How to succeed in business?

It goes without saying that your product or service needs to be perfect, however the lion’s share of your success depends on your effective customer experience. If you don’t agree with this statement, ask your customers!

As the digital world evolves with each passing day, the number of various websites, blogs, e-stores and other online platforms is increasing as well. Such abundance makes people more demanded, sophisticated and picky.

That’s why today online customers do not usually remember the product or the service that drew them initially to a website. However, they greatly remember all the interactions with the site, the emotions and attitudes about using it and communicating with the product ownership. In a word, they remember experiences.

Customers Turn to Online

According to multiple studies, it’s obvious that the number of online users is increasing year after year. In an attempt to make life more comfortable, people turn to a rich variety of web platforms to look for information, necessary products or services, job, and even their soul mate.

Let’s look through the most impressive figures from recent studies that prove the importance of the internet for modern people and explain why you need to invest in enhancing customer experience of your site.

• 96 percent of Americans go shopping online instead of visiting brick-and-mortar location stores. Most consumers are shopping while they are in bed, others prefer making an online purchase while being in the bathroom or in their car. It means wherever consumers are, they’re ready to search for necessary items and buy them, so your website has to be ready to satisfy their needs.
• By 2019 it is predicted that there will be 224 million of digital shoppers in the USA.
• Mobile shopping has advanced tremendously and is worth $3.2 trillion in 2017. As a comparison, in 2013 it was less by half counting $1.5 trillion.
• 71 percent of customers who have had enjoyable and satisfying experience on the site is likely to recommend that to their friends, family, etc.
• Nielsen Norman Group has found out that most users judge the website in less than 59 seconds. So, if you don’t meet their requirements and do not wow them in less than a minute, you’ve lost them. It means that your website design should be captivating and outstanding in order to attract more customers and turn them into revenue generators.

It’s clear that the number of online users are dramatically growing. Most people spend over 3 hours on the web daily using various modern devices.

So, how to stand out from the trillions of web pages and millions of mobile applications? The answer is evident – offer an experience that will make your customers go “wow” and they will definitely come back and not alone.

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Web Design Tricks to Improve Your Customer Experience

So, what does exactly customer experience (CX) mean?

Customer experience is a mixture of web elements and tools that provide effective interaction between your customers and your brand (website, blog, e-store). It is influenced by tons of factors including the site overall look, interface, Navigation and various content modules and forms.

Here are some crucial moments to improve your customer experience.

Start with Engaging Homepage

You have less than 10 seconds to wow your homepage visitors and turn them into the potential client. Otherwise, they click out of your site to look for a more engaging, impressive site. However, you can make efforts to ensure them that your site is amazing using the following elements:

• Choose a clean, cutting-edge and wordpress themes for business or premium templates on other CMS with a prototypical interface.
• Incorporate as more visual elements as possible because people perceive visual information better than other variants. Include attractive pictures , bold typography, video, cinemagraphs, sliders, etc.
• Use bright, distinctive, complementing and pleasing color scheme. Remember that each and every color can dramatically affect moods, feelings, and emotions. Pablo Picasso once noticed, “Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.”

Unfortunately, it is impossible to implement all catchy modules on the homepage, but the basic elements will definitely better first impression from your brand.

For example, look at the premium WordPress Theme for interior design agency – Terra Interior. The theme offers contrast, an attractive color palette with a large, quality images and bold, eye-pleasing typography. Such an effective combination of visual tools gives a great chance to get visitors interested at first sight.

Consider Your Site Usability

According to the results of HubSpot research, 76 percent of users state that the good website has to make it easy for them to find what they want. Humans are inherently lazy. They always search for the easiest way to achieve goals so that your website has to provide comfortable, user-friendly usability with extensive functionality and smooth performance. Considering this users’ preference, site owners should pay more attention to the following factors:

• navigation;
• content arrangement.

Enhance Website Navigation, Especially Product Search

Navigation shows how easy it is for users to take action and browse your website. There are some effective tactics for providing easy and intuitive navigation including a logical page hierarchy and using clickable buttons.

Try to follow the three-click rule concerning web design navigation – a user should be able to find any information with no more than 3 clicks. Be as intuitive as possible and avoid chaotic and confusing navigation, otherwise your users go out directly to your competitors.

