless of which page they’re on.
• Hierarchical organization: Organize your navigational menu in a hierarchical manner, with broader categories at the top level and subcategories nested underneath. This helps users understand the structure of your website and navigate to specific content or pages with minimal effort.
• Visual cues: Incorporate visual cues such as dropdown menus, breadcrumbs, or icons to aid navigation and provide additional context to users. These visual elements help users quickly identify navigation options and understand their relationship to other pages or sections within the website.

3. Information Architecture

Information architecture refers to the organization and structure of information within a website. This UX best practice is an extension of navigation layouts but focuses more deeply on categorizing, labeling, and arranging content to optimize website usability and user experience. While navigation layouts primarily dictate how users move between different sections of a website, information architecture goes further by defining how content is organized within those sections and how users can interact with it. This involves creating a logical information hierarchy by ensuring that content is easy to find, understand, and navigate.

For instance, if you’re designing a website selling various electronic products, you can categorize its products into sections such as “Smartphones,” “Laptops,” and “Accessories.” Within each section, you can create further subcategories, such as “Apple iPhones” and “Android Phones” under the “Smartphones” category. You can then label each product with descriptive titles and relevant information, such as specifications, prices, and customer reviews. This organized structure helps users quickly locate the products they are interested in, understand their features, and make informed purchasing decisions quickly.

4. Optimize Page Speed

Page speed is one of the most important UX best practices you should focus on when designing your website. The average human attention span is 8.25 seconds, so if you want to keep users on your website, this should be your target page speed, or faster. A delay of just a few seconds can increase bounce rates up to over 100 percent, where users leave your site before it fully loads. With page speed, there are several things you can do to reduce it, including: 

• Compressing images to reduce their file size without compromising quality;
• Minifying CSS and JavaScript files to reduce load times;
• Leveraging browser caching to store website elements locally;
• Using content delivery networks (CDNs) to distribute content across multiple servers for faster delivery; and 
• Optimizing server response times by upgrading hosting plans or implementing caching mechanisms.

5. Use Responsive Design for Consistent Experiences Across Devices

Your website design or redesign should cater to users with all kinds of gadgets—phones, tablets, laptops, etc. But this should be informed by data obtained from your market research. It should tell you which devices your target users mostly use to access your website, and prioritize the design accordingly. Responsive design ensures that your website adapts seamlessly to different screen sizes and devices, providing all users with an optimal viewing and browsing experience.

For instance, mobile phones are the most used device to access the internet, so you should pay close attention to optimizing your website for mobile users. This may include implementing mobile-friendly design elements such as responsive layouts, touch-friendly navigation menus, and larger tap targets to accommodate smaller screens and touch interactions.

What Metrics Can Be Used To Measure the Success of UX Design Improvements on a Website?

The journey to UX optimization is ongoing, so you must continuously monitor the effectiveness of your design and make adjustments as needed. Here are some metrics for measuring UX design effectiveness.

• Conversion rate: This is a measure of the number of website users who completed a specific goal, such as buying a product or filling out a contact form, out of the total number of visitors to the website. 
• Bounce rate: This measures the percentage of visitors who leave your website after interacting with just one page. 
• Average session duration: This metric measures the average time users spend on your website per visit. An increase in average session duration indicates that users spend more time engaging with your content.
• Retention rate: This metric measures the percentage of returning visitors to your website over time. A high retention rate suggests that users found value in their initial interactions with your website and are more likely to return.
• User satisfaction surveys: Collect user feedback through surveys or feedback forms to gauge their satisfaction with the website’s usability, design, and overall experience.

Incorporate Customized UX Best Practices for Your Website Redesign

“Customer is king,” goes the popular saying. Therefore, your website’s design should follow UX best practices that prioritize the needs and preferences of your users—and future customers. Need to transform your website design with a top team of UX professionals? Contact us today, and let’s discuss how we can help. 

Frequently Asked Questions

What are some examples of successful website transformations achieved through UX design strategies?

Some notable website redesigns and designs that have seen success by incorporating UX optimization strategies include:

• Airbnb: Since 2017, Airbnb has undergone significant UX redesigns to improve the user experience for both hosts and guests. Today, Airbnb’s user interface has a simplified booking process, enhanced search functionality, and clearer navigation, resulting in increased user engagement and bookings.
• Amazon: Amazon continually optimizes its website’s UX to enhance user experience and drive conversions. Through personalized recommendations, easy checkout processes, and intuitive product search, Amazon maintains its position as a leading e-commerce platform with high customer satisfaction and loyalty.

What are the 5 W’s framework in UX design?

The 5 W’s framework in UX design refers to five key questions: who, what, when, where, and why. These questions can help you understand your users’ demographics, behaviors, motivations, and contexts, which are essential in creating user-centric solutions that meet users’ needs effectively.

What are some common challenges businesses face when implementing UX best practices?

Some common challenges you should expect to face when implementing UX best practices include aligning UX goals with business objectives, securing sufficient resources and support from stakeholders, and overcoming resistance to change within the organization. Additionally, ensuring consistency across different platforms and devices, as well as keeping up with evolving user expectations and technological advancements, can pose significant challenges during the implementation process.

Ann Mooney

Ann Mooney is the Director of Business Development at SOLTECH, and has over 30 years in Sales and Account Management in the Technology, Telecommunications, and Medical Industries. Ann’s key specialties are building long-term business relationships, results-driven sales, and account management.

Ann joined SOLTECH in 2016, she works directly with SOLTECH’s clients to help find them the best technology solutions for their business. Ann utilizes her strategic leadership and proactive problem-solving skills to continually grow SOLTECH’s business and ensure excellent customer service.

With her years of experience in the technology industry, Ann likes to share her expertise to educate her audience on the enhancement of workplace productivity and growth through software solutions in her articles. Her insights offer advice on important considerations for creating custom software, including initial steps, development costs, and timelines, as well as the advantages of collaborating with a skilled software development team.