Our Website Design Company Creates Web Experiences Where Users Take Action
Let’s visit IKEA Gone Wrong.
IKEA Gone Wrong is a fictional store, where everything that makes IKEA successful has been ignored.
When you arrive at IKEA Gone Wrong, your first impression is this: a giant warehouse space filled with 30-foot shelves of boxed inventory. Take your time browsing discounted floor samples in the hallway near the bathrooms. Some of the most damaged items are a steal!
Would you stay for more? Would you order the meatballs? Probably not. And you can imagine why.
At IKEA Gone Wrong, the classic IKEA experience is completely backwards. The real IKEA doesn’t show you the warehouse portion of the store until after you’ve walked through a few hundred square feet of beautifully staged inventory for each part of your home.
At an actual IKEA, you only encounter the warehouse after you’ve already browsed, had an affordable meal, made up your mind, and are ready to haul your furniture home. As for the discounted items, they’re only available at the end of your journey. You’ve already committed to spending a certain amount of money, so why not spend a little more and save while you’re at it? And why not treat yourself to an ice cream or a box of cookies on the way out the door?
Why does IKEA get it so right? They understand the value of user experience.
What Is User Experience?
Although IKEA is overwhelmingly full of options and maze-like aisles, hundreds of millions of visitors successfully find their way through the store to the checkout line where they collectively spend tens of billions of dollars a year. IKEA is a masterclass in creating an experience for consumers by providing optimal conditions for a sale.
Your website (which is essentially your business translated to a digital space) must also take the consumer’s experience into account for leads and conversions. When a visitor clicks on your website, they should feel that it is firing on all cylinders to provide every opportunity for what they want. This is known as user experience, or UX.
Your site should support the best user experience possible, whether you’re designing a website for ecommerce or a place to capture leads. Our website design services team recommends strong UX principles in these key areas:
- Information: Your website should guide visitors to the information they need in a logical order. Begin by creating a sitemap that moves users from general to more specific information.
- Navigation: Users should know where to go on your website to get the information they require. Start by considering the clarity of your menus and navigation bars.
- Interaction: Ensure your website’s pages are all in working order and errors don’t prevent users from viewing pages. Provide opportunities for users to engage through clickable buttons, tools, and forms, but ensure these strategies don’t prevent them from getting where they want to go.
- Consistency: Your website’s design should remain consistent throughout each page in your sitemap, with similar branding, design elements, and layout. Attention-getting anomalies are useful, but they should feel intentional, not seem like mistakes.
- Accessibility: Your site should be desktop and mobile friendly and abide by the core requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) for web design, so your website presents information that all can experience.
- Security: Choose an excellent hosting provider to prevent website downtime, malware, data breaches, and ensure a secure data exchange between users and your site.
It all comes down to this: a good website experience allows a user to take key actions without encountering failure. Our custom website design company puts it this way: whether a user is just learning about your brand or wanting to make a purchase, nothing should get in their way of fulfilling their mission.
UX Gets Real Results
UX matters. According to Adobe:
- 90% of users leave a website if it doesn’t perform well.
- Every dollar invested in UX yields an average return of $1,000.
- Thoughtful, effective user experience can raise conversion rates by 400%.
Even one UX error could cause a user to bounce from your site, potentially causing you to lose out on a lead or conversion.
Think of a website you love visiting, but let it completely fail in one area, such as navigation, information, security, accessibility, or aesthetics:
- Wikipedia, but you can’t view it on mobile.
- eBay, but it’s hard to find the search bar.
- Reddit, but individual comments take more than 15 seconds to load.
- LinkedIn, but you can’t view profiles until you fill out a pop-up form.
The experience you once loved is now ruined because of bad UX. But it doesn’t have to be this way. You can work with a lead-generation or ecommerce website design company to get a professional website that helps you reach the goals you’ve set for your business.
Work With Our Custom Website Design Company
All our marketing services take user experience into account. In fact, we view it as a non-negotiable when creating multi-channel digital marketing strategies for our clients. Whether we’re creating paid media ads, social media ads, writing articles for your blog, or designing an entire website, we know that nothing less than an excellent experience will do for your customers.
Contact iFocus Marketing today to learn more about our website design services. During a discovery call, we’ll talk to you about your goals and how we could help. If you’re ready to move forward with a new website, we’ll perform a digital audit of your web presence, examine how your site currently performs, and create an action plan so you can get every advantage from our web development team.
Peter Mishler, senior digital copywriter at iFocus Marketing, is dedicated to using language to help clients find their audiences. He is the author of two books: a Kathryn A. Morton Prize-winning collection of poetry, from Sarabande Books (2018) and a book of reflections for public school teachers from Andrews McMeel Publishing (2021). His poetry has appeared in many national publications, including The Paris Review, and he is a contributing editor for Literary Hub. New to marketing, Peter taught English for 15 years.
