Website User Experience Trends for 2024
Year after year, UX is the TOP of every website trend list – as it should be! Creating sites that are intuitive and easy to navigate is good for all users – regardless of technical expertise, which is good for your ROI! User experience focuses on accessibility, ease of use as well as creating delightful, streamlined and engaging experiences that encourage users to come back. We’re going to look at some of the current & upcoming trends for 2024 that affect user experience and how each of them rank for cost and accessibility.
PERSONALIZE, PERSONALIZE, PERSONALIZE!
The most important user experience trend is personalization. This trend is increasingly difficult, but will often give you the largest ROI. Customers are increasingly finding themselves with limited personal time. They want to find their products quickly and efficiently then move on with their day. This means presenting them with dynamic content generated based on their preferences.
Ensuring that customers retain their privacy is extremely important. This means that you may only be able to give a personalized experience to those who are logged-in and have given access to their preferences. It also means that you will need to ensure high security hosting.
Average Development Cost:
The development cost will vary depending on the complexity of your project, but with proper planning during the initial development of your site, you can keep the costs to a minimum.
Accessibility Impact:
How does the website personalization concept impact disabled users? Any time you’re serving up relatable and personalized results to users, it also impacts accessibility in a positive way. You’re making the process better for all users!
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)
Chatbot or virtual assistants are the most common place to find AI integrated into websites right now. These technologies can offer substantial labor savings since they only redirect customers to a human if the question cannot be answered by AI. But – the startup costs can be high and these technologies are not seamless from the start. The upfront cost to integrate AI can be steep, and the technology needs time to learn – which means you’ll need to partner the AI with human labor for a while.
Pricing varies wildly depending on complexity, technologies, features, customization and integrations needed. While a simple, low-volume, out of the box AI solution might be free, a high volume company might choose to create their own in-house AI solution costing $500,000+ USD.
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Accessibility Impact:
AI chatbots and assistants can be very helpful for people with disabilities. It allows them to ask questions based on their unique needs. It’s important that the AI be developed to use an eighth grade reading level to allow for the highest level of understanding among your audience.
VOICE SEARCH
Every year voice is on the trends list – but it’s not something that is still widely implemented on the average website. Users can easily add a Google Search with the voice search option to their site for free – (example: the WordPress website search widget comes out of the box with a voice button) – but will it give users good search results?
Unlike typing into a search block, a user is more likely to use full speech instead of a short text snippet. For example a user might type “Color Theory”, while a speech search user might search for “I want to know more about color theory”. While these searches might look the same, the system can recognize them as two distinctly different searches. This is why it’s highly recommended that if you’re going to target a voice search audience, you employ specific changes to optimize and help drive good quality search results. Optimization includes ensuring that you’ve added structured data markup to help search engines better understand your content. It also means ensuring that your content is phrased to answer specific questions – for example “If you want to know more about color theory please read….”. Voice search is very conversational, so ensuring that your content is more closely related with natural speech is extremely important.
Average Development Cost:
Pricing for using voice search can be anything from $0 – $10,000+ USD, while voice search page optimization can be anywhere from $300 – $600 USD per page.
Accessibility Impact:
Any time you’re integrating technology that allows a user to use voice and natural speech you’re going to also positively affect your site accessibility.
AUGMENTED REALITY (AR)
Touted as “The next big thing” for the web, the application of this technology has already made waves in sectors such as retail, tourism, marketing, etc. Web-based AR can use a device’s camera, digital content and/or sensors to create a 3d interactive experience. A potential customer can virtually add different furniture to their room to see how it looks. They can virtually try on different styles of glasses, clothing or change the colors and options of a vehicle to see it in real-time.
For the marketing industry – creating this real-time visual application creates an emotional connection between the product and the customer. The customer no longer needs to guess about how the product will look, they can actually SEE the product in use in their unique environment.
Average Development Cost:
Pricing for AR is normally high. While there are out of the box applications that can be used, many companies need custom application creation. On average a company can expect anywhere from $10,000 – $300,000 USD
Accessibility Impact:
Unfortunately, while there are some disabilities that benefit from AR, the problem is that not everyone can access or enjoy augmented reality equally.
Some Examples:
- An online glasses retailer shows users wearing different glasses by using live video of the users’ face. The live view allows the user to turn their head and see all angles of the glasses on their face. This application will only work well for someone who does not NEED their current glasses to see the image on the screen. In this case the retail store will need to allow users to upload a static image so that they can see options with their glasses on.
- A retail company is offering discounts through an AR scavenger hunt. The AR uses the camera to capture live video of the store and throughout the store there are coins to collect that count towards a discount. Someone who is legally blind will need to have an alternate experience in order to obtain the discounts.
When developing these immersive experiences you should conduct research and testing with diverse users, including people with disabilities. This will help you understand the preferences, challenges and expectations of the widest possible range of users. You should also consider the comfort and safety of users when designing the AR content and interactions. This includes things such as motion sickness, eye strain, fatigue or discomfort. Ensure that you always provide warnings and alternatives to avoid potential hazards as well as ensuring the privacy of users.
MICRO-INTERACTIONS & MICRO-ANIMATIONS
Creating tactile experiences is still very important to help bring the website alive and give the user helpful feedback. Overall this enhances user engagement. Ensuring that this trend has enough contrast to ensure that users see the change is important.
Button Design by Cooper Coeke
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Accessibility Impact:
While these can be accessible in the way that it makes it simple for users to see the different button states. BUT the caveat here is that for these to be 100% accessible you must ensure:
- Adequate color contrast in all states
- For motion sensitive users, the button must abide by the users choice to have reduced motion. This means you may need a secondary button that has little to no motion.
- That all states of the button are available to accessible devices.
USEFUL 404 PAGES
Your user hits a 404 page – “Page Not Found!” – don’t leave them hanging!
Savvy website authors have transitioned a “page not found” from a frustrating experience into an opportunity! Oops the page isn’t here, what about other products? Can we help you find something? Instead of forcing these people back to where they came from, give them the opportunity to easily find something else that might be of value to them.
Source: nintendo.ca 404 page
You can quite easily add a search area, show alternate products, blog posts and more to redirect the user to alternate content. This is a much better user experience that will increase your engagement rate!
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SOCIAL PROOF
One of the biggest factors in a positive overall website user experience is trust. To turn a visitor into a customer, you need to find ways to quickly prove that your business can be trusted. Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen consumer trust levels fall. For 2024, online businesses need to work hard to show their worthiness. Provide statistics, consumer testimonials and other forms of reliable information to help build a relationship with your users.
Things that reduce consumer trust online:
- Unaddressed complaints and/or a large number of social complaints
- Website spelling and grammar mistakes
- Website bugs and glitches
- Low quality website design
Giving customers “proof” might be supplying them with coupons or samples for a product. It could be video product reviews, testimonials, product ratings and/or other types of social commenting. This type of ‘social proof’ can be implemented in many different ways. It could take the form of product ratings and comments or it could be client testimonials.
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NOW LET’S GET DEVELOPING!
If these concepts are intriguing, you’ve come to the right place! Let us help you get your website on the right track to succeed in 2024! Contact My Brother Darryl today.
Sources:
Hero Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash
