So much of content marketing focuses on driving traffic to your brand’s website, applications, and dashboards. A solid marketing strategy may attract visitors through different channels, but a positive user experience makes them linger and take action.
So, what makes a good user experience, or UX? In short, it means ensuring that you anticipate and meet your audience’s needs and wants, get them to that destination efficiently, and leave a great impression about yourself along the way. The challenge is that, often, what you might think your target audience needs and what they actually need can be different. Further, according to Hick’s Law—a gold standard in design by way of the psychology field—we must exercise restraint by not providing too many choices or creating too much distraction with unneeded elements.
Think of it like being a good host: your top priority is making visitors feel comfortable and accommodated so they’ll want to stay a while. Great UX goes beyond that to subtly steer users, too, by applying strategic design and copywriting tactics. A lot of moving parts and complexity go into creating a user experience that intentionally feels like a piece of cake to your users. If it’s executed correctly, your user might not even notice it—the goal is ease and zero fuss, after all.
Keeping UX at the forefront of your web design and content marketing strategies is the best way to reduce bounce and build those all-important brand relationships.
Help visitors make themselves at home on your website by keeping navigation intuitive.
Everyone wants a unique design, but when standard elements aren’t where we expect them to be, frustration sets in quickly. Organize your site with user-friendliness in mind, and don’t let creativity get in the way of clarity. Giving your “contact” page an unusual name in the navigation menu, for example, can make it harder for visitors to figure out how to take the next step.
Professional sitemapping will optimize your site’s organization and linking strategy for the smoothest possible flow. Custom-designed mega menus can keep navigation interesting with visual elements and dynamic, relevant blog or resource feeds that correlate to each content silo your user might be hovering or clicking on, indicating their intent.
Check out these case studies, featuring UNC-Chapel Hill and Restore America’s Estuaries, a national nonprofit, for great examples of how to take heavy navigation requirements and turn them into attractive and clear mega-menus.
Does your website or software use a consistent scheme of reliable fonts, heading sizes, and colors from one page to the next? Have those been chosen with color psychology, web accessibility, content structure, and brand rules at the forefront? When different pages or sections of your site have mismatched themes or elements, it creates confusion for users and breaks down visual brand identity.
Limit yourself to 2-3 carefully selected brand fonts and pay attention to formatting details like text alignment and bullet styles. Subtle inconsistencies can chip away at your brand’s cohesion and credibility, even if visitors aren’t able to precisely identify what’s wrong.
Patience may be a virtue, but don’t count on it from site visitors. Page speed is a critical part of UX — most users expect a page to load in under 2 seconds. At the 3-second mark, the likelihood that a user will abandon your page entirely shoots up by 32%. Additionally, Google has stated that page speed is a ranking factor for SEO.
Make sure that your image files are compressed, that pages aren’t weighed down by unnecessary interactive or video elements, and that your site is optimized for mobile. Even if they are connected to fast wifi, smartphones have less bandwidth than desktops, so certain features may need to be pared to keep your website running smoothly.
A cramped, cluttered design is an assault on the senses — it can literally hurt your eyes.
Don’t make visitors strain to read text or interpret images. White space, or the “blank” areas of a page, are just as important as those filled with content. The strategic use and composition of white space makes it easier to scan and navigate pages by separating elements and breaking up dense walls of text.
White space is especially important for devices with a touchscreen interface. A jumble of small links and buttons makes it likely that visitors will end up in the wrong place.
White space, or negative space, is not a trendy design style. This traces back to classical art and is a non-negotiable for a good user experience now more than ever.
Don’t leave your audience wondering how to take that next step! Effective CTAs meet visitors where they are, prompting conversion events that make sense for each phase of the customer journey.
Create a good user experience by taking the user’s perspective. A first-time visitor who has just reached the end of a helpful blog might not be ready to commit to a subscription service or donate to a cause, but they may be more inclined to read more or download a free resource in exchange for their contact information.
Make your calls to action highly visible, relevant, and easy to act on. Lead users through the marketing funnel with frictionless design and content, and they’ll be able to stay focused on the value you’re providing.
