10 Simple ux strategies for small businesses
UX design sits at the crossroads of technology and marketing, offering tremendous potential for small businesses. With a targeted strategy like the one outlined below, even small UX teams can significantly enhance their SaaS or digital products, saving substantial amounts in development, marketing, and sales costs.
1 - Simplify Navigation
Make it easy for users to find what they’re looking for. Use clear, logical categories and intuitive menu structures so visitors can quickly locate key information. A streamlined navigation experience reduces frustration and helps guide users toward taking action (e.g., making a purchase or signing up).
2 - Clear Calls to Action
Ensure your CTAs stand out visually and are action-oriented. Use concise, direct language like "Get Started," "Shop Now," or "Sign Up Today" to prompt users to take the next step. Place these buttons in easily visible spots, especially on key pages like product listings or landing pages.
3 - Optimize Mobile Experience
With more users browsing on smartphones and tablets, having a mobile-friendly website is crucial. Make sure your site is responsive, meaning it adjusts seamlessly to different screen sizes. This ensures a smooth experience for users, reducing bounce rates and encouraging conversions.
4 - Speed Up Your Website
Users expect fast-loading websites. Slow load times can lead to frustration and higher bounce rates, ultimately impacting conversions. Optimize images, minimize heavy scripts, and consider using caching techniques to enhance site speed. A faster website keeps users engaged and increases the likelihood of conversion.
Optimising site speed is a core part of UX and should be a focus for any business - ensuring that all users regardless of device can experience the optimal journey.
This business was firmly focused on improving site speed globally and this was embedded in the core DNA of the business - with core load time targets of 2 seconds.
5 - Highlight Social Proof and Trust Signals
Add customer reviews, testimonials, trust badges, or secure payment icons to your website. These features help establish credibility and reassure potential buyers, increasing the chances they'll follow through with their purchases. By showcasing positive experiences from others, you can inspire confidence and boost conversions.
6 - Identify Users' Primary Needs & Engage Directly
To truly understand customer needs, it’s essential to ask them directly. Every effective UX strategy begins with user research.
Surveys are key for identifying top tasks, where you can list product features you plan to develop in a simple checkbox format. Use clear, concise wording and a verb-object structure (e.g., "redial a missed call"). Limit choices to a manageable number for more focused results.
After analysing survey results, move on to customer interviews. While surveys provide general insights, interviews allow for a deeper exploration of customer needs. Focus on a select group of customers from your target audience—feedback from random individuals or friends won’t offer valuable insights.
7 - User feedback
User feedback is essential in UX design, and usability testing is a valuable way to gather insights and identify issues. Research suggests that usability tests with just five users can uncover 85% of UX-related problems.
For effective usability testing, follow these steps:
a - Build prototypes based on the information gathered from your target audience.
b - Focus testing on your target audience.
c - Set clear tasks and goals for each test.
d - Measure task completion time and identify challenges users encounter.
8 - Prioritize Key Tasks and Avoid Distractions
In UX design, attempting to accommodate every feature request or satisfy every client often leads to failure. Prioritization is key to success. Although small businesses may encounter differing feedback, the focus should remain on the needs of the broader audience, as reflected in survey and interview results. It’s important to avoid allocating resources to secondary tasks that may appeal to a few but don’t provide significant value to the majority of users.
Prioritization can be looked at in many ways - from a simple end to UX model to breaking the customer experience into different trading elements of the website.
In this example, UX feedback was gathered from a variety of sources and this was all fed into a backlog of possible improvements to move the dial on conversion rate - the exaple here is a product backlog specifically for improving the checkout process.
9 - Simplify the User Experience
The “less is more” principle is particularly relevant in UX design. The fewer elements users have to process, the quicker they can make decisions, leading to higher satisfaction.
UX professionals often overcomplicate interfaces with unnecessary tweaks, making simple actions difficult to find. The key is to avoid clutter and keep things intuitive. For example, a red button in the corner of a screen may be overlooked if surrounded by too much visual noise.
In a world where simplicity and ease are highly valued, UX designers should embrace minimalism. Keep scenarios simple, text concise, and visuals impactful.
In this example, the homepage was very out of date, clunky, not intuitive and manually populated. The business had decided to invest in a DXP however before this implementation, we decided to start looking at some initial design changes to get more traffic through to the highly converting product pages.
The end result after initial testing was that the new homepage UX led to a bounce rate reduction of 12% which was then subsequently rolled out across the wider Global Websites.
10 - Connect with Your Audience Personally
At its core, UX is about creating a genuine connection between your product and your audience. Success doesn’t always require massive investments or complex sales strategies. True growth comes from understanding and relating to your users, showing that great UX is about people, not just technology.
By embracing these strategies, small businesses can create user-friendly digital products that enhance the customer experience, boost satisfaction, and drive success.
