Creating a user-friendly website is one of the most important aspects of ensuring your website gets real results for your business. This is essential for providing a positive experience for website visitors. A user-friendly website is one that is simple and clear, has easy navigation, uses great and relevant visuals, engages the user, and provides value to to website visitors. The following are five crucial tips you can use to create a user-friendly website:
1. Prioritize simplicity and clarity.
A user-friendly website should be easy to understand and flow through, so it’s vital to prioritize simplicity and clarity in your design. While it’s important to make your website stands out from competitors, you can’t sacrifice providing a simple and positive user experience for the sake of having a cool/unique design. If users can’t figure out how to use your website and find it too challenging, then they’re going to have a negative experience and your website will have a higher bounce rate (users leaving your website).
Ways to ensure your website is simple and easy to understand includes using clear and concise language. You should also aim to organize your content in a sensible way – using appropriate headings and subheadings to make it logical to follow. Wherever possible, you should also avoid using any jargon or technical language that may be difficult for website visitors to grasp.
Another great way to ensure your website prioritizes simplicity and clarity is by using a clean and uncluttered design, with tons of white space. While you may want to stick as much content/visuals as possible onto your screen to promote your website’s value, it can be overwhelming and difficult for users to follow. By using a lot of white space, it makes it very easy to flow through the website, focusing on one aspect at a time. This can help make your website and content more readable and much easier for visitors to digest. By providing a simple experience and preventing users from feeling overwhelmed, you are providing a much better overall user experience.
2. Make your website easy to navigate
To ensure your website visitors have a user-friendly experience, your website needs to be simple to navigate. Users should be able to find the relevant information they’re looking for easily without having to “jump through hoops”.
One important way way to make your website is easy to navigate is to use a consistent structure on all pages. This includes using the same menu items (in your website header preferably), submenu items, buttons, and any other interactive elements on each page of your website. This makes it very intuitive for website visitors to move from one page to the next, while preventing users from getting lost or confused.
3. Use visual elements
A user-friendly website should use visual elements, such as images, videos, and graphics, to support and enhance the copywriting on the page. These elements can help to break up large blocks of text, making the content more engaging and easier to read. They can also help to illustrate complex ideas or concepts, making them easier for users to understand.
A properly designed user-friendly website should utilize visual elements, including images, videos, and graphics that not only support, but enhance the content on the page. While you never want to include visuals just for the sake of adding them, using the proper images at the right place can enhance the messaging of the content on your website. Not only that, but these types of elements are a great way to break up large paragraphs of text on your website. This makes the content much easier to read and more engaging. These elements can enhance your content by assisting in illustrating more complex ideas, making them easier for users to comprehend.
4. Make your website responsive
If you have built your website with the aim of providing a user-friendly experience on a computer, that’s great! But there are other devices that need to be optimized for as well. Your website may not be providing a user-friendly experience on a tablet or mobile device. According to Exploding Topics, over 60% of website traffic comes from mobile devices today. This means that to provide a true user-friendly experience on your website, you must ensure that your website is responsive and works on all devices.
Responsive web design refers to building websites that render well and adapt to the size of the screen as well as the type of device (ie- desktop, tablet, mobile). Hiring a great and experienced web designer will have the skillset to ensure your website is responsive and your website visitors have an optimized and positive user experience regardless of the device they are accessing your website from.
5. Ask for feedback from your users
No one will be able to provide better feedback in regards to if your website provides a user-friendly experience than your actual users. A user-friendly website is one that is constantly improving and evolving, based on the feedback received from its website visitors. Without feedback from them, how do you know what is working and what can be improved upon?
You can obtain this critical feedback from your website users through surveys, user testing, and other useful methods. You can then take this feedback into account when making updates and edits to your website. This is a great way to identify parts of your website that your users may find challenging to navigate or confusing, while also providing immensely valuable insights into ensuring you provide the optimal users experience to your website visitors.
Conclusion
Overall, building a user-friendly website involves a well thought-out website design with the end-user in mind. Through focusing on aspects such as simplicity and clarity, easy navigation, relevant visuals that enhance your content, responsive design, and getting critical feedback from users, you can create a website that provides a positive and impactful experience for website visitors that can play a huge part in converting more visitors into clients for your business!
If you’re looking for assistance with building a user-friendly website, Mendel Sites is a web design & development company that heavily prioritizes providing the best user experience possible for website visitors. If you have any questions or want some more tips on creating user-friendly websites, contact us today!