Your User Experience (UX) can play a huge role in the success of your overall business. In fact, some would go as far as to claim that without proper UX, no business can reliably succeed in our digital, globalized, and interconnected world.
In this quick guide, we’ll go over some of the top things that you can do to optimize user experience, increasing conversions and boosting your success online.
What Really Is User Experience?
UX is such a widely-used term these days that many professionals are reluctant to ask about it for fear of embarrassment. After all, if everyone’s in on it, then how far behind do you have to be to not know all about it?
Of course, in truth UX is a very delicate and complex topic that isn’t really that easy to understand.
The simplest way to explain what User Experience really means is to look at it as an umbrella term. Really, User Experience is an amalgam of all sorts of different factors that all come together to describe how your user interacts with your website.
This can range from visual and aesthetic design to overall handling, comfort, convenience, and the overlap between features and user expectations. UX also considers the various demographics of your user base and how different people can view the same web environment with different expectations in mind.
In other words, the art and craft of UX really lies in tailoring the way your users interact with your site to all the various factors that are linked to their satisfaction. After all, a satisfied user is infinitely more likely to convert, both in the short term as well as in the long run.
How to Optimize User Experience
So, how can you improve the quality of your UX to not just draw in more users, but keep your existing base happy and make them convert more reliably? There are a few discrete methods at your disposal, so let’s go over them.
Focus on Core Tasks
Every UX environment can be described by means of core tasks. These are simple wants and directives such as the desire to be entertained, or the desire to find a cheap solution to a particular problem. The aim is to optimize the user experience such that these core tasks are accomplished more smoothly using your solution than anywhere else.
Use Data Analysis
This is a huge point that we couldn’t possibly do justice in such a short guide, so do read up more on how data analysis can revolutionize your UX! But for starters, let it be said that analyzing user data is one of the most crucial things you can do right now to optimize your user experience.
Manual data analysis used to be king – but today it’s decidedly last-century. Top businesses opt for automatic data gathering, analysis, and optimization all in one. This is accomplished by means of highly-advanced automated web optimization tools that can quickly compute mountains of data that mere humans would take weeks, or even months to sift through.
Everything from how long users stay on your site for, to their age, sex, location, previously-used search terms, buying preferences, and much more, can be assessed and algorithmically optimized. In so doing, you cannot just tailor your user experience to your users – you can also vastly improve efficiency by only offering the products and experiences that your customers really want.
Experiment, Experiment, Experiment
The last fundamental step is to optimize your user experience by constantly experimenting with the formula. Even when betting on a fully-automated solution, “fire and forget” is not the best strategy.
Instead, constant tinkering, whilst keeping a solid record of any changes and their outcomes, is the way to go to ensure long-lasting results and steady improvement in key metrics.