Creating a good user experience for your audience is one of the more important aspects that publishers should focus on.
Yes, creating quality content, having a well planned SEO strategy or increasing your subscribers is crucial if you want to grow your business. But if your site is not optimized and doesn’t allow for a fluid navigation, it can be detrimental to your business. In fact, user experience has a direct correlation to the results of your business, including your revenue.
But let’s backtrack for a moment and ask, what exactly is user experience?
User experience or UX can be defined as the combination of all the aspects that users experience and feel when interacting with a company and its products. In the world of digital publishing, it refers to the impression that users have when interacting with publishers, including their website, services, content, etc.
How does the user experience impact publishers?
As businesses, one of the goals that publishers have is to increase revenue. But how does this relate to the user experience? A lot, actually.
Having a poor UX can negatively affect your results, including your revenue and profit. That’s why providing great user experience to your audience can become a crucial aspect to invest in if you want to grow your business and take it to the next level.
In fact, UX design has become a speciality that it’s gaining importance in digital businesses.
According to Adobe, UX designers are those who “create conditions that are more likely to lead to a positive impression”. Their goal is to develop a product that fulfills certain characteristics.
But what makes a user experience design good? It needs to have a function, be desirable, useful, credible, accessible and provide value. That’s why there are a lot of disciplines that merge in order to build an optimal UX, including marketing, engineering or graphic and interface design.
What does data say?
Although having a good user experience seems like common sense, there is data that backs this up.
In a research done by experience management institute Qualtrics XM, the results show that user experience can indeed impact revenue. When users use less effort in completing an online task, it can lead to an increase in their buying spend by 23%. Also, when increasing user satisfaction, their spending increases up to 37%.
This is because user satisfaction has an emotional component and it’s directly tied to the effort required to do a task and its success. Therefore, a less demanding task will have a more positive impact on the user, and will increase their satisfaction.
This also varies depending on the industry. The retail and streaming has a better user digital experience, with up to 6% of revenue lost due to poor digital experience.
On the other hand, the automotive, health and travel industry suffer from big revenue losses -in the case of the first one, it even reaches a staggering 17,93% of expected lost revenue.
4 tips to improve your digital user experience
Now that we know that having a good UX can be incredibly beneficial to your business, what can you do to improve it?
Here are some tips to provide a optimal experience and increase user satisfaction:
1. Optimize for mobile
We live in an age where smartphones are used for everything, from watching movies and series, to managing your bank account. That’s why optimizing your site for mobile devices is crucial so your audience can access your site and interact with it.
But do not only think of how your site looks on the mobile web. Creating a well designed app can make a positive impact in your audience as well and will be also beneficial for other areas of your business. For instance, you can leverage the registered users to collect first-party data.
2. Make the design inclusive
Making the UX design inclusive for people who have disabilities means that more people will get to access and enjoy your site. This is a good opportunity to increase traffic and generate leads, but it’s also important to also provide the same service for the rest of your products. Which leads to the next point.
3. Be consistent
Your UX design must be consistent in all aspects of your brand as a publisher. This means that users need to have a similar user experience when they interact with you via different channels, like when they’re checking a newsletter via their phone or via their PC.
Having very different UX for each device can be really jarring, that’s why having consistency in the way you create these experiences is really important to increase user satisfaction.
4. Keep it simple
Simplicity and efficiency should be key when creating a good user experience. There’s no need to build a UX design from scratch. There are a lot of different templates available online that will make you save time and be more efficient. These templates will also allow you to optimize and structure your site in an easier way, and it will let you invest time and resources in other facets of your business.
UX is all about the users, about how they view and interact with us. And as publishers, we know that our audience comes first. That’s why creating and maintaining a great experience for our readers is crucial and it’s something to always keep in mind.
What is a good user experience design?
A good UX design is the one that is desirable, has a function, is credible, accessible, easy to find and use and can provide value to the users.
What can publishers do to improve their user experience?
There are several ways a publisher can provide a great UX. They can optimize their site for mobile and use simple templates. They also need to be consistent in their messages and experiences and make the design inclusive for all people.