Giving your website great user flow
Making sure your website looks nice and performs well is important. But none of that will matter if you haven’t stopped to think about effective user flow.
Optimizely defines user flow as follows:
User flow is the path taken by a prototypical user on a website or app to complete a task. The user flow takes them from their entry point through a set of steps towards a successful outcome and final action, such as purchasing a product.
So you can have the flashiest website going. But if you haven’t taken the time to determine an effective user flow, all the glitz in the world won’t make up for the negative experience your audience is likely to have. And as we discussed previously, page experience is an important part of your marketing success in 2021.
And while positive user experience is vital, it’s also important to consider where you want your audience to wind up on your site.
There are the outcomes that users want from your site and the outcomes you want from your site. For example, if you’re running a digital advertising campaign that uses a landing page as the destination, there will be an action that you want your visitors to undertake.
Sometimes those actions and outcomes are the same, but not always. So an additional layer of your user flow planning is how your site’s contents and steps will convert your users’ preferred outcomes into your preferred outcomes.
This doesn’t necessarily mean manipulating your site users. Rather, it means ensuring your user flow very clearly and precisely communicates how your desired outcome meets your user’s identified needs.
After all, people are busy. And no one really wants to have to work very hard to get to the natural conclusion of a website. We want to be lea there, preferably in a way that makes us feel good about the path we’re taking.
If that all feels like a lot to think about, you should give us a call! These are the sorts of strategies that the team at Communicatto digs on developing.
Let us get your website wired for success in 2021!