This interview was conducted by Clark Buckner from TechnologyAdvice.com (which provides coverage content on innovative training games and much more). Be sure to check out their Tech Conference Calendar.
Trymata Co-Founder Ritvij Gautam shared 7 tips for a successful website with TechnologyAdvice host Clark Buckner.
In 2014, TryMyUI was acquired by Survey Analytics, a Seattle-based software company that offers multi-platform market research solutions in over 30 industries. TryMyUI provides usability testing services that enable clients to improve their website usability by seeing their user interface (UI) tested by real people in real time, providing them with a creative narrative of information to guide data-driven decisions.
Your UI is critical to creating a good impression of your brand among your website’s visitors; plus, delivering the right message in an appealing way leads to more conversions into paying users.
With that said, Gautam described these 7 useful and effective tips for improving a website:
1. Build a clear navigation menu.
When people use the web, they typically want to accomplish a task or a series of tasks. However, today’s users tend to be impatient. They’re used to instantaneous information and gratification.
Ideally, a website is built to help an end user find what they’re looking for as quickly as possible. However, this is often overlooked because of biases that arise when building a website from a creator-user perspective. A final product that obfuscates your navigational layout, or doesn’t maximize navigational clarity, is not a representation of good UI.
2. Display a prominent search box.
Users want quick access to information. Placing a search box on your site will provide that easy access. However, just having a search box is not enough. A website designer needs to functionally design it such that:
- It’s easy to find on the page.
- It’s highly visible.
- It’s easily recognizable.
- It’s easy to use.
3. Disable pop-up ads, music, audio on load, and similar distractions.
When you enable pop-up ads, music, and the like, people will view it as a revenue generation strategy. But your product is your main revenue generator. The rest is secondary. Make sure that your site is all about your product. You want your product to be the star of your business, so make it the star of your website.
4. Know your users.
Obviously, a website selling toys won’t target 60-year-old men. However, the difference between users and non-users is frequently much more subtle. Consequently, designers need to hone in on that difference and discover exactly who their users are. Users also have particular goals when visiting a site – as a designer, you need to work out what those goals are and ensure that they are achievable on your site.
Ultimately, it’s about putting your finger on that target user. Once your target user is discovered, the path towards the design that works best for them becomes much clearer.
TryMyUI offers highly specialized demographic curation among our features to help clients find their target users, allowing them to tap into their user’s goals and devise a user-centric design. Says Gautam, “A more suitable term for this would actually be ‘target user-centric’ design: theoretically, everyone could be a user of your website, but you only want your target users. These are the people you’re selling to and the people who will pay money for what you’re giving them.”
At TryMyUI, it’s our business to help you know your user. In fact, it’s about more than just knowing your user – you’ll see and experience what your user sees and experiences in real time – you practically get to become your user.
5. Test your users.
Now, supposing you’ve already built and launched a site. You’ve conducted research on your users, and you believe you’ve built a site they would like. Once again, though, this brings us to the paradox of being the creator-user. You need user testing to be done in a way that gives you unbiased and genuine answers coming from real experience.
This is where TryMyUI comes in with these solutions:
- Find your target user: TryMyUI finds exactly who your target users are.
- Watch user behavior: TryMyUI lets you watch users navigate your website and vocalize their responses and thought processes as they happen.
By using TryMyUI, you’ll get to see how your target user would experience your website in a candid user situation. Commonly, user testing is either done in-house by a product’s (biased) creator or by someone that’s paid to do so and may sit across the table from a developer while testing the site. These scenarios do not create a candid user situation. TryMyUI taps into that candid experience in a controlled environment, allowing companies to see real-life users try out their website in the most genuine user situation of all – on his or her own laptop, sitting in their own room at home.
6. Make UI (user interface) relevant to UX (user experience).
Once TryMyUI has all the data, we provide a 20-minute video that identifies the problems within your UI. Ten tests are ideally recommended for the best results, equating to 200 minutes of video. With bulk raw data made available to you, you’re able to go over it, find what’s relevant, and pay attention to patterns.
On a side note, TryMyUI partnered with the The UX Department, a UX consulting firm, to offer the Expert Bundle, a ten-test bundle for $800 which works by sending the tests to a UX expert who will look at your data and generate a report consisting of condensed, impactful information and actionable insights.
7. Lastly – Keep it simple.
Users are humans, and you don’t want your UI to have a steep learning curve. You just want your UI to be simple and accessible. Keep it simple. The user didn’t create your product, so they may have little idea as to how it works. By creating a simple and usable UI, you’ll have a much better chance at making the best first impression.