8 ways to enhance your website’s user experience
What is user experience?
Every time a customer visits your website, you are providing them with an experience. They navigate the site and focus on areas that pique their interest, then they interact with the site by clicking on corresponding buttons and links. Customers are able to scan your online menu and place an order.
Your goal when building a website is to make sure your customers have a good experience. Just like ordering food in person, ordering food online should be easy and intuitive -You do not want to make the process more complicated than it needs to be.
That being said, not only is the content important when building a website, but so is the usability. A website serves no benefit to your business if it is not functioning in an efficient manner.
Why is it important?
User experience is centered around having empathy towards your customers. As a business owner, you want to enhance the human experience to drive sales. That is why it pays to invest in creating a better user experience for your website. According to a recent Forrester study, $1.00 spent on enhancing user experience will return $100 in sales. That’s a 9,900% return on investment.
When customers become frustrated with a website, they are more likely to stop a transaction. For example, if a customer has a difficult time understanding how to input their credit card information or how to remove a certain ingredient from an item on the menu, they are more likely to discontinue their order, resulting in fewer sales.
Here are 8 ways to enhance your website’s user experience
1. Understand your customers’ needs
Since user experience satisfaction is associated with empathy, it is important to understand your customers’ needs. This comes through research. You need to understand how your customers interact with your website and take note of the areas where improvements can be made.
There are two types of research:
Quantitative research: This is research that focuses on numbers and measuring. For example, you might look at how long it takes the average customer to find your online menu or how often a user is unable to complete a task. These statistics will help you make decisions about your website’s design moving forward.
Qualitative research: This type of research focuses on the ‘why’. Why are users having difficulty completing a task? Why are customers only selecting specific products on the menu? Understanding this will help you know if there are any shortcomings on your website that need to be addressed.
2. KISS (Keep is simple, stupid)
The Navy developed the KISS design principle in the 1960s. The idea is to make systems simple and easy to understand. This same principle applies to website design. You want to create a design that is easy for the end user to understand and navigate. The goal is to limit the distractions and focus on driving customers towards completing a transaction.
3. Seek customer feedback
Outside of standard research, it’s a good idea to solicit customer feedback to improve the user experience. Ask your customers what they liked about the online ordering experience and what they found difficult. Many organizations provide some sort of incentive as a way to get customers to provide their feedback. Offering an incentive will help ensure you received enough feedback to recognize trends and make decisions to improve user experience.
4. Utilize conventions
Like a lot of technology, websites have a certain set of design conventions. These principles make it easier for people to use a website because the experience is similar to other websites.
Here are a few:
• Place the logo in the upper left corner
• Add the shopping cart icon to the upper right corner
• Put call to action buttons in the middle of header above the fold
• Add a link to a contact page in the main toolbar
• Make sure menu items are divided into categories
• Place a physical address in the footer
5. Make use of hierarchies
A website should be organized by hierarchies. You want the most important information at the top of the page in larger fonts. As you proceed down the page, headline fonts should get smaller and the information less important. This way your customers can easily find the most important information right away.
6. Responsive design
More and more people are ordering food with their phones. That means you must have a website that works on desktop, tablet and phone. Your website needs to be built with response design, meaning the layout is based on the size of the screen being used. This makes it a better user experience because people are not going to use your online menu if your website does not work on their devices.
7. Personalization
One of the best ways to improve user experience is with personalization. You can identify the user’s IP address or have them log into an account. This information will allow you to create product offerings based on the customer’s order history. You might realize a specific customer always orders a Diet Coke and you can make that a suggestion going forward. Or, you can suggest a certain item based on what is already in their shopping cart. This makes the ordering process that much easier and personal.
8. Create ease of payment
The ultimate goal with a good user experience is to complete the transaction. One of the best ways to get that to happen is by making it easy to pay. You want to make multiple different payment options available (i.e. PayPal and credit card) and ensure the payment system is simple to use. If an individual is a repeat customer, you can save the payment information so they don't need to re-enter their credit card information each time. It’s all about improving the user experience and making the process as frictionless as possible.