Why does user experience matter? Well, it’s quite simple: a poor user experience costs you money. Every way that your website makes money is impacted by poor user experience, and this is why you absolutely must ensure you are getting this right.
We all know how frustrating it is when you’re trying to interact with a website that is poorly designed, constantly sends you in circles and takes forever to load. You immediately form a negative opinion of the company that website represents, and your chances of doing business with them diminish quickly.
Here’s why user experience matters.
Your Website is Your Most Visible Spokesperson
You know when you’re dealing with someone who just doesn’t know what’s going on, so you ask to speak to their manager to try and find someone who can tell you something useful? Well, using a poorly designed website is like that, but you can’t speak to a manager because you can’t get the link to work.
Your website is supposed to be there to show the world what your business stands for, but all it’s going to do if you have a poor UX is tell people that you’re inept. Your company might be brilliant, but if your website doesn’t work well, then what else are customers supposed to think?
The best way to make sure your website is ready to convey the great image of your business is to get it thoroughly tested before you launch.
Lower Conversion Rates
You want to create as few barriers as possible between your customer and purchase. The more barriers there are, the lower your conversion rate is going to be, and that’s not good news for anyone.
One of the most important times to get the user experience right is when customers reach your payment page. If this page is simple and gives your customers great user experience, then you’re going to see far less abandoned carts than with a poorly designed page.
Making a sale is no easy thing and if you’ve got your customer as far as the payment page, then you’ll hate to see all that hard work undone by a poor user experience right at the end.
Ranking Struggles
Poor user experience is going to have a big impact on how well your pages can rank. Some of Google’s key factors when deciding where a page ranks are bounce rate and time on page, and if you’re not offering a good user experience, then you’re going to find it difficult to do well in these two indicators.
The search engines are there to send people to pages that best answer their queries. If they suddenly started listing websites with poor user experience at the top of their rankings, then people would find another search engine that gave them better results. So, Google and all the other search engines put a lot of emphasis on user experience.
If you’re not getting the user experience right, then you’re going to find it much more challenging to rank well, and as a result, you will miss out on that all-important organic traffic.