“Customer experience isn’t an expense. Managing customer experience bolsters your brand.” – Stan Phelps
By Elaine Dodge
Why use detailed and creative photos to boost user experience (UX)?
#1: Your user-friendly website has attractive and/or thought-provoking photography or illustrations.
There’s nothing worse than opening up a site and seeing the same bland, boring stock photography you’ve seen a hundred times before. It’s almost as bad as a site not having any pics at all. People skim your site and their newsfeed on Facebook and Twitter without stopping to read anything unless a picture captures their eye and imagination first. Not only do you want to capture the user’s attention, you also want to inform him, clearly. A good graphic may just do that. It will also help your user-friendly site to stick in his mind.
Hack: How to ensure your website is fresh.
Don’t use bad stock photography. These days smartphones have awesome cameras and great photo-editing apps so there is no excuse. Go out there and shoot those pictures that will speak 1000 words on your website. If you have to use stock pics then make sure they’re eye-catching, intelligent and original.
How to optimize your contact channels for a better user experience (UX)?
#2: Your website gives users more than one way to contact you
You desperately need to contact someone (an actual human being) at the company immediately and all their website has is a contact form. A form! This will annoy users more than bad navigation on the Home page. It’s like walking smack into a wall. Only having a form as a means of contact makes you look like you don’t care. Users will go to someone who does, taking business that could have been yours to them.
Hack: How not to irritate people right at the end
Make sure ALL your contact information is available for users, including your company Facebook page and Twitter handle. There is nothing wrong with having these contact details at the top of every page on your website.
What is it about you that makes you stand out and provide a welcoming user experience (UX)?
#3: Your website’s ‘About Us’ page actually tells the user about you
There’s a global drive for business language to be free of jargon and legal babble. It smacks of a company trying too hard, and puts people off, drives them away and, in the end, often says nothing at all. Your ‘About Us’ page is your company’s story. This is where you should be trying to engage their hearts and minds, to become memorable.
Hack: How to make your ‘About Us’ page engaging and memorable.
Be conversational. Don’t bust their brains. Write the way you would chat to your customers. Speak to them in their language and make it easy for them to absorb your information.
Do your visitors understand what you do by the information on your website?
#4: Your website simply, and clearly, tells users exactly what your company does.
We have already mentioned in the course that you only have 3 seconds for your site to download before a user will look for another site. Imagine how annoyed they’re going to be when after looking at your site, they’re actually not sure what your company does!
Hack: Tell them what they want to know
Make sure your ‘About Us’ page explains your company’s ethos and vision as well as who you are and what you do. It needs to be clear in your page headings, your paragraph headings as well as the body copy. It also needs to feed into your customers wants and desires – why is your customer coming to your website? Figure that out and let them know they have come to the right place in as few words as possible.
Keywords work well with good, engaging and well-researched content which is also relevant
#5: Your copy doesn’t suffer from an infestation of keywords
Gone are the days when stuffing your copy with keywords was the way to get your site to appear high on the first page of Google. Users got bored and Google got clever. Keywords are still important but now it’s more important to know where you put them and what else you have to say. You’re more likely to get a higher ranking if you come across as an expert in your field with an easy-to-understand style of writing. In fact, if your copy is stuffed with keywords these days, Google is more likely to boot you to the last page.
Hack: How to use keywords effectively for better marketing ROI
Although an entire blog could be written about this, here are the five areas where judicious use of keywords will bump your site up in the rankings.
- Titles
- Descriptions
- Headings and Content
- Images Titles and Alternative Text
- URLs
Try out these hacks and you’ll already be on the internet highway to a user-friendly website. And always remember it’s important that users find your site easy to use, a joy to navigate and full of all the information they need. Provide some calls to action like “Do you like what you see? Call us for a FREE consultation (with a phone number)”. After that, it is up to you and your sales staff to welcome your customers as they arrive at your door.
