Website Analysis: How Appearance Affects User Experience - Part 2

This is the third in a series of posts about website analysis. Here, the focus is on how to look at your website to evaluate your visitor’s experience.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In Part 1 of this post, we briefly looked at how three items – load time, clarity of the website or company purpose, and design – affect user experience. Other details to consider include the following: 

• Is it easy to see what’s most important? 
• Does it load fast/look good on a smartphone? 
• Is the contact info easy to find? 
• Does the website have a favicon?

Easy to See What is Important – Size, emphasis, color, and placement all play a role in website design to highlight the important areas of your pages. A good design guides the visitor’s eyes naturally. Making them work to find the important parts of your website may lead to site abandonment.

Loads Fast/Looks Good on Smartphones (and other hand-held devices) – According to Keynote Competitive Research, an industry analyst, two-thirds of all smartphone users expected a mobile site to load in less than four seconds. Nearly half of these users also complained about websites that are not optimized for smartphones (a simpler, easy-to-read version, not just a shrunken copy of the regular website). The message is clear: users want website that load quickly and are configured for these devices.

Contact Info Easy to Find – The phrase, “It’s on the internet, so it must be true,” attests that not all organizations, people, and information are legitimate. An easy-to-find “Contact” page that includes your company address, email, phone number and map (and any other necessary contact information) helps build trust with the site visitor.

Favicon Present – A favicon (short for favorite icon) is a tiny image that appears left of the website address in browser windows. This item is important as web browsers now give people the ability to bookmark their favorite websites, identified simply by the icon, to their browser.  

Summary

Because the first impression people have of your website is its appearance, it’s crucial to get it right for your target audience. Load time, purpose, design, enabling an easy recognition of chief material, smartphone appearance, contact info, and having a favicon present all influence your site visitors experience. Your website users have a favorable experience when your site is well designed and they can find what they want easily. When you consistently give your users a favorable website experience, this translates into an organization that measurably meets its goals.

For More Info

Learn more now about analyzing a website by viewing the Website User Experience Assessment found on this page and also by taking advantage of Act One’s FREE 5-Step Website Analysis to help get you started.