Once you went through the process of buying a domain, hosting and establishing your niche, the next step is to design your websites. This is a very important step that can make or break your website business. Most of the websites fail due to poor design or content quality, which is why you have to do a bit of research in order to come up with the right strategy for catching peoples attention.
Nowadays, there are many different design options for any website no matter if you design it yourself, or put a pre-made theme. However, design optimization is necessary in order to create successful website business no matter which niche you are getting into.
In this article, we will go through some of the best design tips to use in order to improve user interaction.
- Optimize for Speed
Website performance is directly connected to the website design. This means loading times will be much slower if you have a larger content website to load. Your website must be optimized for speed just because nobody likes to wait for website to load. In fact, 25% of users will abandon website if it does not load within four seconds and 46% will not return to poor performing website.
This shows the importance of the problem. Even though website speed is affected by many things, one of them is the website design. Try not to add many widgets, icons, sliders or large media files that will only weight down your website and keep a minimalistic design. If you do this your website will start running fast than a horse in the Breeders Cup betting odds.
- Mobile Friendly
Creating a mobile-friendly website must be one of your first priorities. The majority of users today will come through mobile or a tablet device which means your website must be responsive to fit any screen. Most of the websites that have poor responsiveness are abandoned by users and they are less likely to return.
- Fewer Options
This is a very interesting topic of conversation just because the method is highly effective. It is mentioned in Hicks Law, which states that the more choices an individual has, the longer it will take to make a decision. How to translate this into website language?
Well for starters you can reduce the number of menu items offering only few topics, focus on call to action, stick to one goal per page and etc. Basically, this will improve user interaction by a huge margin and avoid confusion and complication.
- Avoid Visual Complexity
Users do not appreciate visually complicated websites that are hard to navigate through. A recent study by Google shows that the more complicated design website has, the less likely to be perceived by visitors as beautiful. You do not need all the widgets, sidebars, carousels, icons that compromise your website performance as well as your visual esthetics. Keep a minimalistic design few 1-2 colors and allow readers to access the content easily.
- Go for Scrolling Instead of Clicking
Avoiding controls can improve user interaction with content, and people prefer scrolling down instead of clicking. You can just put everything on a very long page, which has a lazy load in order not to affect website performance.
A recent study shows that once they tested this method, the conversions went up by 30%.
- Direct Attention With Creative Visuals
If you get a heat map to highlight peoples attention while they are on your website you will be amazed at what catches their attention. Your job is to funnel user attention and direct it where you want to be.
Yes, you can do that! There are many methods where you can use visual cues to direct user attention to particular segment of your website.
Image Source: RightBrain.no
You can use this to focus users on sharing options or important content news that will improve user interaction with your website.
These are some of the design tips to improve user interaction. There are many different options you can use, but you must find the right way to do it for your target audience.