Your website’s user experience (UX) plays a key role in shaping what a user thinks about your brand. Your company may be the best in its industry, but if your website’s UX is poorly designed, your users will often be left with a negative impression of who you are as a company.

When making UX design choices, it’s crucial to consider what users are looking for as they form their opinions. Here are ten things your users are likely to look for in your UX.

1. Speed

Page load speed is one of the most prominent and easily noticed features of the UX. When a potential customer or client navigates to your website, they will have little patience for a slow-loading webpage. In fact, according to Google, the likelihood of bounce increases by 32% as a page load time increases from one second to three seconds.

2. Simple Designs / Ease of Use

Similar to page load speed, the simplicity of your website’s design is critical to prevent a user from wasting their time. Nobody likes spending excessive time just trying to find the information they are looking for. Users expect designs to be elegant and beautiful, but they also need to provide simplicity for ease of use. This is a delicate balancing act, but it is a critical factor that users look for in a UX.

3. Let Content Shine

When a potential customer or client navigates to your website, they look for particular products or information. For this reason, it’s essential to make your website’s content prominent on the page with proper sizing and easy-to-read fonts. The user shouldn’t have to scroll through the entire page to find the essential information; this content should jump right out at them.

4. Consistency and Fluidity

Another critical aspect of a great UX design is to ensure that navigating through the website offers consistency, with one page or section flowing seamlessly into the next. If a user navigates from your homepage to your service page, for example, and the design of the two pages is drastically different, this can be jarring to the user. They may even momentarily believe that they’ve been redirected to another website entirely.

5. Easy to Navigate

This is similar to design simplicity, but navigation is an important enough component of UX to stand on its own. A user wants to get from point A to point B on your website quickly and efficiently, and they can become easily overwhelmed if you have a complex menu with dozens of page links. Try to narrow your website down to the smallest number of pages possible to prevent users from getting lost in a sea of page links.

6. Responsive Design

The importance of responsive design should be obvious, but there are still far too many websites that do not correctly scale to mobile displays. Approximately half of all web page views originate via mobile devices. This means that one out of every two users is looking for a UX that appropriately scales to mobile screens and provides the same usability as the desktop version.

7. Make Important Elements Pop

Whether this is a content section, an image, infographic, or any other element type, users want the most important parts of your website to be featured front-and-center. You could accomplish this by focusing on proper sizing of elements, the choice of contrasting colors, or even something as simple as a drop-shadow around the critical element.

8. Simple Presentation of Complex Information

Infographics are all the rage these days and for good reason. Using well-designed infographics within your website’s content is a great way to present complex information to your users in a way that’s appealing and simple to understand. A good UX design is all about making life easier for your users, and simplifying the complex is always a crucial step.

9. Page Element Alignment

A user wants to know, with little thought, how different elements within the page relate to one another. You can accomplish this by paying attention to how related page elements are aligned both within the page and in relation to one another.

10. Offer Help

Regardless of how well you have designed your UI and UX, there’s a good chance that many users will still require additional help. Providing an easy-to-use contact and easy-to-find contact functionality is critical. An even better UX choice may be a chatbot for users to get more specific and real-time assistance.

Key Takeaway: Think Like Your Users

When you design a UX, it can be easy to get caught up in what looks good to you as a designer. This doesn’t always match up well with what your users are looking for, though. Think about how it is likely to affect your users with each design decision. It’s even better to conduct usability testing when possible.

The team at Camber Creative has years of experience designing and marking websites and apps. If you want some help with your website, you can contact Camber Creative to get assistance with a brilliantly designed UX and more.