Good UX Design: The Key to an Effective Business Website

User Experience, or UX, is one of the most important parts of good business website design, impacting your website’s effectiveness in converting cold traffic into paying customers. 

What’s the key to great web design? The obvious immediate answer might be a good-looking website – but what if you want your website to be a valuable business asset that helps your business to grow?

The answer to the question then becomes investing in an optimized user experience. The way to do this is through UX design that focuses on functionality and performance as much as a beautiful color palette and attractive visual presentation.

What Exactly Is UX and Why Does It Matter for My Website?

User Experience is an almost intangible part of web design, as it deals with how your website traffic feels when they engage with your site. How you want people to feel will depend on your business and unique goals, but typically you want them to have a positive experience that pushes them further down the customer journey. 

Great UX keeps traffic engaged and interacting with your site, while bad UX will drive traffic away from your business forever – and into the warm and welcoming embrace of a competitor with a website that offers them a better user experience. Read more: Our UX Designers.

A Great User Experience Starts with Great User Interface (UI)

Wait, what’s UI? In web design, UI is how your traffic interacts with your website. More than just creating a pretty layout that makes people feel good about being on your website, UI also concerns the ease of use in navigating your website through putting everything in just the right place so that people can intuitively find the information they want, rather than hacking through a messy jungle of frustratingly irrelevant pages. 

A great UI will improve your website’s UX and boost your website’s effectiveness, while a bad UI will see your bounce rates skyrocket as profits from your website plummet – the exact opposite of what you want! Knowing where to put content and ensuring that your visitors can easily find it is vital if you want an effective business website that delivers on your business goals. 

In short, great web design isn’t just about good looks – it’s also about creating a user-centric experience by focusing on UX and UI as a core part of the design process. 

How Can You Give Your Business Website a Great UX Design?

When it comes to building your business website, the best approach to take to UX design is to think of your website like a grocery store. A grocery store is well-organized because of careful planning and consideration of where to put various elements so that visitors can easily find what they want to buy and enjoy a seamless shopping experience.

Online is no different, except the layout is virtual. Good website design starts by planning out where content will go, optimizing everything for flow. Different types of business websites will have different optimum layouts – knowing what the typical visitor to your site is looking for and making it as easy for them as possible to find it is one example of optimizing a web design at the planning stage. 

Remember: UX is all about making your visitors feel positive, which means minimizing any frustration!

How to Plan Effective UX in Web Design 

Since UX design focuses on delivering what your target market is looking for, the first step in UX design is to know your target market in the form of a user persona. 

You may already have a user persona ready if you know the demographics of your target market, along with what their pain points and desires are. Otherwise, you should invest in developing a user persona. Knowing who you’re designing a website for makes it a lot easier to design something that gives them what they want! 

Once you know who you’re building your website for and what content you want to deliver to them through the website, there are three best practices you can implement at the web design stage to ensure that your website has all the hallmarks of excellence in UX design. 

The first is creating a user flow diagram. You want your traffic to flow effortlessly through the pages of your website as it seeks out the content it is interested in. Later, when your website is live, you can use tools like Google Analytics to see where traffic is going and what it is doing to optimize your UX based on actual user behaviors!  

The second is to create a sitemap. A sitemap is pretty much what it sounds like: a map that plans out the location of every page of a website and its relation to other pages. Sitemaps are a useful tool that can help you to quickly throw out bad navigational ideas early, while the clear overview sitemaps provide make it easier to improve on navigational routes and fill in any informational gaps.

Finally, the third is creating a visual prototype of your website, often called a wireframe. Think of these as static snapshots of the visual design of your site that let you assess how your site looks and feels before investing in the final build. Wireframes are a useful tool for spotting potential issues with UX and allow you to make the necessary changes prior to development rather than not after your site has gone live.

Hire a Professional Web Design Team That Understands UX/UI

These days, almost everyone starts their customer journey online – and for many, that journey will finish with a purchase made online or through a company they discover online. Having a good-looking, informative website that offers a great user experience and a seamless interface isn’t just “nice to have” – it’s mission critical for your business growth. 

At 71Three, we work with small businesses like yours every day and have built up a portfolio of gorgeous business websites that engage and convert across multiple industries. Our job is simple: to help you attract and convert leads so that your bottom line swells.  

Find out how we can help you to build a new website or improve on an existing one that isn’t satisfying your target market or your business goals– contact us today!