UX Design principles for better conversion rate

Let’s say you are a business owner who recently acquired UX Design services in hopes that your business would thrive and succeed only to find your users are dropping out of your website and your conversion rates are plunging through a downward spiral. “Why is this happening?”, you ask, “I have a beautiful web design”. Afterall, who can resist a beautiful web design? The short answer is: almost every single user prefers an easy to use website over a beautiful but dysfunctional website. It is almost guaranteed you will have better conversion rates with function over beauty. But who says you have to choose one over the other? You can definitely have it all. It’s just a matter of building strong bones, skin and muscle before you go and pick the shiny clothes, jewelry and make up. 

There is no follow through step by step recipe on how to make your web design functional, and it is a big learning curve as it is hard to put yourself in the shoes of your audience, but if you try and think like your audience then you are off on the right track. Also a great way to start is to assume your audience knows absolutely nothing. 

In this article we will go over the UX design principles for better conversion rate and for more user engagement. Let’s dive in.

Speak like your audience

Your audience needs to feel like you are speaking directly to them. Copywriting is extremely important in web design and plays a crucial part in captivating your audience. If your audience is young and you use a formal approach, you will lose them as well as if you are a bank and you speak to your customers in a very street like manner you will lose credibility. 

Find out your audience’s age group, their backgrounds, their lifestyle and understand what language they use so you can better captivate them. 

Embrace a minimal approach

Your web design flow must be as simple as possible. We know a thing or two about users: they are impatient, they don’t read and they want the platform to do the thinking for them. In web design there is a misconception that the more information the better, but what often happens is that you end up confusing your users and it can create frustration. Do the thinking for them.

How do you do the thinking for users? Put the important things right in front of them with as few steps as possible. Don’t overcomplicate the user journeys, establish clear paths for each task and make them almost seamless with just a few clicks. A great tip when users are, for example, filling out a form is to get an interactive element that can give messages to your users, such as: “Oh you’re almost there, let’s get this done”, something encouraging and positive, as audiences respond well to that.

Better on site search

There is probably nothing more frustrating than not being able to find what you are looking for.

Another example of “Doing the thinking for your users” in web design, is to use a predict and auto complete mechanism to make the search easier. It saves users loads of time and it makes them find things quicker.

Invest in real but professional Photography

In web design there are a lot of people who use stock images which is helpful when you don’t have professional looking pictures to add to the web design. However this creates an unconscious reaction from your users, it makes them not trust as much. Stock images can be often associated with non legitimate companies which makes it difficult for users to trust you. Always invest in real but professional pictures, of real people and real projects as this will create a bond with your users.

Easier forms, less steps

The best principle in web design is that the best approach is to use fewer steps as possible to achieve a certain task. Users get frustrated quickly and often abandon a task because it is just too time consuming. Whether users are filling out a form or buying a product online it should be so simple that they can just do it on the go. Try to compress data in a very efficient way and only ask the user for absolutely essential info, be straightforward and make it quick.

Don’t play hide and seek

In web design things should be easy to find. It is best to draw a schematic of every single task your users will likely complete on your web design. After you do that, create clear paths for each task by adding CTA’s through the homepage so users can quickly find what they are looking for.

A good example of this is when the “delete your account” button is so hidden and buried that the user cannot find it, worse than seeing your user go, is to deceive him and make it hard for the user to just complete that task. This is a mistake that most don’t recover from.  

Faster page loading

Faster page loading is quite underestimated but navigating through a web design that does not load properly or it takes ages to load is probably the number one frustration for most users and they will likely abandon the website if it gets too slow. The competition is so high that if your web design does not load users will trade you for your competitors just for this reason alone. 

For more information on web design please check our website https://swisstomato.ch/agence-web-geneve/