How Website Design Impacts Customer Experience

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Ecommerce stores are exploding in popularity worldwide. Consumers love the flexibility of making purchases online and receiving those products in the comfort of their own homes.

Businesses are also enjoying the benefits of providing potential and current customers with a solid online experience. The way you design your website impacts the customer experience.

A well-designed site helps a customer navigate your website with ease, learn about your products, engage with your brand, and make simple purchases.

Your design is the difference between an inviting, comforting experience versus a cold, distant one.

A good website design helps customers feel at ease, safe, and secure when browsing your website. Additionally, the colors, spacing, typeface, images, and videos you use influence a customer’s emotional response to your website.

An incomplete, confusing, less-than-appealing website design almost guarantees a tough time attracting and retaining customers.

So, you must design your website with accessibility, inclusivity, and simplicity at its forefront.

Here are seven ways to design your website with customer experience in mind.

Accessibility Is Important

Businesses have an opportunity to engage with their customers in a digital space unlike ever before. This increase in online engagement has also highlighted the importance of web accessibility.

According to the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative, “Web accessibility means that websites, tools, and technologies are designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them.”

It’s important for a website to be accessible to people with disabilities because they’re surely a part of your customer base. Additionally, they deserve just as great of an experience as the rest of your customers do.

Furthermore, making your website accessible improves site quality, and this, in turn, boosts your SEO efforts.

A considerable part of your customer experience should involve helping visitors feel included and supported to engage with your website entirely.

Our digital economy allows businesses to offer everything online. Offer a level of convenience and accessibility that your competitors don’t provide.

When people can’t get to you physically, you can still provide them with a great experience through your brand digitally.

Ensure that visitors are supported with:

• High-quality images and videos.
• Video and image search options.
• Captions on videos.
• Audio features.
• Shopper assistants.
• Bigger fonts and the right color contrasts.
• Interactive design elements.
• Live chat.

Optimize Your Site for Mobile Devices

Research suggests that 73% of internet users worldwide will primarily use their mobile phones to access the internet by 2025. So, that means customers will be accessing your eCommerce store on their mobile phones.

If you want to keep up with your tech-savvy customers, ensure that your website is optimized for mobile devices.

We’ve all visited a website that wasn’t optimized for mobile devices. Its pictures were out of focus, the font was hard to read, and the navigation was all out of whack, among many other things.

If you were completely turned off and left the site immediately, you aren’t alone.

Don’t leave a bad impression on your customers with a site that doesn’t consider where they’re at the most: on their mobile phones.

One of the easiest ways to optimize your website for mobile devices is to use a hosting platform that offers a website builder with responsive website design built-in. In addition, you can enlist the help of experts on the platform. You can also do some self-education if you wish to go about this process on your own.

Use Chatbots and Live Chat

Have you ever wanted to talk to someone in real-time about a product question or customer service issue? Many businesses are now implementing chatbots and live chat features to engage in real-time conversations with their customers.

Chatbots are a great way to improve the customer experience on your website.

If you don’t have a live representative available yet, you can use chatbots to get the conversation started. Customers are able to send a question or message to these bots.

They’ll receive a response immediately asking for additional information that will help facilitate a seamless conversation once a live representative is available.

Implement chat buttons on each page of your website or on the pages your customers engage with the most, like your product pages. Most website builders offer to implement a live chat or chatbot on your website and walk you through how to set up and maintain it.

Simple Navigation Is Key

Confusing navigation is one way to ruin the customer experience on your site. If they can’t access the pages they need, chances are your potential customers won’t turn into loyal customers any time soon.

Simple site navigation is key to a flawless customer experience. They should be able to find your navigation bar with ease. Customers should be able to go from page to page without any complication.

Also, don’t overwhelm your customers with a thousand pages to visit on your website.

A home, about, product, contact, purchase, and blog page is excellent to start with. Your navigation bar should stand out from the rest of the content on your pages. Use a dropdown menu or horizontal bar structure.

Brand Consistency Should Carry Over to Your Site

Your website is only part of your complete digital presence. Chances are you have social media pages, an email network, and potentially a podcast. No matter what online platforms you’re using, your brand should be consistent throughout.

Customers should visit your website and immediately recognize it if they saw your company’s branding on your other platforms. Therefore, your website should have the same look and feel as your other digital spaces.

Use the same color scheme, logo, images, videos, and other components that are used on your social media platforms, email newsletter, and ads. Use brand-specific identifiers that remind customers of the emotional connection they’ve already built with your brand on another platform.

Create Exceptional Content Only

You’ve probably heard this one a thousand times, but it’s worth noting in any post about the customer experience. If you want your eCommerce website to stand out, you must engage visitors with something other than sales and products.

Engaging your potential and current customers with valuable content is a great way to build trust-filled relationships. Exceeding their expectations with content that’s interactive and surprisingly insightful influences the customer experience.

The type of content you share on your website is just as important as how you display it.

Create content about your products. Show videos on how to use your products responsibly. Craft content that shares industry trends and information that could affect them as customers.

A part of your content marketing strategy on your website should also be to share your company’s ethos: your culture, values, goals, and commitments to bettering our community.

Share your social responsibility commitment to diversifying the workplace. Write blog posts on remarkable employees. Talk about your sustainability practices. Share your commitment to being an ethical brand and what that looks like day-to-day.

Customers are more likely to have a better experience with your business if they can trust you and where your operation is headed. Use content to facilitate this trust.

A fantastic customer experience is the difference between losing and retaining loyal customers. Create a website that is accessible, optimized for mobile devices, implements chat features, has simple navigation, is consistent, and is distinguished by excellent content.