3 UX Tips to Improve Consumer Decision Making Process on Your Website

In this blog article, you’ll discover 3 valuable UX (user experience) tips that help improve your website’s ability to guide the consumer decision-making process.

Why is user experience essential to improving the decision making process for your customers?

Websites are the face and storefront of many modern businesses, so making them user-friendly is critical. However, it’s surprising how many websites don’t focus on the needs of the consumer. For example, a common mistake is making the payment process unnecessarily complicated. To make a purchase, a consumer needs to know your prices, what payment methods you accept, what shipping methods you offer, how to get in contact with you, and so on. It’s a long list of things, but all these bits of information need to be clear and easy to find for the consumer. Because if they get too frustrated, they will not complete the purchase and will abandon their shopping carts in frustration. 

A recent survey by Baymard Institute revealed that 64.8% of visitors leave sites that don’t have a clear path to their goals. Most of the time, this lack of clarity was due to poor planning. By implementing the three tips further down, you will be able to reduce the bounce rate on your site, increase the number of leads, and improve your conversion rate.

What is the consumer decision making process?

The consumer decision making process refers to how a potential consumer chooses between different brands or products to fulfil a need. This can be a complex process since it involves different types of information and decisions that the consumer must make. You can’t control all steps of their process. Some will google for hours researching a product before buying. Others will buy the first thing that strikes their fancy without reading a single review. 

You can only influence the customer when they find your page and read about your product. That is why it’s so important their journey on your site is planned and purposeful. Sometimes you only get one chance. Make sure it counts. 

How to use UX to improve the consumer decision making process on your website?

There are 3 areas you can look at to improve the consumer decision making process on your website. The first is ensuring that you don’t overwhelm your customer by giving them too many choices. The second is to make your customer feel like they’re in control. The third is by making it as easy as possible for the consumer to take any required actions.

1. Don’t overwhelm your customers

• Focus your content around your ideal customers and what they want.
• Too many choices paralyze your customers. 
• Resist the impulse to throw the kitchen sink at the customer
• Carefully plan where each page goes and what content goes on each page.

2. Make the customer feel like they’re in control

• Give them what they’d like to know, feel and see about your product or service at the right moment.
• Offer multiple ways to complete actions, so they can connect in a way that suits them (chat and call options, email and text, etc.). 
• Design in a way that the customer feels they are in the driver’s seat on their journey (even though it’s really you steering their direction)

3. Simplify the actions you require a consumer to take

• Have a clear call to action, so your ideal clients know what action they need to take next.
• Prime the customer’s actions in advance through your use of images and colours 
• Test, test and test your forms and payment areas constantly to make sure there are no bugs
• Do not overwhelm the customer by requesting too much data. Ask only for the information you specifically need from the customer to complete their request (and try to only ask for input once). 

Final Takeaways

A great customer centric user experience increases conversions up by to 400%. By aligning your business goals with your ideal customer’s user experience, you can dictate and improve their consumer decision making process. This increases customer satisfaction which then increases your trust and authority. If these things aren’t aligned, you make their decision making process harder. This causes analysis paralysis: where your customer doesn’t buy anything, make a purchase or abandons your site altogether because it’s too complicated or confusing. 

By understanding their needs and wants, you can plan and design how they feel about your business. Increase leads and conversions by using user experience tips to improve and simplify your website’s consumer decision-making process.

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