Zen Blog
Why User Experience is Key to Engagement & Retention
User experience is more important today that it ever has been, competition in almost every market space means that having good UX design on your website or app is key to customer retention. For services that don’t have direct competitors such as in the education sector, competition comes from the variety of other distractions that can engage a user when you fail to. User experience is key in increasing and retaining your user base, both short and long-term.
They say that good UX design is invisible, we couldn’t agree more. UX design is a crucial, if often forgotten, area of digital media. A combination of keeping website or application design aesthetic on brand whilst making sure the user has a pleasant experience on the site. This includes making sure the site is responsive to different devices, easily navigable and the multimedia content loads in an appropriate time.
In the last decade or so the world wide web has matured significantly, long gone are the days of clunky websites designed only for desktop viewing. Mobile has taken over as the primary browsing device for most people, as is reflected the traffic volumes reported by Google and other major websites.
All this mean that the minimum expectations of users have shifted as web technologies have advanced and as new standards have been adopted. Whereas having a fast, navigable, and mobile responsive site used to be a nice bonus and would increase browsing time and conversion rates, it is now essential and expected. Whichever way you measure it there are significant issues with customer conversion and bounce rate when a site is not meeting modern UX expectations. A good example is that users are 5 times more likely to abandon a task on mobile if the website they are using is not properly optimised to their device.
Problems primarily stem from navigation difficulties, text and button sizing making the site illegible and input function problems (for example a drop-down menu for a form not displaying properly). However, this is not to say other issues cannot severely damage session times and conversions on sites. Whatever issues your users are having, as many as 88% may never return if they have a bad experience.
The best solution to these issues is to perform proper investigations into the user and user experience before undertaking any design and development work on your website. Detailing out user flows for how you expect people will engage with your site and how you expect them to complete the tasks you want them to will give you a good idea of where potential choke points might develop.
Performing robust device testing will ensure that there is limited potential for users to be presented with an unusable site. It will always be impossible to verify if your website or application works on all devices and browser versions however covering the most popular mobile and desktop devices will give you a high percentage of guaranteed coverage.
Proper optimisation/compression of images and other media keeps your site lean allowing it to load quickly in most scenarios. In 2021 as many as 40% of users will leave a website if a page takes longer that 3 seconds to load. So, reducing loading times should be a priority. It also has direct SEO benefits as Google likes to present its users with fast loading webpages. You can check your Google page speed performance here.
For more information about how investing in User Experience can improve your websites performance contact the Zen Agency now.
