User experience (UX) is a term that speaks about the user’s viewpoints and emotions when using a particular system, website, or application. It involves the user’s abilities to look at products/systems as a utility that needs to be efficient and usable at the same time.
A good UX is critical if you want to have a design that stands out to consumers and that they may find it delightful. Bad user experience can and will lead to the user leaving the website in search of something better. It can be that the page loading is too slow or that the layout and design are poor to the point it is impossible to find more information.
There are 7 factors that influence and affect your website user experience:
1. Useful: If your website is not useful to someone, why is it worth having an online presence? They do nit benefit the users, and without users, you cannot compete with your industry rivals that have websites with useful content and features.
2. Usable: This relates to the ability of users to navigate in the website without any problems or distractions. The website must have an ease of use for users to feel accomplished and to have a simple, defined process as they browse through the website.
3. Findable: An important note to make is that your website must be easy to find in search engines. On your website, your products and content must be easy to find and can be done by using strong headlines that stand out. The navigation should be easy to access and use along with landing pages and service pages. If users cannot find anything, they are more than likely to leave without reading or buying your content.
4. Credible: To attain credibility for your website, the first impression must really wow the user, as you wont get a second chance to impress them if their experience the first time was bad. A user will also trust you more if you have testimonials, certificates, industry recognition and more, as this shows you have had experience and you can back up it up with proof.
5. Desirable: The desirability of your brand should be conveyed in your design, logo, images, elements and overall aesthetics. The more appealing your website is, the higher your user retention will be. Nailing the copy writing by selling the feeling the users want, rather than the stats and specifications.
6. Accessible: Website accessibility is all about the users with disabilities to navigate your website. It should be easy to use for everyone, which means sometimes having to go with a simpler, yet effective web and UX design process.
7. Valuable: When users open your website, you want to be able to convince the user straight away to give you attention and/or pay for your product/service, and therefore the value you want to deliver must be visible immediately.
A good website UX is something that will pay off in the long run. It will keep and increase your web traffic. The speed of your website and UX is essential in the modern age, as a delay can load speed can increase the bounce rate and result in a potential bad experience. You can reduce the bounce rate by optimizing your website’s UX for success, meaning users will stay longer on your website and explore more content. A good UX is what separates you form your competitors, and will all the right elements on your page, users will give you positive feedback and refer your site to their peers.
To develop an outstanding design and user experience, it is important to keep it simple. UX factors for public facing websites are generally more interested with improving conversion rates and encouraging button clicks wile CMS design is about facilitating tasks. Front-end design is often about convincing users to do something and back-end is concerned with assisting users in doing things they have already decided to do. A problem an all-content system might demonstrate is trying to be appealing to everyone with everything, leaving behind a poor UX. It is incredible hard to appeal to everyone, and the focus should be on one thing done well. It is important to anticipate what the most commonly used tools will be and make them immediately and unambiguously accessible. This is where user research will be extremely handy.
When placing sub-menus and drop-downs, they should be optimized and organized to common-sense groupings that allow users to find these tools quickly. When designing a CMS, remember to ask yourself and others where would you expect to find a particular tool and what should the label on the button be? Web designers and developers can often be tempted to use technical words that may sound nice but from a user’s perspective, it can then be hard to understand. This makes it important to have easy and understandable between non-technical people and systems like PHP.
A good CMS designer should be looking to automate as much of the content authoring process as possible. It should save the user time when doing something for example, if a user uploads an image, they don’t want to upload a separate thumbnail – your system should be able to generate one on their behalf. Dates and times can be auto-filled and updates can be installed spontaneously, etc. CMS should save your user all the micro tasks by making sure the system can complete them. By having an automating system for repetitive parts of the process, the user can be surprised and delighted with the ease of use and lack of friction.
When a user reads documentation, it may be concerning or a glaring omission that there is no reference material. Even a simple system should come with a some supporting documentation to explain key concepts to users who may struggle to figure it out. What makes the documentation better is having the implementation of inline hints, tooltips and other aids that could appear and explain things without the user having to refer to anything from google. A key part of UX design of your CMS might be looking at any areas that may not be 100% clear and support users struggling by having some extra helpful descriptions.
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