Thinking Beyond Pretty Design: UX Principles for Your Website
In this episode of Process to Profitability, I'm talking about the importance of understanding UX principles beyond pretty design for websites in the health and wellness industry and other service providers. UX (User Experience) is all about how users interact with a website, and it plays a vital role in converting visitors into clients. Key principles like usability, accessibility, clarity, consistency, and responsiveness are essential to consider. I discuss common UX issues, such as slow loading times and unclear navigation, and provide three quick steps to improve your website's UX: streamline navigation, optimize for mobile, and use clear call-to-action buttons strategically. Prioritizing UX over aesthetics helps businesses create strategic websites that resonate with their audience and drive better results.
Timestamps:
[00:00:46] The importance of prioritizing your wellbeing
[00:02:47] Choose to run your business outside of the traditional model
[00:03:47] How to create and maintain work-life harmony
[00:06:09] Creating a business with intention as a parent or caregiver
[00:08:13] How I am creating a business with intention
Key Takeaways:
What is UX, and why is it essential in website design?
Key UX principles that business owners should consider
Identifying UX issues in your website
Common pain points such as slow loading times, unclear navigation, lack of accessibility features, and broken links
Implementing quick UX fixes
Prioritizing UX over pretty design
[00:00:00] Samantha Mabe: Welcome back to Process to Profitability. Today I am talking about business with intention from the point of view of websites. So let's think beyond a pretty design to understanding UX principles that can help you create a website with as much intention as you have put into your business.
What is UX and why is it important?
[00:00:23] Samantha Mabe: Let's start by talking about what UX is and why it's important. First UX is user experience, and that is the way that somebody interacts with your product, service, whatever it is. In this case, it's website, so we want to create a website that has a good user experience. The way that somebody uses our website when they come there is easy for them to understand. It's quick, it's simple. It makes their experience feel really good.
[00:01:01] And that is going to help us as a business owner because those people are then going to be more likely to become our clients, and that's why it's so important to think about user experience instead of just creating a design that looks good.
[00:01:17] I see so many websites that look really pretty that have all of the trendy colors and fonts and graphics and layouts, but they don't work well from a user point of view. The fonts are small and hard to read, so it looks good when you're looking at it on Pinterest, it catches your eye, but when you actually go to the site, it's hard to understand what they're talking about because you have to zoom in to read it, and that is where we see a disconnect between the aesthetics of something and the actual UX of it.
Key UX principles to consider for your website
[00:01:55] Samantha Mabe: So let's think about some of the key UX principles that are most important for websites. First is usability. We want our website to be usable by everybody. We want it to have good flow. It makes sense, it looks good, but it's clean. It's easy to read.
[00:02:21] We also want it to be accessible. We want websites that are accessible to anyone who wants to learn about our business. We want them to be easily readable. We want them to have captions. There are lots of things we can do when we think about accessibility as a value for our website.
[00:02:43] We also want to have websites that are clear and consistent. So let's be clear in what we're talking about. When somebody lands on your website, they should understand what it is you do and who you work for very quickly. We don't wanna confuse them with unclear language. We also want to make the way that the website works very clear. We want to make sure that as somebody navigates through our website, they know what the next step is. They know where to go if they're looking for something specific.
[00:03:15] And we also want a website that's responsive. So mobile responsiveness is a huge piece of this. At least 40% of your traffic is coming to your website from a mobile device, and so we want to make sure that that is very well thought out, just like the desktop design that you and I are looking at when we're behind the scenes.
How to check your website's UX
[00:03:40] Samantha Mabe: So how do you know if your website has a good user experience or if there are UX issues? I wanna guide you through the process of identifying UX issues by conducting some simple user testing, and then encourage you to think about how your customers are using your website so that you can see that journey from an outside perspective.
[00:04:07] First, I want you to do some user testing, and we talked about this in a previous episode with heat maps, so you can go back and listen to that one. That's a great way to see how people are using your website and where there might be issues.
[00:04:22] There are also other tools that you can use that will show you color contrast or what your website looks like to somebody who is colorblind.
[00:04:33] Another way we mentioned in a previous episode is to just watch somebody else use your website without telling them exactly what to do and see if they can figure out what you do, where to go, how they can work with you, and what they would do in order to get in touch with you.
[00:04:51] I really want you to put yourself in the shoes of your ideal client who is coming to your website. Think about if they Google you and they come to your website, what is their user experience going to be? What's their journey going to be like? Are there any places along that path that might prove to be stumbling blocks that we can ease through the way that we design?
Common UX issues on websites
[00:05:18] Samantha Mabe: A couple of the pain points that I see most often are slow loading times. So if you go to Google Page Speed Insights, you can see how your website is loading, and if it is slow, A. People are not going to stick around long enough to let it load. And B, that's going to cause a lot of frustration for the people who do want to check out your website.
[00:05:42] The next one is unclear navigation. So if you have links that are confusing, maybe because they're labeled something that is not standard or because things are all over the place, that is going to turn people off very quickly.
[00:05:57] And then if you have a lack of accessibility features. There are some websites that have an accessible mode you can turn on and off, but most of the website platforms that small business owners are using don't offer that. So we just wanna think about accessibility when we're doing our initial design. Think about the font sizes and colors that you're using. Think about how we can add a captions to our blog posts, transcripts to our podcast episodes, those types of things.
[00:06:25] And then another thing is if we have a lot of broken links on our site, that can be extremely frustrating for people if they, if you are linking to something that they're interested in and they click on it, and none of those links work, they're not gonna wanna stick around because they don't trust your website to offer what it says it does.
[00:06:45] All of this comes back to our previous series of data-driven decisions. We want to look at the data, how people are using our website, what the results they are getting are, and see how we can then improve this user experience to get better results in our business.
Quick steps to improving your website's UX
[00:07:05] Samantha Mabe: So, What are a couple of actionable steps you can take to improve your website's UX and make it more than just a pretty design?
Streamline your navigation
[00:07:13] Samantha Mabe: First is streamlining your navigation. Simplify your website's navigation by reducing the number of menu items and providing clear labels.
[00:07:22] On most of the websites I design, I like to have a about page link, a services page, contact page, and a blog page. That's it. If you have multiple services, put them in a dropdown menu that's going to make it clean, simple, and people are easily going to be able to figure out how to move through your website.
Optimize for mobile experience
[00:07:47] Samantha Mabe: The second thing is optimize for mobile experience. Ensure our website is responsive and mobile friendly because so many people are going to be visiting your website on a mobile device.
[00:07:58] Most platforms allow you to do this really easily. They have a way that you can design the mobile alongside the desktop, but start by just taking some time to look at your own website on your phone and see what it looks like.
Clear call to action buttons
[00:08:13] Samantha Mabe: The third thing is to use clear call to action buttons and use them effectively. You want them to stand out with a contrast in color, use clear language about what's going to happen next, and place them strategically on your page so that it guides visitors to take the desired action.
[00:08:31] I like to tell people that, especially on a long sales page or a services page, you want a call to action button every two to three scroll links, so nobody has to scroll to the top or bottom of your page to click on that button. They can always find it very quickly and very easily.
Intentionally good UX is part of an intentional business
[00:08:51] Samantha Mabe: So we've talked a lot about what user experience is and ways that you can improve it, and I just want you to take away that when we're building a business with intention, it goes beyond just the things that we do in our business. We also think about things like our website and intentionally go beyond a pretty aesthetic design to create one, that it has a good user experience that works for our potential clients and the people who are visiting our websites.
[00:09:22] Ultimately this is going to improve your business success because you are going to be reaching more of the right people by creating a website that is strategic and still looks really good.