If you compare your online shop with a brick and mortar store, you will understand what you need to change and improve. Imagine how you are walking through endless merchandises in an attempt to find what you need, but it’s all for nothing. You will leave such a store. Apply the same concept to your e-store.

If you seek for an efficient example of a full-featured, catchy e-store, take a look at WooCommerce template Grand Discount. It features prototypical, intuitive navigation, advanced functionality and a number of necessary options for providing engaging and satisfying shopping experience.

Except for traditional useful elements, the template is equipped with the collection of e-commercial modules like Product list, Wishlist and various sorting options incorporated for shoppers’ convenience.

Plan Content Arrangement

A website is not a book so that do not expect that it will be read by users from cover to cover. As a rule, website visitors look for snippets of information. That’s why pay more attention to how your headlines, products categories, sales messages and announcements look. They have to be simple, short, distinctive and readable.

Placing content randomly on your web page will result in a chaotic and messy overall site look. Most of the premium templates have grid-based layouts.

It means that content is arranged into sections, columns and boxes that is pleasing looking and evokes a sense of harmony. For example, take a look at universal WordPress theme Monstroid2 coming with a set of design skins, amazing page layouts, and extensive functionality.

Developers have created an ideal multipurpose theme where any kind of content will have the proper place. Moreover, the theme is fully responsive so that your website will flow freely on any modern device with any screen resolution.

According to Nielson Norman Group study, 79 percent of users do not read online content word by word but only scan it. Thus, try to place all the content on the page in an F-pattern because most people scan computer screen in such a way. Display information in order of importance: left to right and top to bottom. An effectively structured website will definitely work on your income.

Serve Customers On-the-Go with Mobile-Friendly Web Design

Over the past few years mobile and tablet internet access has been tremendously increasing and even exceeded desktop web usage, StatCounter Global Stats’research informs. American users spend 5-6 hours a day on their smartphones and tablets.

Due to research by BrightLocal, almost two-thirds of customers prefer using a mobile-friendly business website to that is not responsive. And finally, Forrester has found out that consumers spend 85 percent of their time in apps on smartphones.

You can always adjust your site to different screen widths using one of premium fully responsive templates, for instance multipurpose Magento 2 theme – Magetique. It was developed with mobile first paradigm at use so that your website would run freely on smaller screens as well.

Moreover, the template features Accelerated Mobile Pages technology that makes mobile content appear in an instant and positively influences on your search ranking. Such an extension provides site with unique UI and UX design concepts.

Use Pictures with Human Faces

Pictures with human faces, especially eyes are very powerful. Designer Aarron Walter explains that people are constantly exploring the world by seeking something familiar since it gives them a sense of confidence and a feeling of comfort.

When users see a face, they automatically want to trust your service. Faces add a human touch to your digital product. That said, serving a powerful design element pictures with faces help:

1. Attract your visitors’ attention by creating an effect of some kind of social environment.
2. Guide your visitors in a purposeful way.
3. Get your site users engaged – give them an opportunity to play with faces: enhance them or replace with their own.
4. Strike life into faces by using emotional expressions. When you visualize emotions (cry, happiness, laugh, worry, etc.), you can rule your visitors and provoke the same feelings.
5. Make users smile. You can add some humor to your website.

Engaging and satisfying customer experience is the most important metric for site building process. In today’s highly competitive online business environment, creating an outstanding site that runs on any device properly and accurately is the way to stand out from competitors.

Those who can adapt will survive and thrive. Fortunately, it is easy to create a beautiful and functional website, simply by keeping these design requirements in mind or using ready-made templates by TemplateMonster.

The world of web design is extremely diverse, very rich and truly creative. So if you are on the way to create a really fascinating and catchy website with phenomenal user interface, read this free eBook “UI Tips for Web Design Enthusiasts (E-Book)”.

It will help you pick up the right color palette and proper fonts for your business niche, to find out how to make an impressive logo and necessary icons. This e-guide is created by professionals and contains their best practices and insights into UI.

What web design tricks do you follow to increase your customer experience, let us know in the comments section below.

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