User Experience Considerations

Getting traffic to your website can be difficult. But keeping visitors can be even tougher. Visitor’s are more likely to revisit your website if they have a good experience. Here’s just a few items to consider in order to improve your visitor’s experience to your website. No doubt we’ll run a second article on user experience soon!

• Fine-comb your content and how much is displayed - Having a website that is content-rich is one thing, but making sure your content stays relevant to your visitors is another. If you have a lot of essential content, you need to consider a balance of how much information to provide on each page. Too much information per page will overload and confuse the visitor’s, while too little information on too many pages will lead the user to give up clicking to navigate your website.
• Consistent Navigation - Keep the navigation throughout your site consistent. If you have a navigation bar along the top on one page, don’t suddenly switch it to the side on another. Consider using breadcrumb navigation where the path a user has taken to individual pages is listed so that user’s can find their way back easily (think Hansel and Gretel)
• The fold - Consider ‘the fold’ as the information the user will see without scrolling. This information should be the most relevant and should give the user a complete overview about what the rest of the page is about.
• Scrolling - Limit scrolling to one direction. The majority of websites scroll vertically, and thus user’s naturally expect your website to scroll this way. Some portfolio’s venture into horizontal scrolling, but few actually succeed in delivering a good user experience.
• Avoid Pop-ups - Even user prompted pop-ups are annoying at the best of times, so try to avoid them at all costs. If by clicking a link a new window will open, inform the user by including a message in the “title” parameter of the anchor tag. For example:

  <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk" title="Link to Amazon UK (opens in a new window)"
        target="_blank">Amazon UK</a>

• Avoid auto-refresh - Another misused feature. Do not create periodically auto-refreshing pages without alerting the user and without a means to stop the auto-refresh.

Tags: User experience