Usability & User Experience. Happy customers buy more and are more receptive to your business.

Creating an environment where your existing and potential customers are feeling good about themselves and you as a business, means they are more likely to do business with you. The more usable, considered and well thought-out your website is, the more your customers will like you and the experience they have with you.

What is Usability and why is it important?

Why drive people to your website if isn't usable or encourages action? Usablity is about considering all needs and then building your solution from there. If a part of your website doesn't meet a customer or business need, it shouldn't be there. If a customer is unable to find the information they need, they will leave.

The effect
Applying consideration of usability and the user experience means that your website will present targeted information and functionality clearly (determined by both user and business goals), in an easily digestible format, with content that can be reachable in a minimum number of clicks and is in a tone/language that reflects your customers. In other words, it puts the customer first.

The cost of failure?
Ignoring the usability and experience of your website means that you are ignoring your customers and what they want from you as a business. It's like bad customer service in a restaurant, most of the time you leave and don't come back.

Think like a supermarket

Supermarket chains invest lots of money into the psychology of how we shop so that they can influence our decisions. The Retail industry in general invest millions in making sure we walk round a shop a certain way and are always trying to guide us, affecting our experience in that environment.

Put yourself in your customers shoes
The placement of items, their height, how they look are all considered so that we can be encouraged to interact (pick up, feel, read, absorb and then purchase). This translates perfectly to a website and how the user experiences your website. Eye tracking studies and usability research mean we know how people read and experience websites and how little time they give elements that are not relevant or are buried in text strangled by lack of space around them. Looking through someone else's eyes often highlights shortcomings and faults but more importantly helps us understand and remove the barriers on your website that prevent customers doing business with you.

Navigation

Navigation is a common problem with websites causing maximum frustration and negative experiences. Making assumptions about your users will probably lead to high bounce rates in your analytics results - each segmentation of your target audience needs communicating with.

Hold your customers attention
Navigation comes in many forms (not just the buttons at the top of page!) and helps guide people through your website. The different forms of navigation can retain the attention of your customers guiding them to relevant articles, supporting information and FAQs, product specs and case studies. Your potential customers are then being exposed further to your brand, digesting your vast knowledge of the subject matter, acknowledging your credibility and experiencing recent successes. You could even use video to deliver these messages, support you services and introduce key people in your business. See our online video service for more information.

Multiple routes to content
Having multiple routes to content on your website is important as you cannot assume that your customers will follow your basic navigation nad people will respond differently to different messages depending on where they site on your segmentation of your target audience.

How does Redhead employ these techniques?

Usability and User Experience are part of our approach to website design. We can help you understand why your current website might not be performing for a number of usability problems, or employ these consideration at the beginning of a new design project. This approach to website design is most effective at the very early stages of a project, helping to establish reason, purpose and the most effective direction.

Our background of business, design and technical skills allow us to approach each project from a variety of viewpoints which produce considered, purposeful and targeted solutions.

Take advantage of our unique approach

If you would like to discuss how our usablity and user experience approach could benefit your business, contact Redhead on 0845 554 0122 or email hello[at]redheadmedia.co.uk. We can arrange to visit you, talk through your needs & make some recommendations - you can also come to Redhead's offices in Haslemere and try some delicious biscuits - they're incredibly usable, the wrapper comes off and they're gone - 2 simple steps!