Table of Contents
In order to increase on-site engagement and conversion rates, companies are investing more money than ever before into the user experience of their websites. While a nice clean design can go a long way, it isn’t always enough. Here are five UX elements that will help your website perform better:
1.) Hover states
Hover states for your CTAs are crucial. Adding this effect will help make it clear that the button is clickable and creates an interactive vibe. One of our favorite design companies, Blind, does an excellent job of using hover states. They provide several examples on their home page.
2.) Fade-in elements
Most site users will bail on a website if the load time takes too long, making it a critical UX element to fine tune to reduce the bounce rate. Sometimes you don’t have a choice but to use elements that don’t load quickly (HubSpot CTAs, Modules using CSS styles, etc.). A great way to help the load time is to use fade-in elements. Make sure to keep fade-in time short as to not interrupt the flow of the user on the page. A great example of this is from MailChimp.
3.) Full-image CTAs
With mobile becoming the post popular way that users consume content, making sure that you are catering to mobile platforms is important for the overall user experience. There are many ways to accomplish this and a great one is using full images as CTAs and links, rather than solely a CTA button.
90 percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual. Visuals are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text. Here is an example of a fully clickable CTA:
4.) Smooth Scrolling
Anchor links move quickly and can sometimes be disorienting to the user.
To make up for this, use secondary navigation and smooth scrolling. The goal is to get the visitor to the destination content quickly and smoothly. To be successful, the page needs to move at a rate that brings the visitor where he or she wants to go quickly, but not so quickly that he or she doesn’t recognize the content being skipped over.
5.) Use Sticky Navigation
Having to scroll all the way to the top to interact with the menu after reading all of the content on your homepage can be annoying for the user. This is where sticky navigation comes in. When using sticky navigation, be sure that the menu follows the user down the page and that the header is minified so that it takes up less screen real-estate. This will allow for a smooth, distraction-free user experience for users wanting to move around your website.
Need a conversion rate optimization partner? Contact us at HONE Marketing for more information and a free CRO assessment.