7 findings that prove the importance of great UX
Does your website cost your customers? Here are powerful statistics that show how demanding users are when it comes to user experience — after all, they have plenty of choices.
You may be privileged to hold a monopoly in your industry or serve a niche where there is no competition in the immediate area and your customers depend on you, regardless of your online presence. Congratulations, then you are one of the fortunate few! However, the majority of businesses today are facing strong competition and this competitive situation continues to increase.
Every brick-and-mortar business will have to consider a solid online presence, given that an outdated page is not sufficient to keep the visitors on your page. Here are 7 findings that demonstrate the importance of user experience to generate leads and convert them into customers, along with some useful tips on how to improve your page’s UX.
1. Make an impression in a split-second
About 9 years ago, you as a web designer had 50 milliseconds (0.05 seconds) to make a good first impression in order to make sure the visitor won’t leave the page immediately. Presumably, this time span has decreased even further until today. Once a user has decided to visit your page, you have on average of 10 seconds to impress. This is simply due to the many alternatives available. If a site does not look appealing or trustworthy or is not well structured, a user knows that there are many similar pages to discover.
Make sure your web site’s experience or its redesign favors these most significant 0.05 seconds and make sure your page loads fast.
2. UX is everything!
Okay, that sounds a little over the top, but let the numbers speak for themselves:
According to Salesforce, customers’ expectation of user experience has never been higher. A total of 84% of customers say the user experience of a company is as important as the actual products and services offered.
And what makes a sound user experience? Mobile-friendliness, for example, and clear hierarchy, easily legible text every user understands, fast page load time and calls to action (CTAs). We will discover more in the following.
3. Mobile-friendliness for the win
In recent years, website traffic has been marginally dominated by mobile devices over desktop use. Today, mobile devices (excluding tablets) account for 52% of the global website traffic.
This is also apparent in the e-commerce sector. In 2019, 61% of online purchases were made on smartphones, an increase of more than 27% YOY.
If a website isn’t mobile-friendly, 50% of users will use it less, even though they may like the business itself.
4. Page speed optimization increases sales
For sure, you have experienced yourself. You want a website to appear the moment you click on it. You may accept to wait a bit, assuming that your connection may be poor, but after a certain tolerance period, almost every user leaves the page. It could eventually be a broken link, or spam, or whatever.
Page speed is an indicator of how quickly the content on your page loads, as opposed to site speed, which describes the page speed for a series of page views on a website. Page speed is also called “page load time” or “time to first byte”.
According to Forbes, nearly 70% of consumers say that page speed has an impact on their willingness to buy. Moreover, they confirm that a slow loading time lessens chances they will return in future. You can now either hope that they won’t remember until their next search, or act!
A change in load time may influence every step of the buyer’s journey, to the good or the bad. Hence why it is important to optimize images, get rid of excess CSS, enable compression and follow other page speed best practices. Whatever your targeted conversion, a site speed improvement of as little as 0.1 seconds can ultimately increase your conversion rates by an average of 8% (8.4% in retail, 10.1% increase in the travel industry).
“Page speed may be overlooked by many as one of the most important factors in gaining customer attention and retention.” — Forbes
5. Poor UX makes users leave
46% of users answered in a survey by KoMarketing, that “Lack of Message (can’t tell what a company does)” is the main reason why they leave a page, followed by a lack of contact information.
The issue of unclear messaging is definitely an issue that reflects UX writing and the following reasons address UX design: poor design/ navigation (37%), automatic audio/video (33%), intrusive live chat (30%), sliders (17%) and too small fonts (15%).
For 42%, animated ads are considered a reason to leave a page, which goes hand-in-hand with the findings that 420 million people around the world use ad blockers, and poor user experience caused by ads is the most cited reason why they install it. The global adblocking rate in 2018 was estimated at 27%.
6. CTAs improve UX
Over 70% of small business websites do not use call to action buttons. Calls to action are crucial for your conversion rate, however, they can make it or break it, depending on how well they’re designed. This element of web design seems inconspicuous yet is crucial to ensure that your visitors perform the actions you want them to take. Standard navigational elements are essential when it comes to user experience, such as linking the logo back to the home page. E-commerce websites should not lack review sections and compare tools.
7. UX improvements boost ROI
Okay, the last section may be slightly hypothetical, however, research shows that a better user experience leads to a higher return on investment (ROI). As seen in part 4 above, site speed optimization can increase conversion rates and therefore lead to more sales. UX improvements can be pricy when done professionally, but evidence shows that every penny spent brings a great return.
Forrester Research found that a well-constructed user interface can increase the conversion rate of your website by up to 200% and a better UX design can achieve conversion rates of up to 400%.
According to the same research group, every Dollar invested in UX returns on average of $100 overtime. Businesses that invest in UX report lower customer acquisition and support costs, while increasing customer retention and market share. This can be broken down into two main components: money and time.
What did we learn from it?
User experience is the quintessence of conversions. More importantly, an investment in UX is also an asset that pays for itself in the long run. We are aware that users are demanding when it comes to their experience, after all, they spend a lot of time online already and don’t want to waste it more. In order to make the user experience as pleasing for visitors as possible, you should put yourself in the shoes of your visitor.
“People ignore design that ignores people.”
— Frank Chimero, Designer
Make sure to adopt clear and concise navigation. Hamburger navigation is widely used and intuitive to the vast majority. Boost your page speed as much as possible and make sure to leave a good impression in the first few seconds. This includes a clear, neat structure without disturbing elements, sensible use of animation or sound and overall no unnecessary clutter.
