10 tips that improve the user experience of your website

A better website experience comes from ten practical decisions. Apply the Gestalt laws, define and prioritize content, keep things simple, use color with purpose, set a clear hierarchy, build trust, simplify navigation, test with users, design for mobile and load fast. Together they keep visitors longer and turn visits into conversions.

Think of the chief executive of a regional insurer who opens the company website on her phone before a board meeting, to check how customers see the new campaign. She cannot find the claims page in under half a minute, the main button is the same color as the background, and the page jumps while it loads. She closes it and asks the digital team what went wrong. Nothing was broken. The site simply had never been designed from the visitor's point of view, and each small friction added up to a verdict.

The original version of this article opened with a statement that remains true. Incorporating UX design into a website is necessary, because it is what makes the interaction friendly and gives the user comfort and satisfaction, through its visual appeal, ease of use, content and loading speed, among other aspects. The author adds that users are less and less willing to work out how a web page functions. They want to reach their objective in the easiest and fastest way, without a complex interface or difficult navigation. The easier it is to find what they are looking for, the more likely they are to keep interacting and to return.

The commercial consequence is direct. A good user experience helps a website succeed and achieve conversions, while a poor one means visitors probably will not return and the company loses a customer. If you are still sorting out the vocabulary, our guide on UX design versus UI design and our introduction to what user experience is and what it is for will help. What follows are the ten tips of the original article, expanded for readers who must decide where to invest first.

Tip one, how do the laws of Gestalt help a design make sense?

Gestalt laws explain how the human brain organizes what it sees. Applying them helps UX design, because they also help to find the errors in the interaction with an interface. The author highlights five. The law of figure and ground says that an element can be clearly distinguished from the background thanks to its contrast and importance. The law of closure says the brain tends to complete elements that are incomplete, provided they are familiar, which is why a simple icon can be recognized even when it is drawn with a few lines. The principle of proximity says that elements close to each other are perceived as a group. The law of continuity says that elements arranged to follow a flow will be perceived as a group. The law of similarity says that similar elements tend to be classified in the same category.

These ideas are not abstract theory. The Nielsen Norman Group offers practical explanations of the proximity principle, the similarity principle and the principle of closure in interface design. Proximity tells you to put a label close to its field and a price close to its product, so that nobody has to search for the connection. Similarity tells you to style all links in the same way, so that a visitor learns once what is clickable. Figure and ground tells you to make the primary button stand out against the page. A designer who applies these three ideas consistently will already have solved a large share of the confusion that visitors report.

Tip two, how should content be defined and prioritized?

Giving users quality content, and generating value for them, makes them stay longer and explore. The author adds that it is not enough to decide which content to include. It must be prioritized, so that what is essential reaches the user first, and it must be structured, so that every piece of information makes sense within the section in which it lives and the user knows where to go to find it.

The author also recommends refreshing content every month, to continue nurturing customers and to position the site in Google, and suggests blogging as a simple method for generating it. We keep the monthly rhythm as the author's recommendation. We could not find a rule in Google's documentation that requires monthly updates, so it is best read as a useful discipline for keeping a site alive and not as a ranking requirement. The reasons for a regular editorial habit are better stated in terms of the audience, since a site that keeps answering new questions gives people a reason to return. Google's own guidance on helpful, reliable, people-first content makes the same point about usefulness. For a practical method, our article on the ten steps to create a blog that delights walks through the process.

Tip three, why does less often mean more?

The phrase applies to design, content and navigation alike. In design, the advice is not to overload pages with elements and information that users cannot digest, and to leave blank spaces that give the eye a place to rest. In content, focus on what generates real value for the user and do not try to cover too much, prioritizing what remains. In navigation, important information should be a few clicks away, since a path with many clicks can confuse people.

White space is not wasted space. It separates groups, draws attention to the most important item and signals quality. Executives who ask designers to fit more onto the home page, to give every department a place, usually end up with a page where nothing stands out. A useful discipline is to ask of every element on a page what the visitor would lose if it were removed. If the answer is nothing, it probably belongs elsewhere.

Tip four, how should color be used?

Color has two main objectives on a website. The first is to identify the site with the brand image of the company. The second is to help the design and the interaction of the user with the interface. For the first, use the most representative brand colors, one in greater quantity and the others in lesser amounts as complements, so that they do not compete with each other.

The author is careful to add that this does not mean applying the whole palette to every element. Color should go on the elements you want to highlight, and a good practice is to apply it to the points of interaction, such as buttons and links, so that they stand out and are easy to identify. One refinement is worth making. Color should never be the only way to convey meaning, because a significant share of people have a color vision deficiency, and contrast between text and background must be sufficient for people with low vision. The W3C tips for designing for web accessibility explain why, and a quick contrast check during design avoids costly corrections later.

Tip five, what does it mean to take care of the hierarchy?

Visual hierarchy makes it easier for users to digest the content of a page. It allows you to highlight the information that interests the user so that they continue reading, giving emphasis to what fits the client and keeping the person on the site for longer. The tools are size, weight, color, position and spacing. A page with a clear hierarchy has a headline that is obviously the most important element, supporting text that is clearly secondary, and a single primary action.

A simple test is to squint at the page, or look at it from a distance, and ask what stands out. If the answer is not the thing you most want the visitor to notice, the hierarchy needs work. The same logic applies to the headings in the text. Clear headings let people who scan, which is most people, find the section they want in seconds.

Tip six, how do you build trust through design and through the brand?

The author recommends a design that builds trust, with elements that tell people where they are in the navigation process and where they should go next, and with clear calls to action. Human beings like what is familiar and predictable, so give users guides within the website that let them feel confident and not lost. Breadcrumbs, a visible menu, consistent page layouts and descriptive button names are all signs that the site is under control.

