Understanding how users move through your website, the pages they visit, the information they pause to read, and the content they skip past, can all be vital for understanding the user flow, and consequently, improving the user experience. Your website users want to find the right information, product or service that they need, as soon as possible, and it’s essential that your website helps them achieve this outcome, with as few disruptions as possible. But what are the most common issues that disrupt the user flow? And how can you avoid these? Well, here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester, we are Manchester’s leading web design experts, and we provide high quality, effective, web design solutions for a range of local companies and businesses across Manchester, and the surrounding area. This includes Blackburn and Stockport. As a result, we have produced this guide to everything you should know about preventing barriers to the user flow.
What is the user flow?
The user flow is the overall traffic pattern of your users, including the website pages they visit, how they access each page (navigation bar or search bar) and how this related to increasing sales, sign ups or bookings. Planning to improve the user flow, and providing the right information and visual content, in the right places, is essential.
What are the most common issues that disrupt the user flow?
So, what are the different barriers, disruptions and obstacles that your users face when moving through your website, towards the end goal? Well, there are several that frequently occur across a range of websites, of varying sizes. These include:
- Obstructive website pop-ups
- Slow loading visual content
- Complicated checkout forms
Obstructive website pop-ups
While your website users will probably tolerate some pop-ups, especially those like cookie notifications and permission popups, other website popups can be disruptive. These include marketing ads, and full page popups with no clear way to close the popups. This disruption can cause a negative browsing experience for your potential customers, which can not only lead to them leaving your website and heading to a competitor, but it can sour their opinion of your company in the long run too. As a result, your website popups should always aim to be:
- useful for the potential customer or client
- purposeful
- easy to close
Slow loading visual content
When your website users are browsing your website, they expect your content to load very quickly. In fact, if your page doesn’t load within just 2 seconds, you could risk your potential customers getting bored and leaving to another website. This slow loading content is usually visual,a s these files tend to be larger. As a result you should be sure to always optimize images for quick loading, and compress them to reduce file size, but not quality.
Complicated checkout forms
The final stage of any potential customers journey is the checkout form. And with up to 80% of people abandoning their cart at this point, it is imperative that you ensure this checkout form is easy to use and easy to understand. Using features like auto-fill can be very helpful.
For more information about effective web design, get in touch with the experts today, here at Pumpkin Web Design Manchester. We are Manchester’s leading web design experts.