How UX Can Impact Conversion Rates

While bringing users to your website is an important achievement, what they do once they reach you can make or break the success of your business. In this blog, we explore how user experience impacts conversion rates. 

What is UX? 

We believe that UX design is, at its core, digital problem-solving. Although, there are many different definitions of UX, and different brands and individuals will have different interpretations of what it means to conduct UX design.  

Simply put, user experience is, as the name suggests, the experience that a user has when interacting with your product. UX designers research user behaviour in order to understand and improve the interactions that users have with the product, create value for the user, and build credibility in your product. 

Take a look at this article to learn more about how we define UX at PixelTree, and why we think you should make user experience a top priority.

Does UX impact conversion rates? 

The short answer is yes, good UX does impact conversion rates. Driving traffic to your website is important, but the user experience once they reach the site is what determines whether or not they’ll stay on your page and convert. This could be anything from signing up for a newsletter to purchasing a product. Low conversion rates may well be a sign of poor user experience.

Good UX research can help you to understand the needs and frustrations of your users. This information can help you design your website with good UX, which will encourage users to convert. Learn more about UX research here. 

What aspects of UX directly impact conversions? 

There is more to user experience than strictly securing conversions, like building credibility and creating value. However, there are elements of UX that directly impact your ability to secure conversions, and should be paid attention to. 

Site speed

With many new tools and technologies available, users have grown accustomed to quick response times. Slow site speed means that even if users reach your page, they may be clicking away before they even get to see your content. 

But how slow is too slow? When it comes to waiting for a page to load, fractions of a second can make all the difference in user experience. According to Google industry insights, when page loading times go from 1 to 3 seconds, the probability of users bouncing increases by 32%. While a 5 second loading time increases the bouncing probability by as much as 90%.

Intelligible process

When it comes to completing the conversion process, ease is key. Making it hard for the user to figure out where to start and how to progress increases the likelihood of them abandoning your site for a competitor’s. An important part of this is creating good calls to action on key pages.

Calls to Action

Calls to Action are important elements of a user’s experience and journey through your site, they tell your users what to do. Failing to appeal to the user with a Call to Action, or making your call to action hard to find, unclear, or unappealing can be detrimental to your conversion rate.

Aesthetics vs. Functionality

Good user experience means that neither functionality nor aesthetics are sacrificed. Good aesthetics can make your site stand out and captivate the user, while good functionality will make it easy for your users to navigate and accomplish their goals. Striking the perfect balance between these two elements can do wonders for your conversions. 

Unresponsive design

Responsive web design means that your site will quickly change and adapt to the user’s device. A Google study found that 90% of users switch between devices to accomplish a goal online. If your site makes it difficult for a user to accomplish their goal on a mobile or tablet, it may mean that they simply abandon the task before they have a chance to switch devices. 

So How Can you Improve User Experience?

While there are many tools and resources out there to learn more about UX (like our blog!), good UX design requires careful research, prototyping, and testing. Simply going by guesswork, can make the whole process longer, more costly, and ineffective. 

Pixeltree can help you transform your business and boost conversion rates by undertaking customer-focused UX design that delivers to your customer’s expectations. Our services include UX audits and UX design, as well as streamlined design sprints, that condense the whole design process into an intense and result-driven 4-day sprint. Learn more about our process and contact for any inquiries here.