Trust also depends on the relationship with the brand beyond the website. The author lists actions that earn it, which include giving value through content, helping to satisfy a need and using the customer's data responsibly, and points to a HubSpot article on three actions to generate trust and guarantee the exchange with your clients, which is written in Spanish. The author closes with a reminder that deserves emphasis. A good user experience does not depend only on the website, but on the whole relationship that the customer has with the brand. A beautiful site cannot compensate for a delayed answer to an inquiry or an unclear invoice.

Tip seven, what makes navigation good?

Provide easy and fast routes to the different pages, so that people reach what they seek. The easier the navigation is and the fewer steps it takes, the more likely the user will not get lost. The author adds a point that is easy to overlook, which is that the number of steps is not the only variable. The grouping of the contents matters as well. A page can be only one click away and still be impossible to find, if it is filed under a label that the visitor would never think of.

This is the territory of information architecture. Companies frequently organize menus by internal departments, while customers think in terms of tasks and problems. Techniques such as card sorting, where real users group topics in the way that makes sense to them, and tree testing, where they try to find items in a proposed structure, reveal these mismatches quickly. We discuss how navigation and search visibility interact in our article on SEO and UX.

Tip eight, why must you test with real users?

The author calls testing one of the most fundamental points. It is where you learn what works and what does not with real users, and where you receive feedback on whether the previous seven tips are working as expected. Without testing, every design decision is a hypothesis. With testing, it becomes evidence.

The investment is modest. The Nielsen Norman Group has long argued that a handful of participants is enough to uncover most of the major problems in a round of testing, as explained in its article on why you only need to test with five users. The point is to test early, repeat often and fix what you find. We describe the process in detail in our article on usability testing in UX design.

Tip nine, what does responsive design require?

It is now common for people to reach websites from mobile devices, so the design must adapt to them and work optimally, offering the same experience. For many audiences the phone is the first and sometimes the only screen. Google, for its part, uses the mobile version of a site as the basis for indexing, as it explained when it announced that mobile-first indexing has landed, so a site that works poorly on a phone is at a disadvantage both with people and with search.

Responsive design is more than shrinking a layout. Buttons must be large enough to touch, text must be readable without zooming, forms must work with a phone keyboard, and menus must be reachable with a thumb. Test on a real mid-range device, with a normal mobile connection, because a site that feels fast on a developer's laptop can be frustrating in the field.

Tip ten, how fast should a site load?

Users today look for immediacy, and a slow page makes them close it without using it. The author's advice is to optimize the site and avoid loading it with heavy content. To make this concrete, Google defines measurable targets for the loading experience. Its Core Web Vitals measure how quickly the main content appears, how soon the page responds to input, and how stable the layout is while it loads. The page that jumps as the visitor reaches for a button, as in the opening scene of this article, fails the third measure.

Most speed gains come from unglamorous work such as compressing images, removing scripts nobody uses, caching, and choosing hosting suited to the audience. Because every added widget, tracker and font costs time, speed should be part of the conversation whenever somebody asks for a new feature on the site.

What does this mean for the C-level?

The author closes with a promise that is also a business case. A website that provides a satisfactory experience increases conversions, because it produces happy customers who stay longer and return, and that in turn benefits search positioning and the digital strategy as a whole. For executives, the practical implication is that experience quality should be managed like any other asset, with an owner, indicators and a budget. Indicators might include task completion on key pages, mobile page speed, conversion rate by device and the number of support questions that the website should have answered.

The ten tips also work as a checklist for evaluating agencies and internal teams. Ask which of them the current site satisfies, which it violates and what evidence supports the answer. A team that can answer with data from testing and analytics is likely to be improving the site continuously. A team that answers with opinions is likely to be redesigning it every few years.

How can a director start next Monday?

Take the ten tips and give the home page, the main service page and the contact page a score of one to five on each, using a colleague who does not work on the site as a second reviewer. Then pick the three lowest scores and assign each to a named person with a date. Open the site on a phone, time how long it takes to find your most important page, and share the result with the team. Plan a first round of five usability sessions within a month, and agree on two or three indicators to track from now on. Small, visible improvements in the first month build the support needed for larger changes later.

How does ICX help?

ICX Consulting assesses websites against these principles and designs improvements together with the teams that will maintain them, from research and information architecture to prototyping and optimization. If you want to begin with a structured review, we recommend our Heuristic Tests Toolkit. We chose it for this topic because the ten tips are, in effect, a set of usability heuristics, and the toolkit helps a team score a site against them methodically before investing in redesign or testing. You can also explore our UX optimization service.

Frequently asked questions

Which of the ten tips should we tackle first?

Start with navigation, loading speed and mobile behavior, because they affect every visitor on every page. Content and hierarchy come next, and testing should run alongside all of them to confirm that the changes help.

How often should a website be reviewed?

Review the key pages at least quarterly, using analytics and a few user sessions. Do a deeper assessment whenever the business changes significantly, for example with a new product line or market.

Does good UX really increase conversions?

Removing obstacles from important journeys generally raises completion rates, which is why UX is treated as a commercial lever. The size of the effect depends on how many obstacles exist today, so measure the baseline before you change anything.

Is UX the same as UI?

No. UI refers to the visual and interactive elements of the interface, while UX covers the whole experience of achieving a goal, including content, navigation, speed and trust. A good UI is one ingredient of a good UX.

A website that is easy to use earns attention, trust and return visits, and those are the foundations of every digital result a company wants. If you would like an expert view on how your own site measures up against these ten tips, request a diagnostic with an ICX consultant and we will review it with you.