A Good website is the perfect combination of all the necessary aspects and elements that invokes a user into clicking it, browsing its pages and staying on it long enough for the website owner to acknowledge it.

Websites are predominantly set for the best functionality, best ecommerce platform and latest up to date extensions, which are all very significant if the website has to last. However, another factor that has been underrated and unsung in website evaluation studies is the UX or User Experience. Believe it or not, this is one of the primary factors that determine if the website will be the highest ranking clicker or just a piece of floating garbage on the internet.

How Much Does UX Matter

User Experience or UX is simply how the user feels about interacting with a digital interface. Most of the factors involve thorough working from both designers and developers, where as others include environmental and user preferences. These factors comprise of accessibility, usability of the interface, performance, design/theme/aesthetics, ergonomics and utility of Marketing. All human interaction on digital platforms deeply depends on these factors and thus, a good website that needs to earn attention on the internet must incorporate these in its UX.

Factors Affecting UX

Although these factors are the pillars of a good User Experience, the human aspects that measure a website’s effectiveness through User Experience is not just limited to usability. Through several researchers and studies in this very particular subject, we have seen that human emotion also play a cardinal role in connecting the person visually to the appearance of the website. Keeping them into account, let’s talk about their effects in the website business.

Website Forms

First off there are the forms. Remember, nobody wants to fill in their information if you fail to make them feel secure about it. Forms are no doubt an essential mechanism of acquiring information from the customers, and using it to various benefits in terms of marketing, custom products, price estimates and many other uses. Forms are also an integral part of the inquiry process that helps the admin understand the needs of its audience and set targets for his organization.

Solution:

In order to keep the forms on the website and remain on engaged with the customer, you need to keep the questions on the low and, allow optional fields and set comments as instructions below the attributes.

Placeholder Text in Fields

Talking about forms, you can also use placeholder text to exemplify the type of answer required for the form field. Placeholder text is the example entered within the field in the form of removable text. The idea is absolutely brilliant and helps customers understand better about what the form is asking from them. The problem is that as I’ve experienced myself on many websites, when you try the enter information in the field; the placeholder text stays there mixing up with your text. The only way to rid it is delete it manually or your form will not go through. Now imagine this with 20 other fields you have to enter your information on.

Solution:

In order to prevent customers from being annoyed and still get them to enter the correct information, make sure the placeholder text vanishes as soon as the customer enters the information.

Formatting in Attributes

This problem can be avoided by using the correct type of field suitable for the information. However, if you there is no provision as such, you must always add the instruction to which format of information the user needs to enter such as digits and text. If you wait for the customer to enter information of the wrong format, only to receive an error message, that user is as good as gone from your store.

Solution:

This mostly happens on checkout pages when the customers gets frustrated and decides to abandon the website. You can use examples below the fields to clarify the user.

Prevent Error Messages

No one can refute that Error Messages are an essential part of automated correction system in a professional website. How to use them, is however a bigger argument. To understand how these messages affect the UX of a customer, let’s put you in the shoes of an online buyer who attempts to purchase a product by filling in their User ID and Password to get registered. Within 6-7 of your tries, you simply cannot get registered, because the error message only says “Re-enter user ID” where is should be saying “That User is already taken”!

Solution:

Such unfound error messages frustrate the customers and result in an immediate abandonment. Always ask your developers to produce a self explanatory error message that properly tells the user what is must do right to avoid it from popping up again.

Large Headers

I can’t seem to figure out how this thing developed, and better yet, got trending on the internet with increasing number of websites using Large fixed Navigation headers on their pages. Now the issue is that each time, when the user scrolls down the page he faces difficulty in viewing the content that actually matters. These large headers and similar elements block the content and disable the user to read or see the important content below it. On bigger websites where there are categories and larger font, this problem becomes even crucial because the content becomes completely concealed.

Solution:

To solve this issue the admin can ask the developer to NOT to use these Large fixed Navigational headers and instead use simple ones that allow the user to properly read the text.

Adopt Responsive Design

In this modern age of exponential technology and gadgetry, a landslide percentage of online users view and use websites from their tablets and other handheld devices that have proportionally smaller screens compared to a laptop or desktop computer. The problem arises when the website fails to accommodate in the smaller screen, whereas it does perfectly on the larger screen. This is a straight “NOPE” for the customer. Without the ability to span the website on their device, the website will never reach the user because most on the time that user browses on his/her handheld device.

Solution:

Responsive websites are an approach to web designing for creating sites that can provide optimal viewing and interactive experience through least panning, resizing and scrolling on every device.

Use Lighter Shades for Contrast

What happens when you have to view something that is dark, against a contrast that it officially black as well. You get my point? Let me explain. When you use a dark font for your text and set it on a darker background, the result would absolutely be blindness for the user. Never choose parallel spectrum font and contrast as it not only causes disability in reading, but also reflects your sense of poor choice to the customers.

Solution:

You can use lighter shades as contrast. I’ve seen on many top ranking websites myself. They have cleverly used lighter shades such as yellow, pale white, cloud white and even light orange as background.

Text and Images

A website should be as much as text centric as much as multimedia. The user simply cannot picture a product by relying on its textual description. The eye trusts the visual details of an image much more than written documentation, however, without the written details the image cannot speak as intended. Aside from UX, texts also carry a lot of importance with regards to marketing through SEO techniques.

Solution:

You need to make sure the typography, color and size is optimized so its suits the majority’s psychological appeal. Similarly, the images you use should be HD with zooming functions for ideal viewing experience.

Choosing Color

The human eye can detect about 10 million different colors, but that doesn’t mean you can pick any color for your website and add it to your font. Colors ought to be chosen carefully as many colors cannot simply co-exist. You cannot spam neon green against an orange background same as dark blue cannot be distinguished against a black background.

Solution:

I don’t really know which colors are trending at the moment, but the appropriate use of green for call to actions buttons, white for negative spacing and black for most fonts is a safe practice that every website incorporates. You can give an artistic touch anytime, but by abiding with the basic rules mentioned above.

Call to Actions

Let me explain this with an example from our daily lives. When you are on a casual day to buy some merchandise from street vendors, what draws you near the stall without looking at the merchandise? It’s the chants most vendors use to attract the buyer by incorporating points of interest. Similarly, your store will only be good enough to attract the buyer if you make correct use of “Call to Actions”.

Solutions:

“Call to Actions”, are triggers that immediately provoke their audience into executing a certain action. By using an attractive phrase or statement with a nicely fashioned button, you can make an exceptionally good call to action.

Touch Function for Mobile Devices

This is one of the most annoying elements to haggle with and the worst part is that it’s all over the internet as site owners are doing it indiscriminately. If your settings a touch target for the mobile user, for the Love of God please leave some space for the user to interact with it. I remember when I tried to buy baseball cap from an online store but just couldn’t help hitting the “Rating” button each time I tried my thumb to reach the “Checkout” button. This not only frustrates the user, but sends him cursing away from the website.

Solution:

Other users will not be as patient as me, so before you get trapped into your own website, ask you designer to place the button with appropriate spacing next to other touch targets on your website, or you may never get subscribers or buyers, and might not even be able to figure out the problem.

Conclusion

All these notorious problems are the major reason many hard worked websites get UX problems that eventually cripple website into a ghost ship floating on the internet. Only by adding a little of effort and taking some precautionary measures, you can prevent these issues from spiraling into a costly catastrophe. If you heed the solutions to each one of these problems, I assure you that not only you will successfully deliver a promising experience to your users and customers, but also raise your website in a top ranking clicker on search engines. When it comes to UX, “you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward technology” – Steve Jobs.