Law Technology Today From the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center
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As most people are internet savvy for any need or activity ranging from making a purchase to finding some information, your website can be the launchpad for your business. Today’s consumers are well informed and they research on the web before making a purchase.
A whopping 88% of customers research online before deciding to make a purchase. Many of them end up purchasing online instead of going to the local store. So if your website helps to search for information easier, you are going to convert more business.
Question is, what are the time tested principles to give a boost to your user experience? How can you improve your website by tweaking a few things around? Without indulging in a complete redesign you can boost usability and user experience of your website through the following measures and changes.
Remove The Clutter and Use White Space
The best way to give a facelift to your existing website is to remove the entire visual clutter responsible for distracting the audience’s attention. You can remove the cognitive load of unnecessary animations, the clutter of banner ads, and too many widgets and sidebars to create a lot of vacant and white space around each piece of content.
When you make sure your website contents have enough white space around, the users can easily engage without any distraction. This will also help them to stay focused and make use of the content on their pages. To ensure visual clarity and some white space around each piece of content evaluate the cognitive load of every page and accordingly bring changes where it is necessary.
Make Use of High-Quality Large Images
These days people are less attentive to text content apart from grabbing content at a glance. As most users access websites and online content through their mobile devices, readability becomes a bigger challenge for small screens. This is why images and graphics play so important a role in delivering the message.
But images of low quality and less clarity actually undermines the visual profile of a website and the brand image. Moreover, if you are selling products and services to your customers, your quality will be mainly judged by the customers through the product images. This makes it quite mandatory for business websites to use appropriate images for their offerings.
While using high-quality images with appropriate size specifications you also need to consider their loading speed. If the images fail to load faster, the whole purpose is lost and it would doubly undermine the usability of your website. This is why it is also important to use the right image formats for faster loading.
Focus On Using Appropriate Calls-To-Action
The call to action buttons and intuitive guidance not only helps a website convert business and make sales from the website visitors, but they also reduce the confusion of the users about what actions to take next. Call to action on every website page clearly offers directions about the next course of action.
Now, call to action buttons and links should be placed appropriately across the website pages to initiate user responses and activities leading to more engagement, lead generation, or business conversion.
Most websites make the mistake of providing a call to action at the very end of a web page without really considering that many users may not stick with the web page up to that point. This is why it is equally important to make use of mid-way call to action buttons to keep the motivation alive before they reach the ultimate decisive point.
Instead of directly pushing sales with a call to action such as “order now” or “buy”, you can use buttons like “get more information” or “know more” to keep the users engaged and only come with the decisive buy button in the very end.
Testimonials Spread Across The Website
A great many business websites belonging to service providers and product brands showcase standalone testimonial pages for the users to evaluate the business through the sayings and opinions of other customers. But very few users just prefer going to these pages for reading testimonials. This is why instead of creating standalone testimonial pages it is more effective to spread the customer testimonials across the whole website and use them in different areas as per the context.
The good words about your services can actually be read and make an impact when they are used in appropriate places and contexts. Using testimonials in different service pages and product descriptions are more effective.
Boost Your Homepage Interactions
Most websites still don’t do enough to keep their users engaged on the homepage. They just expect their users to go to service and product pages. But since the homepage actually represents your business brand in totality, you can utilize it even more for making an impression and keeping your visitors engaged through homepage content.
A homepage now can be slightly longer and be loaded with quality content corresponding to your business. Through homepage content, a business can also explain the value proposition of the brand. On the homepage, you can use an introductory video, a brief and precise overview of your services and brand offerings, a brief description of your product features, some testimonials, case studies, and company description.
Enhance Readability
Finally, for any website, it is important to provide unique, relevant, and high-quality content to the users to ensure user engagement and traction. Besides writing engaging content for the website, it is also important to boost readability by using user-friendly formats and content layouts.
As the attention span of most mobile web users is very low, most of them prefer at a glance scanning of the content than attentive reading. This is why it is important to present in an instantly readable manner with smaller paragraph size, proper use of fonts and typography, and distraction-free layout. Making use of bullet points and content breaks with headings and subheadings will further help at a glance reading.
Ensure Easy Navigation
Navigation is a key aspect of website usability and user experience. Without easy navigation, users cannot find the blogs, product pages, contact pages and company information easily on a website. On the other hand, without easy navigation, most users will leave a website without visiting other pages and contents and this would significantly lower the audience engagement.
One of the time tested rules of great navigation is that the users should be able to get to a web page or their required content just by using three clicks. Intuitive navigation will further help users to get to the web pages they were searching for more effortlessly.
Superb Onboarding Experience
Does your website work like a functional app to solve user problems? Is your website complex with multilayered navigation and a rich reserve of contents and tools? Well, in such cases you also need to ensure providing a smooth onboarding experience to your visitors.
An onboarding screen layout with progressive guidance can help a first time user get precise directions about the location of the different pages and functions and how to navigate and use them to forget things done with the least effort.
Test Too Often and Early
Finally, to make sure everything is functioning properly and the website offers a better experience after these changes, you need to subject it to rigorous testing. It is advisable to carry out usability testing early after every change is done and make a complete performance audit after the redesign is finished.
When the new website becomes live with the above-suggested changes, your duty is to see how it is actually impacting the user experience of your customers and audience. You should continuously test and take note of further scopes for value additions.
Conclusion
All the tips we mentioned so far have been discussed hundreds of times on the web. But here in the context of redesign or improving a website we mentioned them since they can easily make the impact legible.
