In our previous blog post, our expert Maria Kovacheva, Director of UX/UI at Resolute Software, shared the three main reasons why users will typically leave a website and not convert to leads or customers. These include a suboptimal customer experience, low-quality content, and website performance issues.
One of the key reasons for this is that frequently companies create a website on the go, as they need to show up online quickly. Unfortunately, this means that they don’t invest the necessary time, budget, and attention in the process. While it’s understandable, it’s not necessarily a good decision as it results in a badly designed customer journey and a suboptimal website. The purpose of a website, after all, is to attract customers.
Of course, the specific issues outlined in Maria’s first blog post are essential to be fixed in order to improve the performance of your website and the length of stay of visitors. But there are also aspects of the process of creating a website that can be put in place which can help ensure that your website creation process is efficient in the first place.
BUT, first things first… start with creating a simple plan
As Benjamin Franklin said: “by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” Though it might sound far-fetched, it’s a solid rule in creating a website that converts visitors. Planning your website is more about setting the goals that you want to achieve through it and finding the teams and specialists you need for its creation than about anything else.
Once you have your goals planned out, along with some ideas about what you want it to look like and how you want it to function, you can proceed with looking for a team or company that will execute your project.
Roughly, in terms of manpower, you will need an engineering team that will develop the website and a UX and UI design team that will provide it with its looks and user-facing functionality and logic. You will also need marketing and sales teams that will provide input about its content and messaging.
Of course, some of these, such as marketing and sales, will already be part of your company, whereas developers and designers are often hired outside of the company.
After you are done with the planning, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty tips of how to make people stick. As follows, here are three tips on how to ensure that the website you create will make visitors stay.
1. Get your UX right and then get the UI right
The difference between UX and UI is often misunderstood and so companies assume that as long as there are a designer and a developer involved, the job will be done. However, there is an important difference between UX and UI designers.
The UX designer defines the strategy and the path toward an action that you want the visitor to take. They need to understand users’ psychology and map out the website based on that. The UI designer, on the other hand, creates the visual aspect - the visual assets, following the guidelines provided by the UX designer.
If we need to give an example here, this is airbnb website which is the top of mind choice when you say excellent customer journey. It leads you intuitively throughout its pages and it’s easy to use, no matter if you are a host or a traveller. You are impressed with smooth design from its white and red color scheme, all the way down to its font.
By Airbnb
2. Place your web developers at the center of the process
Ultimately, it is your web development team that ties the whole website together. Project managers, designers, content specialists, sales, and marketers all provide input that requires the work of developers to see the light of day. Therefore, it is important to place your development team at the center of the process.
Being so central in the process, it is important that you make sure that their proposed solutions will work toward achieving your goals. This will require brainstorming, planning sessions, and consultations with all teams in order to arrive at the solution that the development team will need to implement.
Our next example is Stripe’s website. It looks amazing but is also very rich in terms of functionalities and integrations. Iconography and microinteractions are very fascinating.
By Stripe
3. Make sure teams communicate with each other
On that note, you need to enable and support communication between teams.
UX and marketing teams in particular need to work in tandem, and so you need to make sure that there’s a constant communications channel open between them. The best websites are a result of the collaboration of these two teams and achieve an outcome that is both strategic and has a clear objective.
Your salespeople, on the other hand, are closest to your customers. They can tell you what exactly your customers need, what they want to hear, and how fast they are willing to commit. Based on this information, your marketing team can work with the content and polish it, so as to create a compelling and unique selling proposition that will keep users’ attention and make them stay on your website.
Check out the next example we have prepared for you - maze.co. The content is simple, impactful, the flow is smooth and the overall experience you get is very pleasant. Well done, Maze!
By Maze
How Resolute Software can help you
Resolute Software has years of experience in helping businesses modernize their websites and improve their UX. We have successfully completed over 100 projects with companies from across the globe that have enabled them to boost their online performance and conversions.
By conducting a UX Assessment together with you, we can help you determine which areas of your website are in need of a change and what the best course of action is. After analyzing and defining the areas that require work, we offer you a prototype that reflects our recommendations and a map of the steps that should be taken next.
Does your website need a UX check-up? Get in touch with us, and let’s see how we can help you!
