By providing an engaging user experience, you are more likely to drive conversion and ensure that your website and brand are memorable in the long run. Here are ways to ensure that your corporate website provides a memorable and intuitive user experience for your users online.

Thorough Brand Immersion

Before you can dive-in to creating an effective user experience, you need to understand what your user is looking for. Why are they coming to your website, and how can you guide and simplify their experience online?

A great starting point for user experience research is hosting a focus group or brand immersion session, either with a specific sample group of consumers, or internally with key stakeholders. These interview-style group sessions are used to gain a better understanding on a certain brand-related topic. Groups are ideally small but diverse and feature people who will respond differently to stimuli. Some may say that chatbots on a website are helpful in answering questions, while others say that it is too obnoxious. The purpose of a focus group is to generate a sample of opinions that represent the thoughts of the entire population of your target audience.

Following the brand immersion phase, creating user personas is an effective way to establish your audience online. Buyer personas can be simple, but they provide the foundation for developing your unique user journeys in order to create an effective experience online.

Simplified Path to Purchase

After you have an accurate understanding of your user personas, the next step is to map each of their unique journeys on your website. What is their starting point? Where will they navigate to next? It is likely that you may end up with multiple user journeys for the multiple personas you create. Be as thorough as possible throughout this process and understand how your website can accommodate for each user in order to develop a purposeful path to purchase.

Your user journeys are based on your site architecture, or site map. Your site map shows exactly where pages live and how people can navigate from page to page. By evaluating your current site map, you can identify opportunities to add or remove pages that make it easier for your users to find the content they are looking for faster and more efficiently.

A Lasting Impression

When building a new website, there is often a huge focus on the initial landing page experience. Your goal is to engage your users quickly and effectively in order to keep them on your website to explore other pages. While creating a visually-stunning page is important, here are ways to tell a clear and purposeful brand story online:

1. Your main call-to-action (CTA) should be easily visible with clear and concise messaging.

2. Push a single, focused, and strategic message. Make sure the user understands where they are and what they can learn from your website.

3. Show off your product or service and avoid being vague or adding fluff. Flashy copywriting can sometimes distract from the overall objectives of the website.

4. Feature authentic testimonials to establish credibility and authenticity.

Gather, Test, and Evolve

After conducting thorough brand immersion, streamlining the path to conversion, and optimizing your landing page experience, the user experience, it is essential to test your results and refine accordingly.

The most important thing to remember with user experience optimization is that it is an ongoing process. As your brand continues to grow and change, so should your website, which means conducting even more user research, A/B testing, and paying attention to the analytics.

A/B testing refers to the process of gathering feedback and insights on different versions or alternatives. For example, one version of your website may feature big bold copy on the homepage hero, while another version may surface a compelling image on the homepage hero. A/B testing can help us understand which of the two visuals perform better when it comes to traffic, engagement, and conversion.

Analytics also provides you with a better understanding of your user experience. After your website has launched, it is helpful to compile reports that compare your projected user journeys with the actual ones. Are your users able to find the content they are searching for? How long are they staying on each page of your website? Thorough analytics allow you to measure key metrics to assess user behavior and adjust the user experience accordingly. With proper research and a fundamental understanding of your users and their goals, you are more likely to create a web experience that is optimized to drive traffic, engagement, and conversion for your business.