Whether you have an established business website or you’re just starting your business, optimizing your user experience (UX) should be at the forefront of your mind. Your user experience can delight your customers, pushing them to spend more or increase your average conversion across your website.
On average you have around 3-5 seconds to make a good first impression and capture your visitor’s attention. Once captured, the next hurdle is getting them to convert.
In the past eight years, I have been designing for eCommerce brands and I’ve learned some handy tricks along the way. In this article, we’re going to walk through these tips to leverage user experience and increase conversions across your website. These 9 tips are also handy if you’ve just started to design your next business website.
1. Don’t forget your trademarks & rights reserved
You’ll be shocked at how many user testing videos and focus groups saw users stating that the first thing they check on a website is if there is a registered trademark(™) or rights reserved(®) symbol next to their logo. You might think of this as an old-school way of looking at things, but since childhood, a lot of users have had this ingrained into them and spotted it on numerous world-famous brands. So they subconsciously relate these symbols back to trust.
Though trademarking your brand isn’t really common practice for a startup, it probably should be. You cannot just place these symbols next to your logo; you need to look at the regulatory requirements for using them. Typically, trademarking a logo costs around $500 — but this can increase dramatically if you need a phrasing trademarked.
2. Establish a clear call to action
This has been said time and time again by numerous designers — but I’ll reiterate it. Having a clear primary call to action can dramatically increase conversions and click-through rates. But, you need to make sure that the coloring of your main action is at the top of your visual hierarchy (different from the rest of the buttons across your website).
Lots of websites color their calls to action the same. If you want your user to enquire or add to the cart, then make sure this button is a different color from the rest of your buttons. If it has to be the same color, make it stand out in some other way.
3. Observe & learn
You may think of this one as a given, but lots of founders and business owners still don’t know about user recording or heat mapping their website. This data is invaluable and serves as a visual reference that you can work to when looking at improving your website.
These tools track user mouse movements and how they’re interacting with your website — some even track “Rage clicks” where the user clicked numerous times in a rage usually caused by a broken link or an inactive button. The tools that can be used for this are inexpensive and mostly free up to a certain limit. I would recommend using Hotjar or Fullstory to capture your visitors’ heatmaps and user recordings.
“Using HotJar for recording our customers’ interactions with our website quickly and easily enabled us to optimize converting those customers, by improving and focusing on the content they care about.”
4. Include phone & live chat
In a recent A/B test where 100,000 new customers visited the website, the B test which showcased the phone number for our company in the navigational bar received an increase in conversion and reduction in bounce rates. Displaying your company phone number is a simple UX change that could bring your website similar results.
If you do not have a company phone number then live chat could also work. Although it’s best to have both options available if possible to increase user confidence and trust in the company.
5. FOMO signals (Fear of missing out)
FOMO signals are usually those annoying pop-ups on websites that typically state “Someone recently bought this.” When implemented like this, customers become weary and they are usually working towards a negative for your metrics.
Implementing FOMO signals gracefully such as on a product page above a call to action button gives the signal more weighting and trust. An example would be: “Only 4 remaining in the warehouse”. This method typically requires quite a bit of integration but can increase conversion rates dramatically.
6. Reach out to your customers
This method is straightforward but often overlooked by a lot of companies. You can reach out to your customers pre or post-purchase by interviewing them and learning about their experience, or creating a simple survey that the user can fill in.
You’ll always be surprised how much customers will tell you about the experience, and you can usually catch complaints before they visit the review websites. Just make sure the survey is worthwhile to the customer — this can be as simple as adding a coupon code on their next purchase or a small Amazon voucher.
7. Mobile First?
You’ll hear a lot of companies use the term “Mobile First”, and they are correct, as most web traffic for eCommerce and SaaS is generally now mobile. But what a lot of these companies are missing is that most of their conversions will still be on Desktop and Tablet. This is partly due to people finding what they’re looking for on mobile and making the purchase on their desktop machine where it’s easier to consume the information and “feels” safer. To conclude, design mobile-first but don’t overlook your conversion statistics on the desktop when designing.
8. Test on other browsers
Every user doesn’t browse on Google Chrome. Though we developers and techies love it, the general populace uses the browser their mobile or desktop comes with, such as Safari, Firefox, or Opera. A lot of websites don’t employ cross-browser testing as part of their user experience testing suite. Conducting this quite simple test can make a difference in a sale.
A lot of SaaS companies don’t realize that some markets are browsing their websites on dated software such as Internet Explorer 9/10 and sometimes fancy SaaS websites don’t even load on these browsers.
9. Build scannable content
When we create content for our pages, we tend to write in paragraphs which we expect the user to read in their entirety — but this isn’t the case. When writing, create content that can be easily scan-read on the screen. In the design world, we call this test the “Five-second test”; in this time a user should know what the page is about or what the product is to a degree of accuracy.
To increase your content’s scannability, I’d recommend creating bullet point lists of the most important aspects of information. These tests can be conducted at a low price using the Usability Hub platform.
Conclusion
In conclusion, some of the methods listed above may work for your website or may not even make a dent. The best way to test or experiment with these methods is by creating an A/B test on your website or simply taking note of your key metrics before launching the changes. Then monitor them over a few months depending on how much data you’re collecting per day.
User experience can be extremely useful when creating a website and shouldn’t be overlooked. Just make sure you’re testing to get the most out of it.
Jonathan Kelley is a UI/UX designer with over 10 years’ experience in designing for large eCommerce brands and smaller startups. You’ll find him currently working at email archiving company Cryoserver and working on his own voucher codes startup Vouchertoday, which offers great coupons for brands like VonHaus, Moonpig, and Boohoo.
