User experience is easy to overlook, especially when you’re a brand new start-up eager to get going and earning a name for yourself. Unfortunately, not giving user experience enough attention can have a drastic impact on the experience which your customers will have with your product and service and can lead to you getting off to a less than favourable start.
A positive user experience leads to higher engagement rates, social sharing and improved brand awareness. This, in turn, leads to faster and more secure growth.
To provide a good user experience to our visitors, you don’t need any specialist knowledge or tools, you simply need to be aware of possible mistakes and how they could be fixed. At times, you might have to employ expert help, but you can do a lot on your own as well, and make sure people want to come to, and stay on your website.
Prioritise Usability over Aesthetics
Whilst it is important that your website looks good, it also needs to be easily usable and intuitive. The world’s most beautiful website isn’t going to do much for you if your visitors are unable to easily navigate your site or find what they are looking for. Clear menu structures and a well-thought-out internal linking structure are the first things on your list to tackle.
It is still important that your website looks good though! Hire a decent web designer or design agency to do this for you, because you want people to be wowed by what they are seeing. If you are blown away with the way your site looks, your visitors will be too.
Make sure the theme and layout you go for is in line with both your brand, and the type of website you need. Remember that it has to load fast, the imagery needs to be clear, and your branding colours need to be present throughout. Make sure you use the same overall themes across all your social networks as well.
Incorporate New Technologies
Artificial intelligence and machine learning have come a long way in recent years and are now key additions to any website, new or old, big or small. Chatbots and other clever AI technologies can be used to provide basic-level customer service and assistance, amongst other things, all of which helps boost user experience, because there is always an instantaneous and helpful point of contact available through your website and social media pages.
A chatbot will be especially helpful if you are running your new start-up company on your own. Customer service can be a huge time sink and deploying chatbots is a great way to ensure that your visitors at least get some help before their queries are passed on to you. This keeps customers happy because they know their query is being dealt with.
You can choose to employ other types of bots as well – for setting up meetings or tracking parcels for example. It all depends on the kind of service you offer. Don’t sky away from using the latest tech, as it will surely be able to help take your business to the next level.
You can also opt for a custom software solution that will be tailor-made to your specific needs, whatever they may be. That way, you will be ensuring a much more personalized and pleasant user experience as well, and allow your customers to connect with your brand on a whole new level.
Don’t Use a Paywall
There are people out there who view paywalls as the holy grail to generating large email subscriber lists, yet the truth is most people will instantly leave a website if they see a paywall, and this is especially true if the end-user has no choice but to sign up to your email newsletter in-order to remove it.
We would always recommend avoiding the use of paywalls in their entirety as they serve as nothing more than a way to frustrate your visitors, something which you absolutely want to avoid in your earliest days of operation. Forced email subscribers are also not what you want; you want people to sign up to your email newsletter because they are genuinely interested and will engage with you, not because they are being forced into doing it.
As a new start-up business, hitting the nail on the head with user experience is important. If you are unable to immediately provide an experience which engages your earliest visitors, has them coming back for more and encourages them to talk about your company, you are going to suffer from a lower conversion rate and find it harder to compete within your industry. There are many ways you can boost user experience, with the above three tips being simple suggestions.
We can’t stress the importance of building a good and pleasant website from the very start. You will certainly have time to fix certain things later, but by that time, you will already be remembered for all the wrong things. Invest a bit of time early on, and you will not have to suffer the stress of losing valuable customers, or having to view low conversion rates.
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