Image Source: Pexels
The following is a guest post by Kyriaki Raouna from LearnWorlds.
Many components make up a successful business. Generating enough profits that can help your company withstand the weather and grow in due course is the priority.
To do this, however, much effort needs to go into building a strong online presence and ensuring that you make it easy for your target audience to find you, connect and interact with you. You can do this by building a website that has a powerful design.
Stanford’s Web Credibility researchhas found that about 75 percent of people make assumptions about a business, its products, and services based on the look of the website.
And this is where the user interface (UI) comes in.
A carefully designed website that has an attractive user interface has the power to transform users into paying customers. And, it can do so much more for a landing page.
This article shares a few handful tips that can help you build a landing page that ticks off important UI checkpoints.
1. Create powerful call-to-actions
A landing page is the first page your site visitors land on, and its purpose is to encourage users to take action. There you will need to place call-to-actions that will help site visitors carry out a specific task like buying your product or service.
For a strong CTA that leads users to conversion, you need to come up with a text or phrase (no more than 3 words) that’s simple and easy to understand.
Image Source: Moosend
In this example, the School of Calisthenics uses both color and text to embellish their CTAs making these action points stand out. Both ‘Login’ CTAs have vibrant colors that show users where they need to click if they want to contact the school and become members.
2. Show authority and trust
Building authority and trust can go a long way to convincing a site visitor to invest in your product or service. Social proof can help you get you one step closer to making a sale, and testimonials or reviews from existing customers can show users that your company is reliable and committed to delivering excellent service.
Image Source: Breather
On top of testimonials though, you can also add the logos of companies that you have worked with, any customers, partners, or websites that you got a mention on. This is a pretty common but powerful tactic used by many successful companies like Unbounce and HubSpot.
Image Source: Eachnight
Image Source: HubSpot
3. Ensure web security
Every website needs to have an HTTPS certificate. This is a protocol that can ensure the safety of your company and your clients when interacting or using your site, especially for e-commerce purposes.
A complement to the factor of trust I mentioned earlier, is ensuring that your website is secure and that everything that your browser sends and receives from the web is encrypted – protected by third parties who may be performing malicious activities on your site.
Running an HTTPS is crucial if you are working on an interface that requests any type of sensitive information from your users. It also protects you from any penalties or lawsuits if any data privacy concerns arise.
Image Source: Ahrefs
You can tell a website is encrypted when it uses HTTP in front of the website address or shows a lock next to it just like the Ahrefs example shows.
4. Use professional images
Don’t take visual content for granted. Images have the power to create a certain aesthetic and when carefully chosen, they can prompt users to take appropriate action.
Image Source: Convert.com
Prefer to choose attractive and professional images that create the emotions you want to bring out to users. Stock photos can work but you also want to come up with your behind-the-scenes photos that can give your site visitors a thorough insight into who you are and what you do for them.
5. Add illustrations
Illustrations are so enjoyable to watch – especially when there is some motion involved, and they can give your website a touch of real creativity. Illustrations work in favor of the design, enhancing the usability, emotional and visual appeal of the interface.
[Text Wrapping Break]Even something as simple as a picture of a hand holding a mobile phone (see ReplyBuy’s example) can offer a unique aesthetic spin and direct the user’s attention to the CTAs, and reinforce the message you want to give out.
Image Source:ReplyBuy
Airbnb also uses illustrations to take the user interface to a new level, allowing the imagination of the users to run wild or to places they have never been, but would certainly want to travel to.
Image Source: Airbnb
6. Create eye-catching headings
Your landing page’s content should always say users what they can get from your landing page. Besides, they are visiting your site for a reason – either to find more about your company, reach out to you, browse or buy your products.
Help them out by creating eye-catching headlines that can guide their way throughout your page just as effortlessly and give them the right guidelines as to what they need to do next.
Image Source: Visme
English Buzz goes straight to the point here and lets people know what the company can do for them right away. So if you were hoping to join a course to learn the English language, you will instantly know you are in the right place.
The same goes with Intercom as it boldly states what its product can do for the user and the benefits that come with it upon its purchase.
Image Source: Intercom
7. Choose the right fonts and colors
When designing your landing page, you need to think about typography and color. Consider how color psychology works, and choose a font that helps you get the right message across, and matches the personality of your brand.
Your color palette may include up to 3 or 5 colors that look good together, even that means they are made up of a bright, colorful, or high-contrasting combination of colors.
Image Source: GiftRocket
Make sure both fonts and colors work in favor of your company’s logo, your industry, and what you do as a business. This should help build unity and consistency and avoid confusing users on their quest of deciding what they want to do on your page.
8. Make it accessible on mobile devices
More and more people are using their mobile devices to check out a business or search for a product. This presents the need to make sure that your landing page is easily accessible on smartphones and tablets, having their CTAs and contact buttons clearly visible.
A page that is difficult to navigate or takes too long to load on mobile devices can push potential customers away. Even worse, it may prevent them from engaging with you at all in the future.
Image Source: SEJ
Trello, Drift, and Hulu are all prominent examples for creating a landing page that is attractive and accessible on mobile.
If you aren’t sure how mobile-friendly your website is, you can try ThinkWithGoogle’s service to find out here.
9. Ask for as little information as you can
Every landing page comes with an opt-in form, a sign-up field, or a call-to-action that asks users to give their contact details like name and email address. If the user wants to engage with you in a more direct way, or learn more about your company and keep hearing from you through an email newsletter, make it as easy as possible for them to do so.
Image Source: Shopify
Take it from Shopify which makes it super easy for users to sign up and open up their online store, asking them only to provide their email address.
10. Use videos
The use of video improves interactivity and has the power to increase the level of engagement on your site. When it’s used on a landing page it can help users get most of the important information out of the page just as quickly and of course, encourage them to buy.
Whether it’s a welcoming video, an explainer video, a product tutorial, it can help build brand awareness, and keep users for a longer time on your site which can have some pretty amazing results.
Image Source: LearnWorlds
If you are choosing to use video, make sure you pick the best presentation format and video player. For example, would it be just one video, a series of videos, a video grid, portal, or slider? In the end, it all comes down to how well each fits with the rest of your content.
Last Tips
With UI design, less is more. This means that whichever way you choose to present your content on your landing page, you need to keep it simple. Too much of everything – fonts, text, colors, photos, won’t give it the balance your page needs and will most likely look strange and difficult to interact with.
All these elements need to be relevant but also complete each other to help you get the key message across. If you want your landing page to convert visitors into customers, there needs to be a purposeful blend of the elements mentioned above.
Don’t forget, that the goal in any UI design is to build a user interface that makes it easy, efficient, and fun so that it makes the page as user-friendly as possible.
Ready to create a UI powerful landing page?
When designing your landing page, your goal is to create an interface that works for the benefit of the user and doesn’t interfere with whatever they are doing on the page.
A misplaced CTA, a wrong choice of font that makes the text hard to read, or a long drop-down list of options on the main set menu can easily distract the user from getting what they need out from a page or completing the actions you want them to take.
Just like Joe Sparano says ‘Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.’
To achieve this ‘invisible UI’ make everything count towards creating an exceptional design that your audience deserves. Good luck!
Kyriaki Raouna is a Content Creator for LearnWorlds, writing about marketing and e-learning, helping course creators on their journey to create, market, and sell their online courses. Equipped with a degree in Career Guidance, she has a strong background in education management and career success. In her free time, she gets crafty and musical.
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