6 Essential UX/UI Tips for Businesses

If you’re running a business or you’re working for a business website/app, it’s important you know how to optimize the UX/UI design of the business’ website or app.

Design is as important as marketing, product quality or customer service. A great design will bring long-term benefits for the business and, conversely, a poor design can be costly for the business. This also explains why big digital businesses such as Facebook and Amazon upgrades (and keeps upgrading) their design over time. It’s worth the investment!

To further optimize your online business, learn the following essential UX/UI tips:

1) Consider the structure, too

Design is not just all about the eyes – at least in UX/UI design. You need to consider the structure of your website, too.

A good structure is easy to navigate and easy-to-use. If your customer cannot find the Cart button right away when shopping at your online store, he/she may be annoyed and discouraged to make the purchase – hence, you lose the sale!

Be sure that your buttons and pages work, too. If you’re “Buy” button doesn’t work, this will also discourage your customer from making the purchase.

The structure is very important because it is essentially the flow of your website or app.

2) Be sure to have the essential pages

These are the basic pages every business website – well, every website – should have:

About Us – Your visitors would like to know whom they are dealing with, and they can find it on your “About Us”.

Your “About Us” is a perfect opportunity to showcase your business – who you are or your team, what do you do, what is your business’ mission and vision, etc.

Your “About Us” does not need to be dull, though. Make it as interesting as you wish!

Contact – Your visitors may contact you for certain reason, so it’s important you let them know that they can reach you – by having a Contact page!

A Contact page normally consists of a contact form. But if you can’t make a contact form, listing out your business email or number is a good alternative. Nevertheless, have a Contact form because that tells your visitors that they can reach you.

FAQ – If your customers have questions, maybe your FAQ can answer them – and it will be very practical because they don’t have to wait for your response.

Of course, your FAQ does not need to answer all questions (because you can’t predict every question!) However, it should answer common questions or questions you think will be asked by your customers.

If you noticed that one question is always being asked all the time and your fingers are getting tired of answering back to it, it’s worthy to be part of your FAQ.

3) Color is marketing, too!

Choose a color that will resonate with your brand, so don’t just pick any color. Also, learn how to integrate that color on your website or app.

Choosing a color for your marketing typically depends on learning color psychology. According to this theory, every color correspond to a certain meaning – such as green for nature or red for love. This explains why environmental websites are green and some food companies like Coca-Cola use red.

To learn more, please read How to Apply Color Psychology in UI Design.

4) Your website should be responsive

When we create a website, and created a very beautiful one, we tend to get wowed at our design. “Wow, it looks great… on my laptop!”

However, don’t forget about our little gadgets – tablets and, especially, mobile phones.

If your design doesn’t fit into smaller screens, you are going to lose a lot of opportunities – especially since many people are now using tablets and mobile phones. Even if they use laptops or desktop computers, the time they encountered your website was probably through a tablet or mobile phone.

To maximize your website, make it responsive to fit all types of screens.

5) Chatbots are great!

Chatbots are not necessarily essential (that’s why you have your Contact page there). However, having a chatbot may boost your encounter with your visitors because they will be more encouraged to contact you if they see a chatbot on your website.

6) Don’t just reinvent the wheel

Since designers are artists, and artists are creatives who like to reinvent the wheel, we tend to reinvent the wheel to explore new ideas and make experiments out of them.

While there’s nothing wrong with that, your approach should also be based on your results – how does your design work for your visitors? It is possible that you like your design so much, but your visitors don’t.

One way to be sure you won’t lose track is by not totally deviating from the standards.

The word “standards” might sound boring, but usability-wise, it is great because users are already acquainted by it. If you try to deviate to these standards, your users will find it out to navigate your website, adding a cognitive load on their part.

Conclusion

A great design can boil down to how you implement the essential UX/UI factors. And in business, it could mean increased sales and profit!

Either way, don’t overlook your design. It’s worth the investment in the long run!