The web UX (user experience) design space has seen a phenomenal evolution in the last few years, and one of the most interesting trends in this field is the integration of video content into web pages and mobile screens.
Implementing videos into their website is, in fact, one of the simplest ways website owners can improve user experience without having to spend hours designing and revising instructional copies.
Data also suggests that videos play a key role in attracting the audience, with 96% of marketers believing that videos are important to their strategy. Another data point suggests that more and more brands are now creating long-form video content, such as webinars, as an increasing number of viewers are watching them.
When used in the right way, video not only improves the overall user experience but can also enhance the user’s journey and increase their time on your website. To help you understand this intersection of UX and videos better, we are going to explore the topic in more detail.
Here we will dive deeper into web UX, the importance of adding videos, and various ways to use videos for a seamless user experience.
What Is A Website User Experience (UX)?
User experience or UX, by definition, is a user’s experience with a brand, business, or company. It encompasses various aspects of the user’s experience, including the things they see, hear, and experience and their emotional reactions.
While several different factors affect the user experience, the main ones among these are usability, credibility, accessibility, usefulness, and value.
With regards to web design specifically, user experience best practices focus primarily on making a web page or website easy to use and appealing to consumers. This is done by using different elements such as images, content, and media to create powerful emotional responses among them.
Importance Of Videos For Better Website UX
Wondering what role videos play in ensuring a smooth UX, then?
a. Videos Help Entertain Visitors
Videos are an excellent way to achieve the end goal of entertaining your audience. They bring in a surprise element and also add to its appeal as a medium.
Irrespective of age and profile, consumers generally like discovering what happens next, making them happily sit through and wait to watch the videos.
Apart from this, videos also boost trust and credibility among users. Data suggests that almost 89% of buyers in a survey say they were convinced to buy a product after watching a video.
b. Ensure Effective Content Delivery
With ever-decreasing attention spans, videos are an excellent medium to grab people’s attention faster. Unlike text content, videos help engage more with visitors.
To make the videos even more engaging, make sure to customize your videos or use stock videos and motion graphics that allow you to create a unique and refined look for your content.
By employing a reliable free online video editor, you can enhance the visual appeal and polish your videos. It grants you the ability to trim, merge, add effects, and apply transitions, enabling you to craft captivating narratives and captivate your audience’s attention.
c. Add Personality To Your Website
The expressive nature of videos makes them a perfect tool for sharing your personality and adding a brand touch to your product, service, and website.
This, in turn, helps you in making a long-lasting first impression on consumers. Besides, videos as a medium are ideal for boosting user experience because of their interactive and immersive nature.
This also means that your messaging and brand image will better impact your users even after they have logged off your website.
d. Videos Help Attract Attention
Videos are a great way to attract the attention of your audience. Besides, nicely made videos make them pause and take in your content. Further, in 2023 as many as 91% of businesses said they use video as a part of their overall marketing strategy.
Main Video Elements For Improving User Experience
Creating videos for your website can be fun. But for optimized results, there are a few important technical details that you must take into account.
So, when it comes to utilizing video to enhance your web UX, here are some of the major factors to consider-
Strong Beginning
Make sure to capture your audience’s attention from the very beginning. The initial few seconds of your video are very important as they help determine whether the user will engage with your video content. This makes it important to start strong and capture the client’s attention early on.
Keep It On Auto-Mute
Another important thing to keep in mind is to make auto-mute the default setting in your videos. This means that sound or volume should not be allowed unless the user decides to listen to a video.
Don’t Make Them Lengthy
Integrating short videos (up to 2 minutes) can help you get the most significant engagement from your audience. Therefore, ensure not to waste their time and keep the messaging simple, sharp, accurate, and to the point.
Make It Easy To Access
Ease and accessibility should be other important considerations while integrating videos to improve the web user experience. You can do this by adding a title, description, and closed captions to let the users decide how they wish to consume the information.
Yet another feature that helps improve accessibility is the collapsing player, which allows your consumers to follow the video while having to scroll between pages.
User Control
Once the consumers start watching your video, make sure to give them full control over interacting with the player. This means giving them the freedom to explore all of the features, from sound and fullscreen to social media sharing and recommended content, if any.
Load Time
Video load time is the time your page content requires to load when the user clicks on it. Today’s users just take a few seconds to decide if they wish to stay on your webpage. Not giving them fast-loading pages and video content will quickly make them bored and move on.
