User experience is an essential factor for any businesses which have an online presence. Google now sees user experience as priority for both itself and webmasters looking to rank in SERPs results.
Google wants your content to be valuable, and your website to be designed with UX in mind. This ranges from having an intuitive, simple and accessible design, landing pages optimised for users, to ensuring that your website is responsive so that a customers experience remains unchanged no matter whether they are accessing it from a desktop or mobile device.
If you’re setting up a new business or looking to optimise your existing website, weve spoken to GoDaddys Stefano Maruzzi and Company Checks Alastair Campbell in order to get their insights and experiences of user experience.
Take a look at the questions they have answered below to see what simple steps you can take improve user experience for your customers.
First up we have feedback from Stefano Maruzzi, VP EMEA at GoDaddy. GoDaddy provides business owners with a platform on which to register a domain name, build a website, as well as a variety of online services such as hosting, web security and online marketing.
How do you define user experience
The user experience is essentially the journey visitors will take as they visit and use a website. Is it easy to find information Is navigation to other pages intuitive, and do they have a clear purpose Is it aesthetically pleasing with clear, consistent colours and branding These are all questions that web designers consider, and that inform the user experience, when creating a new site.
In what ways do you help clients with user experience
As GoDaddy, we provide a number of tools designed to make it easy for even complete beginners to build professional, slick websites with the user experience front of mind. With our Website Builder for example, we provide a whole range of customisable template designs, into which customers can easily insert the features they need, including social and business apps.
Read more on user experience:
- A review of the best design events at London Technology Week 2015
- What businesses can learn from Twitter and Facebook’s responses to user feedback
- User experience should always be top priority
What impact has “mobilegeddon” had on the future of user experience
Googles move to prioritise mobile-ready websites in its search rankings means there will be a bigger focus on mobile optimisation than previously. We should also see a further proliferation in websites with mobile-first designs, where the desktop experience mirrors that of a phone or tablet.
A remarkable number of websites still arent mobile-optimised Forrester suggests only 38 per cent of enterprise sites are so purely from the perspective of its impact on user experience, this should provoke a positive shift with more web designers and business owners improving their websites.
What simple steps can companies take to improve user experience for their customers
Think of a website as a shop window with an open all hours sign on the front. Customers can visit at their leisure, so it’s vital that they are greeted with a user experience that is as good as it can be. Achieving this doesnt need to be massively time-consuming or expensive, either. Here are a few points for startups to keep in mind:
- Prioritise important information: When looking for a new service, customers want to find the right information as quickly as possible. Details such as location, operating hours and contact details should all feature prominently on the home page.
- Remove clutter: Having a busy page with too much going on is a sure-fire way of confusing customers. A clean, minimal website design can be a respite from the poor experience your customers might face elsewhere.
- Make it mobile-friendly: With mobile having overtaken PC internet usage, theres a very good chance your customers will access your website this way. We all know browsing a website that isnt mobile friendly can be frustrating, so keep each page of the site similar to ensure a feeling of continuity as users scroll through on their phones or other mobile devices.
Continue onto the next page for insights from business financial data provider Company Check a firm that has to have UX front and centre owing to the nature of its operation.
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Alastair Campbell is the founder of Company Check, which provides a free UK company check with financial data from Companies House. Company Check is Europe’s largest source of free data covering ten countries.
How do you define user experience
User experience is all about ensuring that the tools or services or products you provide to your audience are designed in a way which best meets their needs, whatever those may be. In the online sense, this means creating a website which is easy for the target user to use (note that this doesn’t mean the site has to be simple, it just needs to be designed and built in a way that suits the target user).
For us at Company Check, our whole business model is built around the provision of business data which is accessed through our website. This data is used most frequently by businesses undertaking due diligence and for this reason, it needs to be easy and quick to use and not require a degree in computer programming to work it out!
This is why visitors to our site will see that the most prominent feature is the search bar, since this is the primary reason people have come to the site. Not sure what to type in the search bar We’ve added a handy hint (a dummy business name) to help you. Everything on our site has been built to make the search and retrieval of business data as simple as possible so that our users can achieve their goals quickly and easily.
In what ways do you help clients with user experience
As well as being a data provider, we’re also a team of developers and as such, we’re always looking for ways to improve user experience. We’re quite fortunate in that over three million visitors access our website every month, so we’ve got a really good data set of users accessing, logging into and using Company Check’s search features.
This means we can use tools such as Google Analytics to better understand what our audience is doing and to refine the experience to make those things easier and more pleasurable for them. One of the main ways this has manifested itself recently has been in the redesign of the website.
This is a result of the analysis of millions of views on our site and also speaking to people we know use it to identify areas that can be improved. Our new design is cleaner, the search bar is even more prominent and we’ve also added extra engagement functionality such as the ability to claim your business and brand your own page.
What impact has “mobilegeddon” had on the future of user experience
The mobile update from Google certainly got people talking, but I believe a good user experience comes from an understanding of the user, not the rules laid out by the search engines.
What we should all remember is that Google’s primary function is to provide high quality search results to its users, so anything which is detrimental to the experience a user has on your site is also detrimental to their perception of the service Google has provided them when they found your website through its search.
In this way, so-called mobilegeddon needn’t have caused so much discussion, nor warranted such a grand name. Rather, we should always be seeking to improve the experience we are providing to our end users the bottom line is that that’s what Google is trying to do as well, so whether it’s now or further down the line, you can be sure the algorithm updates they make will continue to push better user experience across the board.
What simple steps can companies take to improve user experience for their customers
It has to start with a really thorough understanding of your customer, it’s as simple (or potentially complex) as that. For us, we knew our target audience to be business owners and sales managers and we knew their intent to be to better understand the businesses they were interacting with, so we built our website around that.
For other startups, make sure you know who you’re targeting, and be specific. Get to know more about them speak to them in person, use the expanse of the web to research them and what motivates them and challenges them. Ask what it is that your business does that is going to solve a problem they have or meet a need, and ensure your delivery speaks to that.
User experience is so important, especially in this age where the new businesses are being incorporated every day. Businesses can’t rest on their laurels and it is those who provide the best experience for their users that will win over their competitors.
We hope that these insights have inspired you to take your own UX design into consideration I order to improve your customers online journey.
Gareth Bull is the director of Bulldog Digital Media, which helps SMEs drive sales and increase brand awareness through social media and organic SEO.
