How To Design Your Website For Better User Experience

When designing a website, remember that the largest search engine on the internet has only a search box on its home page, yet it has billions of users and visitors. There are websites that seem so techy and sophisticated, but users find it hard to go from one part to another. And then there are sites that look so simple, but users love them because they’re so easy to surf and use.

Check this out if you want to know how Laughn Samurai explains how to build user-friendly websites that are designed around the behavior and mindset of their target users and subscribers. Here are some things to keep in mind to give a great experience to your users and visitors.

Know What Your Users Need And Like

The first thing you need to know about user experience is that you should know what your expected users want to see on your site in the first place. It may sound like a truism but a lot of website designers build websites based on their own notions of functionality and aesthetics.

You should get to know the typical user or types of users you would like to attract to your site. In short, you need to fully understand how your target users think and what they’d like to see on your website. Don’t look at how your website works from your back-office dashboard perspective. Look at it from the point of view of the user looking at your homepage interface.

If you want to know what works with your targeted users, check out similar websites which have the highest traffic and conversions. If you’re designing a boutique online store, for instance, you should check similar stores. Scroll down and see if there are user comments or reviews which give insights into what makes them work. You might also find online surveys or industry reviews about why users like these sites and pages.

Every Page Should Lead Them To What They Need From You

Every page on your website has to contain a clear, compelling call-to-action. This could be a video, a link, a form, or a button that ushers the users to the next step. There are no uniform rules on what specific call-to-action should be on each page. It depends on what you’d like the page to do. This can be a simple link to the services page from your homepage. It could be a button to start a chatroom with a chatbot.

Here are some examples of call-to-action which you can put on your pages:

• Links to related blog posts within the text of your blog or a neat listing of the links at the end of your blog
• A fillable box to log in to your website as a member, paid user, or subscriber
• A ‘Contact Us’ link to the page containing a form which they can fill out to send you a message
• An online tool that will allow the users to schedule an appointment
• A link that will take them to a form that they can fill out to subscribe to your site
• Downloadable PDFs (company profile, product brochures, item descriptions, etc.)

Everything They Need In All The Right Places

If you’re the user and you landed on your own site for the first time, what would you think a few minutes after you’ve clicked a few links and buttons? User experience is the metric they don’t measure, but it’s what your website designers should be asking themselves when they’re mapping the lay of the land. Would the users be familiar with most links, buttons, and other clickables or would they be groping in the dark?

Here are a few conventions to which your website designers should keep in mind:

• Most users would expect your logo at the top-left corner and your main navigation menu at the topmost, somewhere in the middle or right side
• There should be a call-to-action button at the top
• A ‘Contact Us’ link is usually included in the navigation menu
• A search box should be somewhere at the top, sometimes in the header
• There’s a bunch of other usual stuff at the footer such as social media icons, site maps, and other very useful but not too frequently clicked links such as user terms and conditions, privacy policy, etc.

Think About How Your Site Would Look To Tablet And Mobile Users

Another thing you should keep in mind are your tablet and mobile users. You should also think about what functionalities are supported by your servers and applications for tablet and mobile devices. More internet users are logging in from their tablet and mobile devices instead of desktops and laptops. You should also test your user experience for these devices.

Make It Easy

All too often internet users complain that they found a website too difficult to navigate or, worse, that they didn’t find what they were looking for even though the search engine pushed these websites to them. This is the last thing you’ll ever want your users to experience, which is why it’s crucial to think how your users think when building your website. Make it easy for them.