How To Make Your Site More Enjoyable In UX Design
A good user experience is all about ensuring your website caters to everyone and allows users to navigate as seamlessly as possible. There are countless ways you can level-up your website’s UX, most of which fall under a framework that’s built around improving:
- Usability
- Equitability
- Enjoyability
- Useful
- Accessibility
Today we’re here to talk all about enjoyability. Without sounding too obvious, enjoyability is focused around how enjoyable your website is for the user. If you’re struggling with making the content of your sire more engaging, I have some good news for you… And that is there are some many minor changes you can make to steer you in the right direction!
How Does Your Site Make The User Feel?
A website should be all about inciting certain emotions in the user, whether that’s excitement to use your product, empathy for your cause, or curiosity for how your service could help them. That’s why when reviewing the User Experience of your website, it’s important to assess how the user might feel when they browse through your pages. Will they have the desired reaction or will they be bored, overwhelmed or confused.
How you choose to communicate with the user can influence the emotions they feel, which is why you should never underestimate the power of content.
If the user is likely to feel negative emotions towards your content, such as boredom, this drastically lowers the chances of them staying on your site, let alone carry out any desired actions like purchasing a product or inquiring about a service.
The Layout Of Your Content
Believe it or not, the layout of your content can very much determine how enjoyable someone’s experience is. If your page is cluttered, this can trigger negative emotions such as confusion, disarray, frustration – you name it! All of which you can safely say are far from negative. But, if your page is structured and organized, this can trigger much more positive emotions.
It’s time to consult the layout checklist!
- Use headers to break up text, allowing users to fish out key information
- Use bullet points where possible to structure content and improve readability
- Use shorter sentences & vary sentence length to keep it interesting
- Use short paragraphs to break up text
- Don’t be afraid to bold certain words to highlight key pieces of information
Copywriting
The copy on your page is a huge indication on how engaging and enjoyable your website is. If you’re using copy that’s very basic and generic, this will have a huge knock-on effect to a user’s onsite experience. When it comes to incorporating more engaging copy, there are a few steps you can take to drive that engagement from the user:
- Use an attention grabbing headline- This is a great way to pull in the user and encourage them to read more of your content.
- Use stories, metaphors and case studies- Users are more likely to recall/remember a piece of content if there’s a story attached to it. The use of metaphors paints more of a picture for the user and case studies help build trust.
- Use clear call to actions- It’s important to ensure you are always guiding the user along in their journey. This not only makes their experience more seamless, but it also improves the likelihood of them completing a desired action on your page.
- Pull your audience in within your first few sentences- This is an important step to take if you want to gain there interest as quickly as possible.
- Ask questions and try to relate to user where possible- Engaging with the user and aticipating/addressing their concerns can make them feel at ease, encouraging more positive emotions.
Images & Video
There is nothing more disengaging than a wall of text, keep your content interesting through relevant, quality imagery and better yet video and audio! When you provide the user with more variety in terms of the type of content they digest, the more digestible it becomes.
With the evolution of content, it’s getting harder and harder to keep users engaged through the standard format of text and images. So jump on any instances where you can incorporate short-form or long-form video and even an audio file. This not only makes your website more enjoyable, it also allows you to feed the user with more important information in a more appealing format.
