A couple of decades ago, we knew somebody who designed a rather woeful e-commerce website. It didn’t function on mobile devices. It had a colour scheme that didn’t consider the colour wheel, and navigating through the website was akin to navigating the roads of the UK using a map that was created long before those roads existed. It was awful. Still, it made money. A lot of money.
It wouldn’t do nowadays. You see, visitors to online platforms are more ruthless about what sites they use. If a site doesn’t have a good user experience, they’ll move on rather quickly.
On this page, we want to discuss why user experience is more important than ever, and why refinements to the user experience will define the future of online platforms for a long time to come.
Customers expect a good interface
A couple of decades ago, internet usage was not as prevalent as it is today. Yes, it was popular, but nothing like it is now. People were fine with a crummy website, because that was the norm back then, especially with smaller businesses that were just starting to break into the e-commerce arena, or at least into a new way of marketing their local business. It’s different now.
It doesn’t matter the size of your business – when a person lands on your website, they expect:
– It should load quickly.
– To see a decent graphic design.
– To find the right amount of information about products/services on offer.
– To easily find what they want through the website’s navigation.
Potential customers determine in secondswhether a website is worth their time. Seriously. If your website isn’t loading within a couple of seconds, that visitor is out of there. They don’t care how good your website is because they know that there are dozens more websites just like yours that care about the user experience.
So, if you want people to spend some time on your website, you need to invest heavily in developing a good user experience. You need to constantly be developing your platform to play into a better user experience too. Things aren’t set in stone – the site design ideals we live by now won’t be the same a couple of years from now. If your site isn’t evolving from a user experience viewpoint, you’ll get left behind.
Customers expect a mobile experience
Again, this wasn’t expected a few years ago. Now, it is a requirement. Your user interface needs to work just as well on a mobile device as it does on a computer. In fact, the former is much more important since this is how the vast majority of people will discover your website. If your site looks awful on a mobile device, people will skip it.
Plenty of industries have needed to evolve to this. For example, just a decade or so ago, most online casino games couldn’t be played on mobile devices. You needed a computer. With the rise in the number of smartphones, this meant that companies were leaving a load of cash on the table. Nowadays, all of the most popular casino table games are available on mobile devices (natively), and any online casino that doesn’t embrace mobile devices isn’t going to make the grade.
Good user interfaces impact profitability
You’ve probably worked this part out already, right? A good site user interface keeps people interested in your website. If people find it tricky to navigate your website, or it just loads a fraction too slowly for them, then they’ll be off to the next site. If a customer is not on your platform, then you are not getting their money. It’s as simple as that.
If you look at websites like Amazon (love them or hate them), they are always working hard to ensure that the customer experience is the best it can be. It isn’t just the bucket loads of cash they have for marketing that makes them money – it is the fact that they have refined their user interface to extract the maximum amount of cash from their customers. Their whole site is based around keeping people on the website for as long as possible. After all, if people don’t leave the website, they won’t spend money elsewhere.
We promise you that an investment in the user interface for your website will be worth it. As long as you work with a good UX designer, then you’ll end up with a site that makes more money than you ever spent on the design. Although, once again, we have to tell you that you need to keep your website up to date with current design norms to ensure the customers keep rolling in.
Good site design gets your website found
If you’re into marketing, then you’ll know the bulk of your customers will come through search engines. This is why you’re (hopefully) investing in search engine optimization. Google uses a variety of metrics to determine whether a site should be placed near the top of the list. These metrics include whether a site works well on mobile, and how long a person stays on a website. It also takes note of the speed which a site loads at. So, if your site is failing from a user experience perspective, this will cause all manner of issues when it comes to ranking in Google, and you’ll lose customers.
Site design builds trust
Finally, a decent site design builds trust in your platform, and as a website owner, this is important. If you look trustworthy, people will trust you. You’ve probably stumbled across a few legit websites that you thought were scams due to how poorly they were designed. Don’t fall into the same trap!
Final thoughts
There you have it. This is why user experience is important on your online platform. Invest in user experience and you will stand a far better chance of making money.
