If you were to start reading online about user experience, (UX) it wouldn’t take long to get bogged down in website best practices, technical SEO, and user interface design. Yet there’s an easier and faster way to get on track to improving your customer’s user experience, and that’s to put yourself in their shoes.

What is UX?

As the name implies, user experience, UX for short, is the sum of what your prospect encounters as they visit your website or use your app or other software. Every experience generates emotions. The reason we want to monitor UX is we want those emotions to be productive for our businesses.

UX is the Road to Connection with Your Customers

As with nearly every small business marketing activity, the best way to start is with your ideal customer profile.
We’ll assume your products are great. Customers love them and get a lot of value from them. In some way it makes their lives better and easier. It makes them feel good about having a relationship with you. (If you don’t currently know how they feel about your products, it pays to find out.)\

Once you understand their true motivations and feelings about your products, you would, of course, want your website to give them the same positive feelings towards you and your company.

Before you dive into any technical SEO or website work, take a good peak inside your customers’ heads. A good understanding of your ideal customer will guide you in figuring out what content to present.

Your website is often their first point of contact with your business, typically after a web search to help them solve a problem.

Or it might be the second or third point of contact, for instance, after receiving a direct mail piece, as they start to investigate your product and service offerings.

Perhaps they’re coming to your site after a purchase. In that case, your website should also be an efficient component of your customer service automation strategy.

Whatever their reason for being there, it must be an easy, seamless experience that increases their confidence in you and fulfills a need.

That’s where user experience (UX) comes into play. When you understand the “why” that’s motivating your ideal customers, it’s much easier to work on the items that affect their UX.

What really resonates with them? Key talking points, for instance, can be presented as bullets on the web page. A few other basic items to consider about your customer experience:

Contact Forms

What’s their experience using your contact forms? Is what you’re offering valuable enough to get them to fork over their contact info? Or should your requests for information be broken into parts?

Calls to Action

Do they make sense from your customer’s perspective? Are they clear and meaningful? Do they motivate?

Empty Space

Is there any white space on your pages? White space is an integral and effective component to good visual marketing. Yes, we’re excited about our products and services, but we’re not going to get all that info into one paragraph or even one page.

Break it up. Give the viewers’ minds a rest.

Understanding User Experience to Improve Conversions - a UX Infographic

Don’t over-complicate the thinking behind your customer experience. It’s easy to get lost in the latest best practices for SEO, website design, and content marketing. Better to start with insight into your best customers. Let that guide you in setting up their user experience with your website.

The user experience infographic below, courtesy of our web design colleagues at Caxy, will help you avoid some of the top user experience frustrations and keep you in tune with your customers. In addition to the items above, it also points out important technical SEO items to fix as design elements that require attention.

If you find this helpful, please share with your colleagues or leave a comment below.