While this should go without saying, your website has a huge impact on your sales and the number of clients you can, and will, close. How your website looks and performs will determine how the public perceives you and your business and can decide how successful a new marketing campaign can do post-implementation, so design is an essential part of any marketing campaign and a necessity to compete in a media driven world.

Furthermore, it will serve to develop your authority as a trusted provider. Whether you actually sell your products and services online or not, your website exists to initiate and catalyze visitor conversion. This might take the form of an actual checkout, the filling out of a subscription form or a free quote. In any case, conversions are taking place on your site.

If you’re considering a redesign, this blog should supply you with some of the considerations necessary to making the decisions that will facilitate an overhaul while positively impacting your overall profitability.

The usability and user experience (UX design) both affect the conversion rate of your site and will directly have an impact on revenue generated. Neither hinges completely on specific details like color theory or font selection as much as it does aspects like cross-browser and mobile compatibility, content management systems, site architecture and so forth. The scope of the UX is directed at affecting “all aspects of the user’s interaction with the product: how it is perceived, learned, and used” (Norman).

UX design begins by learning about a business, doing market research to understand its users and understanding how a service can be developed that would affect them in a meaningful way. Thus UX design has become a critical turning point in defining business strategy and provides a baseline for said decisions, but a UX driven process doesn’t end at implementation. Its focus extends into ongoing testing and continued development down the road. The easier potential clients find it to connect to you, the more likely they are to turn to you for their needs.

Moving forward, below are simple tips to better usability and UX.

1. This point should be the most intuitive. Critical elements; especially, those that aid navigation, should be emphasized. The site’s capabilities and limitations should be easy to discern. High contrast between text and any background used should increase legibility. That typically means using dark text against a light background.

2. While being unique and standing apart from the crowd is normally considered good, sometimes you have to follow conventional wisdom and do what everyone else is doing. Usage patterns, behavior developed from extended web use, expect that links be blue. It expects for navigation to be straightforward. Users should be able to find information quickly and easily despite the length of a document. This can be utilized with search functions, indexes, table of contents and so forth.

As a sidebar, Jakob Nielsen performed a usability study on search boxes. While this might not sound fascinating, it found that the average search box length is 18-characters wide, and that 27% of queries were too long for it. Extending it to 27-characters would accommodate 90% of queries.

3. White space, or negative space, improves comprehension and builds hierarchy between elements on a page. As information gets densely packed into a document, it can become difficult to comprehend and/or unreadable. What is a cipher eventually leads to abandonment. Employ margins, padding, scale and spacing. When repeatedly and effectively utilized, it helps develop an identity and rapport between you and your user.

4. Usability testing and diminishing marginal return tie in together on this point. A second study by Nielsen found that five test subjects would reveal around 85% of all problems with a website. It would take an additional ten testers to reveal the remaining quirks. In the smaller group studies, it was found that the first one or two users discovered the larger problems. The other testers would find smaller ones and confirm what the first one or two had already found. While the biggest delta is going from zero to one tester, any testing is better than no testing.

Michael Smythe, winner of the Designers Institute of New Zealand Outstanding Achievement Award, gives this definition for design, “Design is an integrative process that seeks resolution -not compromise- through cross-disciplinary teamwork. Design is intentional. Success by design simply means prospering on purpose.” In the long-run, effective design is an investment that increases the bottom line by capturing new market share and bolstering customer retention.

If you have any questions as to how Bravo Design, Inc. might contribute to your growing business, please visit us at http://www.bravodesigninc.com/contact/ or leave a comment on this page, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

1. Donald Norman: Invisible Computer.
2. Jakob Nielsen & Hoa Loranger: Prioritizing Web Usability.
3. Jakob Nielsen: Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users.