10 simple tips to improve your site usability
Printed 2025-02-20
For a site to be an effective marketing tool, it must solve several problems at once. When you develop a turnkey website , these tasks are to ensure traffic attraction, increase engagement, help to retain visitors and convert them into customers.
This is a science and psychology combined with art. The site development team should focus on several fundamentally different areas in order to create a digital product that will “fall into” the target audience. Here are 10 steps to follow when designing a site.
1 . Customer avatar
Customer avatar is primarily intended to coordinate the marketing strategy and advertising itself. To create the perfect design and interface, you do not need to know what exactly the “client Lisa” likes or what her pain points are. However, you need to know the types of customers you are targeting: what they look at sites and how they shop, what devices they use, how they find and use your products or services. Develop a strategy for working with these user avatars, not specific customers.
2. Simple design
Customers should feel the interest right away by going to the site. The site design should be simple, use free space to highlight the main elements and not contain unnecessary “garbage”. This encourages visitors to walk on the pages of the site on their own, instead of painfully searching for the necessary information among the heap of useless details.
3. Design as a toy
When you are working on usability, strive to make the site look like a game with a children's developmental toy. This means using large elements with a simple design and a clear meaning, understandable even to a child, and practical, brief calls to action (CTA).
This approach works great on any device, especially on mobile: there, large buttons greatly facilitate navigation.
4. Responsiveness
Every time you create a website design , you must make sure that it looks as it should on mobile devices. How will it look on a smartphone, but on a tablet? If the site is designed primarily for personal computers (desktops), you need to carefully consider the mobile version of the design.
The best results can be achieved using the principle of “Mobile first”: first create a design for mobile devices, and only then add it to the desktop version. This is especially true given the transition of most of the traffic from laptops to phones.
5. Do not trust feelings
Never think that your site and its interface is perfect just because you personally think that it looks great. Or because it performed well when tested by your team. How you or your team appreciate design and usability will often be very different from what the customer feels.
Always do external testing. There are many services that test the site using real visitors. Their comments, behavior and actions are recorded during the interaction with your site and / or application, and then you can view all this and make the necessary changes.
6. Diversify content
People are attracted to different things, and some respond to certain types of content better than others. Thanks to testing, you can find the right balance between video or animation, images and text content on the pages of your site.
Continue to improve, diversify, and test your content on a real audience to track how changes in content are changing the level of engagement. For example, you may find that static images are less effective, while animations and live videos, on the contrary, are causing more interest to your target audience.
7. Make the text sing
It is impossible to create a good design or interface without using text content. Regardless of whether you use text to a minimum or do longreads, you must be sure that the text captures and holds the user's attention.
Each word in the text should serve the purpose, bringing the visitor closer to becoming a buyer.
8. Integrate Social Media
Make it easy for your visitors to share content (like feedback and thoughts), share company and product information, and interact with other customers throughout the sales funnel . For example, Amazon does this through a Q & A block, as well as through comment blocks. “Social proof” is of great importance for successful interaction with potential customers.
9. Gather feedback
Make your clients feel your attention and value by directly requesting their feedback while they are on your site. Instead of annoying customers with offers to subscribe to the newsletter when they try to leave the site, try to do a survey by asking them to answer a couple of short questions (for example, regarding the convenience of using the site). Use these ideas to further improve your UX.
10. Personalize the site
Customization in any form is an important part of improving usability, making the site more attractive for each client. You can give the user the opportunity to customize the style of the site's interface (for example, the color scheme of the design and menu items). This will allow the user to contribute to the improvement of his own UI, and at the same time will engage in interaction with the site. This will increase the chances that he will return again.