The key to successful web design is meeting user expectations. The aesthetic appeal of your website is important, but money spent on a talented web designer will be wasted if the functionality and user-friendliness of the site isn’t up to scratch. A website that is slow, lacking in essential information or riddled with usability problems and glitches will do nothing but annoy the consumer and damage your brand.
Brands should be listening closely to user feedback when designing a website. However, until your site is live – how do you know the impact it will make on your target audience? Luckily, there is research being carried out on web design and the user experience all the time. Here are just 20 of the many useful stats and survey findings to help you design the perfect user-friendly website…
Loading speeds
An Econsultancy study has found that:
- 47% of people expect a web page to load in less than 2 seconds
- If images won’t load, 46% of people will try another device while 39% will give up. If images take too long to load, 44% will switch devices while 39% will give up and go elsewhere
Kissmetrics research has also revealed that:
- Even just a 1 second delay in loading can cause conversions to drop by 7%. An example of this impact is an e-commerce website making $100,000 a day, which could lose $2.5 million in sales a year due to a 1 second page loading delay
This demonstrates the importance of making your website lightning-fast, and finding a balance between amazing quality images and enormous file sizes that slow page loading right down.
Crucial information
Consumers expect to find certain information on your website, and they need to find it right away or patience will go out of the window. KoMarketing found that:
- 86% of site visitors look immediately for a page relating to a company’s products or services
- Around half of visitors to B2B websites want to see a products or services page before anything else
- 65% of visitors look for contact information first
- 52% of people expect to see an ‘about us’ page
Website organisation
Researchers at Visual Website Optimiser conducted a case study which revealed that:
- Organising a website properly boosted sales by 35.6%
- Cart clicks were increased by 34% simply by adding a navigational bar to the left of the page and removing a cluttered promotional bar from the right of the page
Mobile optimisation
Don’t think optimising your website for smartphones and tablets is that important? Research from SmartInsights suggests that brands who neglect mobile could miss out, as:
- 80% of consumers use smartphones to search the internet
Are there any other crucial factors web designers must be getting right in order to boost user experience? What feedback have you received from visitors to your website, and have you acted on it? Please feel free to share your thoughts.
