There is a reason you are not familiar with many -maybe not even one- of Airbnb’s competitors. The renting/booking marketplace “giant” has thrived in the global market for a decade and still hasn’t found anyone that can stand up to him.
User-friendly Experience + Simplified Buying Journey = More Sales
Online businesses in 2020 are forced to compete with large online and big box retailers, including Amazon, Wayfair, and brick-and-mortar stores like Walmart and Best Buy. In order to compete, e-commerce websites need to have a great user-experience (UX) and a streamlined buying process. Complicated checkout systems, over-cluttered product pages, and a lack of mobile optimization can severely inhibit a retailer from competing with large companies that have large, dedicated user-experience teams.
User-centered design isn’t just about creating a great experience for customers—it’s also a smart business move.
User experience is all about making your website both aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly for visitors. It’s about more than just a great design – it’s about functionality and how easily the user can navigate the site to find exactly what they’re looking for.
Psychology plays a big part in a user’s experience with an application. By understanding how our designs are perceived, we can make adjustments so that the apps we create are more effective in achieving the goals of the user.
To help you understand the perception of the user, I will introduce some design principles which I think are the most important, and also provide common examples of these principles in practice.
In order to improve the user experience, you have to start by observing customers interacting with your product.
The first step to improving your own UX (and reaping the business benefits) is to conduct a usability assessment of your product, software or website. This process uncovers the most common problems. Often, usage analytics indicate UX issues with your product. Usability testing explains these issues.
At Situated Research, we help our clients to conduct competitive website assessments so our clients can stay ahead of their industry. A Competitive Website Assessment makes it easy to spy on your competition. You’ll be able to see things like how many indexed pages, inbound links, and social media followers they have, and how your traffic rank compares to theirs.
By combining eye tracking with other usability studies, you can determine where your users look, for how long, and why. This can help you design interfaces that are effective at directing user attention to important things in the user interface.
Last week we published an article on the first five tips on improving your website’s user experience. Today we want to continue with that same theme and provide the final five tips.
This list is a starting point to providing the user experience that you want to give your customers online. Remember, if users come to your website and have trouble finding information or ordering a product, they will often leave your website and you will lose their business.
Websites are a representation of your business and your products or services offered. That is why it is so important to give your users a great experience no matter how they interact with your business.
Our team has come up with ten usability guidelines for web developers and business owners to follow. This list is a starting point to providing the user experience that you want to give your customers online.