Is your website designed effectively for your end-user?

It goes with saying that an effective B2B website should have strong and consistent branding, SEO optimisation, and clear messaging and CTAs.

Yet there is one often overlooked ingredient to effective web design that can truly affect brand loyalty, conversions, and sales: your end user.

If your website doesn’t speak to your target audience, you risk losing them. Particularly as people form an opinion about a website in just 50 milliseconds.

Here’s a quick overview of the ways in which you can ensure your website adds value to your end users by putting them at the heart of every design decision.

Define your user personas

What does your typical user look like? What are their behaviours, goals, and pain points?

Creating a user persona can help to answer all the above. It involves researching general information about your target audience to create a fictional persona that summarises the general characteristics of your users.

For example, it can help give you an understanding of their gender, age, job title, personality, and more. Spending the time creating typical user personas helps you to view your site through their eyes, build empathy for them, and help you focus on improving their experience of your site.

Most importantly from a web design perspective, it lets you make decisions based on hard data rather than guesswork.

Take a look at your competition

As well as taking a deep dive into your existing customers, it’s also important to consider what you can do to attract new prospects.

Competitor research will allow you to identify what is attracting customers elsewhere, what they’re engaging with on social media, and highlight potential gaps in the market. You can then focus your efforts on reeling customers in by positioning your brand as one step ahead of the competition by providing the solution to their needs.

Take them on a journey

Once you’ve defined your end user’s needs and pain points, you should ensure that every touchpoint of the user journey takes them one step closer to getting what they need.

Think of your site as a pathway to conversion. Each page, call to action, and piece of navigation should add value, be engaging, and provide relevant information. This could include offering a live chat facility, which 79% of businesses say had a positive effect on both sales and customer loyalty.

Ensure content adds value

Never post a blog simply because you’ve not added one for a while. Every piece of content should be part of an overall strategy to give your end users what they’re looking for.

SEO research can really help by providing you with the keywords that your target audience is searching for. You can then create relevant content (such as blogs, podcasts, white papers, social posts, polls) based on these topics.

Make considered design choices

In the same way that you wouldn’t pepper a website designed to engage children with blocks of plain black and white text, it’s important to make design choices based on your end user. This includes:

• Imagery: Illustrations, stock photos, original photos, or 3D renders can all influence your end user. One study found that a webpage with an authentic photo had a 35% higher conversion rate than a page with a stock photo
• Colour scheme: There’s more to your choice of colour than looking pretty. Your chosen tones can increase brand recognition by 80% and can affect mood and emotions e.g. red is associated with love, passion, and energy.
• Typography: Your chosen font is another example of a brand’s non-verbal communication. Fonts can help to make a website feel corporate or modern and, when customised, can become an integral, instantly recognisable part of your brand e.g. Disney.

Consider your end user, reap the benefits

A website designed with the end user in mind is more likely to provide a positive user experience. And happy users are more likely to become repeat visitors. Plus, 72% of customers share positive experiences with six (or more) people. In other words, designing for your end user can lead to many more end users.