User experience (UX) is a way to describe the means by which a website or piece of software is made to be easy and intuitive for average people to use. The experience of the user should ideally be that they found what they wanted with as little hassle as possible.

This is often a lot easier said than done, and different audiences will vary in how much attention needs to be paid to UX. For example, an audience of young adults who are tech savvy will be able to navigate a poor user interface better than someone who is elderly and has little prior experience.

While it can be difficult to make optimal, UX is crucial to retaining customers and driving business. Let’s take a look at the major ways you can create a better user experience.

Make it look good

You’ve no doubt seen websites that look extremely primitive and are downright ugly. Not only are the images, graphics and fonts a mess but there is not intuitive website layout for people to navigate.

Having a mix of flashy GIFs and other multimedia content is considered gimmicky and actually slows down the speed of your website. The best modern website had minimalistic designs while still featuring the businesses’ branding prominently.

In fact, making sure you website loads quickly is another important part of UX, so don’t overload you website with high pixel density images and cumbersome graphics.

A good website will follow a strict colour palette and won’t diverge from this without good reason. The colour scheme usually follows the primary colours found in your businesses’ logo.

Remember, this is about experience and creating a visually appealing website is part of what leaves a good impression and retains people on the website.

Have an intuitive sitemap

The sitemap is simply the blueprint of your website, showing the chain of connections between different hyperlinks. It goes without saying that having a cleverly designed sitemap is essential for creating an ideal user experience.

Above all, people need to be able to find what they’re looking for in as few clicks as possible. The more menus and pages that a user has to navigate, the more burned out they will feel with your site.

It would be a disaster if you were losing potential sales because users were getting frustrated with your website’s layout. You want people to buy your products and services, so making that as easy for them as possible makes a lot of sense.