A fraction of a second.
That’s how long it takes a website user to develop an opinion about your brand. The difference between a strong first impression and debilitating negative experience? Often, it’s the user experience (UX).
There’s a difference between user experience and customer experience – but the two go hand in hand. For example, consumers view brands with fast, sleek and modern websites as progressive. The same consumers view brands with slow, sloppy and archaic websites as behind the times. Optimizing the user experience is perhaps the only way to simultaneously improve your website and overall customer experience.
Optimizing the user experience is a “two birds with one stone” process to add permanent value to your brand, business and bottom line. At Bowen Media, we consolidated the UX optimization process down to four golden rules you can implement today for a more powerful digital campaign.
1. Get Your Website Up to Speed
Every second counts. Patience is thin on the web – and loading time is a huge deal. Slow loading websites frustrate users, often to the point of page abandonment. According to KISSmetrics, 40 percent of users will abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load.
Even a one-second delay in page load time yields:
- 11% fewer page views
- 16% decrease in customer satisfaction
- 7% loss in conversions
Is there anything more important to a business than customer satisfaction? Probably not. 79 percent of dissatisfied customers are unlikely to make a repeat purchase – and 44 percent are likely to tell their friends about the negative experience. Just take a lesson from Amazon’s playbook:
Amazon reported a 1% increase in revenue for every 100 milliseconds improvement to its website speed.
Every delay puts your conversion rates at risk – not to mention your entire brand perception. Want to enhance the user experience? Get your website up to speed.
2. Ramp Up Website Security
High-profile cyber attacks run rampant on the modern web. Recent attacks on Home Depot comprised about 56 million payment cards, costing the company $62 million. A similar attack on Sony Pictures targeted enough internal data – including contracts, salaries, budgets, emails and Social Security numbers – for the production company to cancel the release of The Interview.
The average cyber attack costs a US company almost $6 million.
Like high-profile companies, small businesses are especially vulnerable to cyber attacks. Hackers strategically target small businesses with weak network protection. Businesses from all industries are at risk – from banking and IT to health care and transportation.
Your end users deserve protection. Your private data should be exactly that – private. The right processes put into place by a UX-driven web design company ramp up your security to keep the hackers at bay. The end result is a safer website with a better user experience and happier customers.
3. Declutter the Layout
Perhaps the most important rule of UX design – say more with less. A smart web design company knows to go easy on text and opt for sleek graphics to tell the brand story. Even the shortest and simplest of text-based messages – complemented with powerful visuals – can speak volumes about a brand. Sending the right message starts with choosing the best layout to optimize the user experience.
Clutter on a website is an open invitation to lose your target audience’s attention. It’s the reason minimalism climbed steadily in popularity in recent years. Sometimes, it’s the small design tweaks that significantly improve the user experience and ultimately the customer’s experience with your brand. Do your brand a favor. Declutter your layout.
4. Partner with a Web Design Company
The best user experiences begin with the expertise of a UX-driven web design company. Bowen Media is an award-winning web design company driven to design something greater. We partner with brands to leave a lasting impact from the first second a visitor spends on a website. We carefully design alongside a process – and meet goals together as a team – to deliver the best possible outcome for representing your brand to the public eye. Contact us today.
Every second counts. Patience is thin on the web – and loading time is a huge deal. Slow loading websites frustrate users, often to the point of page abandonment. According to KISSmetrics, 40 percent of users will abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load.