This is why speed plays a vital role in retaining and attracting customers. Besides, it is best to check if your videos and images are properly formatted before uploading them to your website.
Different Types Of Videos To Use On Your Website For Better User Experience
Videos have been a prominent form of content in the last few years, with several video and UX trends emerging during this period.
If you also wish to make your website more engaging for the audience, here are some of the types of videos to use that may help-
Looping Videos
As the name suggests, these are short videos that keep on moving, thus giving the impression that the video is much longer than it is. Put simply, looping videos are where designers use animation to visually entertain their visitors without investing too much into creating content.
These kinds of videos are ideal to use when you want specific information to be remembered longer by your users. So, if you wish your audience to remember your brand or offerings, looping animations can greatly help.
Product Videos
An increasing number of e-commerce businesses use product videos today to give potential buyers a closer look at an item, product, or service and give a detailed explanation of its main features and benefits or simply demonstrate a product.
Statistics also show that as high as 66% of consumers prefer watching short-form videos and find them most engaging before they make a buying decision.
This is simply because short-form videos provide better information about a product in a simple and easy-to-understand way. This both speeds up and simplifies the decision-making process for the buyer’s manifolds.
Animated Videos
Animated videos or web animations are best used to grab the user’s attention as soon as they land on your home page.
The best way to do this is by integrating a nice animation that helps you capture your audience’s attention and entertain them in a fun yet non-intrusive way.
Testimonials And Case Studies
Testimonials and case studies are great for supporting your brand and delivering simple, easy-to-digest content that helps your users learn more about you.
These types of videos are an effective way to build trust and credibility because of the opinions shared by real people buying from or working with your brand.
Personalized Videos
Using personalized video is another popular trend in video marketing these days. Such personalized videos contain various personal elements such as name, age, preferences, etc., and make the users feel more comfortable as if the brand is directly speaking to them.
Several modern video platforms available today allow businesses to customize their videos automatically.
Company Culture Videos
These are another excellent category of videos you can create for your website for a better user experience. One of the best parts about these videos is that they serve the dual purpose of exposing your users to the emotion and personality behind your brand.
They also help you display the kind of people and culture you’ve built for your brand or business, thus spreading brand awareness. Apart from this, you can also use company culture videos to attract new talent and show them why they should choose your business to work with.
Things To Consider When Integrating Video Into User Design
Here are some of the things to consider when you are integrating videos into user design-
Length Of The Video
The one thing that can significantly impact your user experience design is your video’s length. Videos that are too long often require more bandwidth and can reduce the loading speed of your website, making it difficult for users to access websites on the go.
Likewise, very short videos can limit users to get the background they need. The ideal way to navigate the situation here is to keep your videos short while giving users all the necessary information simultaneously.
Video Format
The format of the video plays an equally important role in how your target audience receives it. For instance, some consumers look for explainer videos to learn more about the product, whereas others consider testimonial videos as the more effective way to make a purchase decision.
The key here is to consider where each type of video appears on your website to ensure that they are most effective for user engagement.
Video Location
Another important factor here is the location where you place your videos on your website, as the right location can ensure that you easily entice your visitors to interact with them.
Likewise, you need to know when it is best to place videos in the background. For instance, background videos provide continuity to a webpage and help you create a more cohesive website design and a seamless user experience.
Video SEO Tips For Better UX
Once you have a fair idea of optimizing your videos so they work best on your website, the next step is to optimize your videos for SEO to enhance the UX.
Here are some tips you can use to do this-
a. Don’t Remove All The Text From Videos
While videos are great tools for UX and can significantly improve your brand awareness , make sure not to overdo it. This is simply because Google needs text to place your page or site on the Google search results, and replacing all text with videos can start impacting your traffic negatively
b. Make It Mobile Optimized
With mobile users accounting for almost half of all internet users, it is important to ensure your videos are fully optimized for mobile use.
This means making sure that all your videos work fine on mobile with a high enough resolution so that they can be clearly seen on mobile devices.
In Conclusion
Videos play a prominent role in ensuring a smooth user experience design and amplifying the value of your website. Finding the right intersection of UX design and video content can also help your customers better connect with your brand and its offerings and build brand loyalty.
In this post, we have shared some of the top tips and strategies for improving your website’s UX designs by integrating videos that will give clear direction on being effective in your video content strategy.
Regardless of the messaging your business aims to deliver, using videos in your web design improves the chances of being heard and improves the overall UX design of your website and app experience significantly.
