Jenkinson & Associates
Marketing With Results

How To Improve Your Website User Experience - UX Checklist

Value for money, customer service standards, product quality – all the kinds of things you need to keep an eye on, in order to succeed.  Nevertheless, they’re all rendered completely redundant if you do not deliver a flawless user experience.

These days, doing business and pretty much else online has become the new norm.  It’s what everybody does without even thinking about it.  And it’s because of this that both expectations and demands in terms of website quality have never been higher.

When boil down to its basics, there are 10 supremely important things every user experience should feature.  So if you can’t say with confidence that your own website features the following, you might want to think about addressing the relevant issues as soon as possible:

Product quality, customer service standards, value for money – all of the utmost importance for any online business.  But at the same time, all entirely redundant without the most outstanding user experience.

Regardless of what you do and how you do it, the UX you offer will determine whether or not you succeed.  So with this in mind, what follows is a briefly summarized ten-point UX checklist you might want to take the time to consider.

If one or more of the following is missing, it’s pretty much inevitable that your business is being held back:

1.  Lightning loading times

First up, patience is a virtue the vast majority of web users simply do not have.  If you keep them waiting for any longer than around 3 seconds, chances are they’re out the door and gone for good.

2.  Flawless mobile experience

These days, it isn’t simply enough to offer a basic level of mobile compatibility.  If anything, the mobile experience you offer should be even more intuitive, intelligent and enjoyable as the desktop version of your website.

3. Contact information

Believe it or not, half of all consumers stated that a lack of sufficient contact information is sufficient for them to permanently lose trust in the respective business.

4. CTA buttons

The secret with effective CTS buttons in determining where the line should be drawn up.  Not too few, not too many, not to large, not to small.  All of which differs from one website to the next.

5. Instinctive navigation

Your navigation system should be instinctively easy to use by every visitor to your website.  The easier it is for visitors to get where they want to be, the better.

6. Simple forms

If you need your customers to provide you with any of their personal data for any reason, always request as little as possible.  And in doing so, keep contact and submission forms short and simple.

7. Minimised marketing

Try to avoid the hard-sell at all costs. The greater the quantity of space you dedicate to marketing materials and advertising, the more difficult it will be for visitors to take you seriously.

Even if your business is fundamentally about selling products or services, customers never like to feel as if this is the case.  As such, the more advertisements and marketing materials you have all over your website, the more your customers will believe they are little more than financial statistics in your eyes.

8. Auto-play video and audio

Feel free to provide your visitors with the option of playing all the video and audio content you like.  However, don’t make the catastrophically common mistake of auto-playing such content, without their express consent.

9. A simple search function

Make it as easy as possible for your customers to find exactly what they need, by including a simplified yet highly intelligent search function.

10. Professional presentation

Last up, try to remember that professional presentation doesn’t have to mean complex or ostentatious. Adobe recently carried out a study, which found that close to half of all consumers will abandon a website if they do not like the presentation of its content or layout.