Online presence of businesses have become a common practice if you want to build your brand. Your website and its UX has become a crucial deciding factor for the purchase of your product.
But clicking your website in today’s competitive race of high-quality websites, is itself a long-awaited patience exercise. And none other than the search engines themselves scrutinize your website for ranking on its first search engine results page (SERP). Therefore, you need to have a good UX design of your website.
So, if you ever asked a professional content marketing agency in India, why US is important for your business? Well, your conversion rates can rise up to 200 % with a well-designed user interface of your website.
You just need to have a simple, but user-centric UX design of your website which reflects a trustworthy image of your website to the users. Though it’s not some one-time effort but an evolving exercise that you need to maintain forever.
Worry not! I have simplified this task for you with a full-proof Website UX checklist which will elevate your website interaction to a new level.
Let’s start with your homepage checklist.
1. Website’s Homepage Design
Your website’s homepage gives the first impression to your visitors. As it’s rightly said, “the first impression is the last impression”, you should not have a last but a lasting impression.
For this, you need to tick mark the following tweaks when done to your website:
- Your homepage’s loading time should be in between 1-3 seconds only. You can reserve huge sized files for internal navigation.
- Your contact information should be clear, updated and accessible from the homepage.
- Your homepage should provide a clear and customer-centric information about your product or service.
- Your social media links should be visible with optimum sized icons.
- Your homepage should have a clear call-to-action (CTA) icon guiding the visitors to relevant pages.
- Your videos or images should be relevant and should seek permission to play from the visitors.
- You should provide a search box, if you have a lot of pages to visit.
- You should have a clear link to the ‘About Us’ page at the top of the homepage.
- You must announce at the homepage if any major changes (eg., security policy changes, etc.) are done to your website.
That’s it your homepage is optimized for a good UX design.
Let’s move on to the layout of your website.
2. Website’s Layout
Well there are other important factors which can improve the whole layout of your website, irrespective of whether it’s a homepage or a navigation page. Your layout and design should compliment your organization’s goals and objectives. For eg., a website serving graphic designing products, should have a unique but enjoyable and classy UX design of its website. Whereas, ecommerce websites need to focus more on their navigation, search filters and payment gateways.
So, you must follow these pointers to have a quality layout of your website:
- Your website, above the fold (part of the website without scrolling), must have the important information relevant to the visitors.
- Your website should be responsive, i.e., easy to navigate and use on different devices, without the need of adjusting the screen.
- Your images should be alt attributed. It is useful if the images take time to load for the users to understand the intent of the image.
- Your pages should avoid cluttering with an ample amount of negative space in between the content.
- Your brand’s logo should be placed at the same place on every page of your website.
- Keep pop-ups to a minimum and they should not cover the whole page abruptly.
- The ‘clickable elements’ should be clear to be understood. You can highlight them with a unique background or color.
- You should keep your font style, sizes and the style of writing consistent throughout the website.
- Your page’s background should not distract the visitors from the content.
- Keep attention grabbing animations minimum and relevant only.
Now you have understood the layout features of your website.
Another important UX factor is navigation.
3. Website’s Navigation Channels
It is important for a good UX designed website to allow easy navigation to its visitors. But it’s not enough. With the ease of navigation, there are other relevant and ignored optimization factors that you must consider.
- The navigation links should be consistently clear on every page.
- You should provide breadcrumbs to the users, for easy going-in and coming-out.
- Maintain the position of the navigation links at both the top and bottom of the pages.
- Use a leyman user’s mind-set to design the content categories for logical navigation. Also, include sort and filter options for the categories if you have a huge range of products.
- You can also link your logo on every page to the homepage. This practice gives a professional impression to the visitors.
- If yours is an ecommerce site, then provide a clear item cart and checkout navigation links on each page.
- Your important commands like, ‘buy’, ‘checkout’, should be displayed as buttons, not links.
- You should provide informative sitemap links on each page.
- You may insert ‘trigger words’ in navigation labels to attract users while scanning your site.
- Your external links should open in a new tab to avoid getting lost from your site.
Now it’s easy to navigate your website for your users. But we should also understand about the forms on websites.
4. Website’s Input Forms
There are many instances where you seek customer’s feedback or input regarding your product, or their pain points, in a format of forms. For example, a form popping-up on the screen, once your website visitor reaches a point where he/she is likely to answer your form questions.
But there are certain checks to be done for quality user-experience:
- Your questions should be relevant and only necessary to be asked.
- Your form fields should be labeled with conventional terms like, Age, Color choice, etc.
- Your form completion should end with a confirmation page.
- Your form should alert with error messages next to the incorrect input field while filling the form, rather than after submitting.
- You should avoid input of special characters like, $, %, etc. It should be automatically input once the field is answered.
- Your text boxes should have plenty of answer space.
- Your form should ask permission if some private information is required, prior to filling the form, like, passport number, etc.
- Your form’s entry fields should clearly indicate the required format of the information, for eg., date – 11/02/2022.
With this, you can easily optimize your input forms which enhance the UX of your website in a positive way.
And now comes the most important part of the section – high-quality content.
5. Website’s Content
Here it’s not just about the quality of your content but the way it’s presented to the visitors.
Let’s jump straight to the website’s content checklist:
- Your content should be precise and easily scan-able, with relevant paragraph lengths, subheadings, images and lists.
- You should go for an adequate contrast between the text and the background color. Like you can keep the light background color with dark colored text.
- The language of your content should be readable by a common audience. You must avoid complex jargons or words, use simple but informative language. For example, instead of ‘dextrous’ you can write ‘skilled’.
- Your product pages should contain all the relevant and updated information necessary to make a purchase by a common, uninformed consumer.
- Your website should maintain a quality but interesting blog to spread awareness about your product. It also shows you care more about your audience by providing them the important insights.
Here we have completed our checklist to a good UX website.
Conclusion
With a good website UX your professionalism, trustworthiness and conversions increase immensely in the eyes of your audience and eventually for the SERPs. Your homepage marks the benchmark for your website’s user-interface, which should be maintained throughout the website.
These checklists will definitely improve your website’s UX standards. But remember to maintain the exercise time-to-time.
Let us know if you have any new insights to the website UX checklist. Share your site visitor’s UX experiences and how you improved those?
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