Web Experience Best Practices

Web Experiences are a great way to help increase a website's interactivity, conversion rate and encourage users to focus on certain content within the website. When correctly designed, these web experiences can grab users attention and be used to highlight sales, subscriptions, email updates and so on. However, there are some things to remember when developing an efficient element for your website. You should create web experiences that are eye catching, add value and avoid disturbing users. A poorly designed strategy can harm conversions, increase the sites bounce rate, and disrupt the flow of your website.

The key message to remember is that when using web experiences, you must connect the user's intent on the site to the call to action.

Web Experiences Best Practices

In this series of articles, we’ll highlight the best practices you should consider when creating an innovative and functional web experience design for your site.

Avoid Irritating The User

Consider the user experience when adding web experiences to your site, and the number encountered per page. One or two can be an effective way to engage with a use. However, adding more can irritate users into leaving the site altogether. It's important to consider their timings and try to avoid disturbing the user simultaneously. This key call to action message could be overlooked rather than highlighted if multiple messages are fighting for attention.

Try to avoid web experiences overlapping with the actual content of the website, excluding the pop-up takeover, which is designed specifically for this action. A little obscurity is a great option to combine the effect from messages and the actual website appearance, but never to close the overall visibility of the website content completely.

Always include an easy way to get out of the web experience if it's a pop-up takeover: either click outside of it or place a clear X button in the top-right.

Think About Timing

Timing is a significant factor when it comes to web experiences. If they appear too soon, such as when the page has yet to finish loading, it can be annoying and disruptive. If they are too late, you could miss additional conversions. Consider the user experience. For example, if users are browsing the details of a plan or product, it could be more effective to show a corner pop-up to the webchat function to offer the opportunity to gather more information specific to the user's personal needs. In this case, the web experience provides a pleasant bonus to the user at the time when they are considering converting.

To find the perfect time when a web experience should be triggered, take a look at the average time spent on the website in your analytics. This will vary site by site. What is the timing where there are the highest abandoned carts/pages and how can the user be engaged before they hit this threshold.

Examples of timing for web experiences:

Upon entry.
After a certain point of scrolling.
Triggered by an action.
Immediately before exiting.

Design Consistency

Keep in mind the style and branding of the overall site when adding web experiences, like any element of your website, they contribute to your brand’s perception.

Consider adding a pattern/alternative color background or relevant picture to grab the attention of users but also complimenting your site. This is so the experience can distinguish itself from the site's overall content.

If your branding has colorful and strong visuals, then using minimalist designs will clash and be hard to notice against the style of the actual website. When creating experiences it's important to base this on your site’s overall color scheme, they will come across as less intrusive – making your users more likely to interact and convert.

Message Communication

The aim of web experiences is to deliver extra value, and we should know that users are also aware of this. So, when one appears, they’re going to be drawn to that specific information or value-added opportunity. When adding experiences to your site and what that message should include, here are some rules to consider:

Avoid web experiences for the sole objective of having a loud design element in that location on the website. If you waste users time with a meaningless disruption, you can lose their trust.
Every web experience should bring some value to users. If not, people wouldn’t care about them, and would not be inclined to provide their email or any other kind of personal information.
The key message to remember when web experiences is that the user intent on that specific web page must connect to the call to action.
The stage of the user journey should also be considered when discussing content. The same message should not be communicated to users in different stages of the buying process.
- It’s better to push a sales message in a more advanced stage, such as a notification widget for when a product was last purchased by a user. Highlighting this to those who are already considering making a purchase.
- To early-stage visitors who may be browsing and yet to be fully converted, an email-capture-corner to receive updates on prices and so on, is a good opportunity to capture their details for email mailing lists and encourage conversion at a later opportunity.
- If you want to give users something to contemplate while they move around the site, consider putting in a sidebar experience.
Web Experiences approaches and design can be difficult to pick in order to receive optimal results. However, they can be combined with targeting scenarios to improve their efficiency and AB testing to find the best application all working together to convert users. The ways to identify what wording and approach that has the highest conversion rate, spend time testing:
- Headline variations.
- Value proposition variations.
- Call to action variations (sign up now as opposed to get more information).
- The length of the wording included (minimal as opposed to longer copy).

The purpose of a web experience is to grab attention, bring additional value and convert users to the website, and that happens if they are designed well, carefully thought through and tested.

Aisling O’Dwyer

Marketing Consultant