These websites have nailed UX: Here’s what your small business can learn

If you’re building a business website, it can be easy to overlook the importance of user experience (UX) but it’s integral to attract visitors to your site – and keep them coming back for more.

The best designed websites grab, engage and sell. Essentially, UX will demand the user’s attention, keep them on page, and, hopefully, lead to a conversion.

To give you a full understanding of what great UX design looks like – and serve up inspiration on how you can mirror it within your small business – we’ve brought together a showcase of UK start-ups and fast-growth brands who have nailed their UX…

Websites with great UX design… tell a story

Lucy and Yak’s website, lucyandyak.com, has been built with the user in mind and incorporates brilliantly vivid photography, easy-to-use navigation features and a clear proposition. Its ‘Our Story’ page is particularly compelling and gives visitors an insider view to the company.

Using clever graphics, and a timeline format, the ethical fashion brand has created a scroll-through story of the business’ history from inception to present day – and also provides a narrative to what the start-up is looking to achieve and its future growth.

Websites with great UX… aren’t afraid to embrace white space

Minimalism is one of the big UX trends of 2018 and, whereas it was once common place to fill your website landing pages with as much copy and detail as possible, today less can most certainly be more.

Sparkling water brand drinkseriously.com offers a good example of how to use white space with simple, but contrasting, colour schemes and headers which clearly describe each page.

Websites with great UX… have clear calls to action

Calls to action (CTAs) direct your reader’s attention and help to generate a conversion or sale. No matter how visually appealing your site is or how interesting, a site without clear CTAs is missing a trick by failing to engage visitors to make an action.

As shown in the screenshot above, mattress start-up simbasleep.com has carefully positioned CTAs in two areas of its website landing page; with a CTA button within its central image and a clear CTA within its popscroll animation.

Websites with great UX… offer good site navigation and functionality

Sites such as plansnap.com offer easy to use site navigation functions; these include six clear headers which guide the user around the site and draw the attention to the most important elements:

1. What the business is about
2. Relevant blog posts – so the user can better understand the business and its USP
3. Information on the partners it works with
4. Information on the ambassadors it works with
5. Press activity and testimonials
6. A contact page with details on how to get in touch with various functions of the business, along with details of the company address

And, as to our point above on the importance of CTAs, PlanSnap makes it easy for the user to navigate to its app via its ‘Get the app’ CTA.

Other sites – such as underwear e-tailer attollolingerie.com – have achieved the same effect by offering drop-down navigation bars across key headers.

Websites with great UX… are optimised for mobile

With 2018 data from Statista highlighting that 54.9% of all global website traffic comes from mobile, if you want to offer your visitors a good user experience then your site has to be mobile-optimised.

Flightclubdarts.com has made its website mobile-friendly by translating its desktop experience to mobile with matching photography, logo branding and venue headers, while mobile navigation and functionality has also been prioritised.

When considering your website design needs, review your site analytics to gauge what proportion of your visitors come to your site via mobile and desktop – along with your most popular website landing pages – as this should inform your strategy.

There are a number of free, and paid-for, tools available that enable you to test how mobile-friendly your site is such as the Google Mobile Friendly Test, while tools including mobiReady, MobilePhoneEmulator, and Screenfly are able to display your site on a mocked-up mobile screen.

Want to know more? Take a look at this article showing you how to make your website mobile-friendly.

UX for thought

From these examples of good UX websites, it’s clear that if you want to build a website with great UX, you need to make sure you:

• Consider a minimalist approach with simple copy and formatting
• Integrate easy to use navigation bars, headers and drop-downs
• Involve direct and simple CTAs across your site
• Offer a compelling story (great animation and high-res photography helps but make sure this doesn’t impact your page load speeds)
• Ensure your website is mobile-friendly

If you’re looking for a full rundown on how to achieve great UX for your website, this detailed guide takes you through each step – from sharing your business story to adding a press page and getting a chatbot.