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Website Usability: Tips to improve the user experience

Written by: Mark Cijo

Article Overview: As a webmaster your major call is to achieve higher conversion rate. Conversion rate can be sales or a readership or service subscription. Behind every website there is a prime goal of achieving 100% conversion. There are many factors that affect the conversion rate and the major of that is the website usability. If your website serves as a bad space for your visitors, they will never stay on your website.

Website Usability: Tips to improve the user experience

As a webmaster your major call is to achieve higher conversion rate. Conversion rate can be sales or a readership or service subscription. Behind every website there is a prime goal of achieving 100% conversion. There are many factors that affect the conversion rate and the major of that is the website usability. If your website serves as a bad space for your visitors, they will never stay on your website.

What heads a person to buy some product or service from your website?

It is definitely the Motivation that heads any visitor to buy a product.

Clarity of thought is the next important factor. You need to express the uniqueness of the product to the visitor within 10 seconds before he moves away from your site. The website should speak to itself that there is something in me that you are looking for and you will find it so quick in my website. This will head for a sale.

The incentive you offer is the next factors. What is the benefit that user will get if he buy the product from your site. These are some important factors to improve the conversion rate. Analyze your website using any website tracking tool (Analytics, omniture, Woopra) If you see that there is a great percentage of bounce rate/ or hit results with low conversion, keep an eye on your website usability. There is some friction in your site that drives away the website conversion goals. What is that?

It can be:

Bad navigation structure – Unclear or less effective navigation structure will drive your conversion goals away. Make sure you have your product available in few clicks, if possible in one click. Creating separate static landing pages for category can help you with this to an extent.

How effectively you address anxiety- As a visitor how I can trust this site. How safe is my credit card information? Showing the security certified payment gateway can reduce the anxiety of the customer

Given below are some important site element that can help you improve the website usability

• The headline: The headline of the product or service you offer
• The introduction – The introduction of the product, telling what it is? Make is short , sweet and simple
• The benefits statement– What benefits me if I choose this products or what is it unique about this products from other products
• Supporting pictures/ images– Add supporting picture of the products, make sure you use the alt tag
• Content- A brief keyword rich and unique content about the product

Some bad practices:

• Placing too many fields on the landing page forms: I don’t like to fill long forms, don’t you? Giving a long form to the visitor in the landing page will reduce the conversion.
• Improper placement of primary offer content in the right or left column of the page - Placement is God, make sure you always place the catchy part towards the center of the page
• Concentrating all the sales effort on the 1 page or landing page
• Placement of images without caption is of no use.
• Increasing friction by having a very long form with too many questions at the beginning
• Distracting users by offering related offers and choices before the goal has been accomplished

Our aim is ultimately Conversion, have them fill the contact details say name, email id and phone number. If we lose them at any point we can call them back to initiate the buying the cycle.

Related Articles
  Site Design Usability and Navigation
  How to Avoid the Website Usability Gap
  Website Users Hold the Secrets to Increased Sales
  To Gain Mindshare Design with the User in Mind
  Get Over Yourself and Publish Your Prices Already

Article Tags: benefit, bounce, clarity, conversion rate, friction, important factors, motivation, navigation structure, prime goal, rate conversion, readership, service subscription, span style, style font, style text, uniqueness, website conversion, website usability



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