Employees engage with your website and databases regularly. If the user experience (UX) impacts workflow or productivity, they may grow aggravated. In a world where staff shortages are a valid concern, any minor aggravation can lead to people quitting, going to a competitor, or striking out on their own. If you want to reduce churn, look at your website’s UX and then expand the review to the UX of all tools they use.
These tools should run smoothly — otherwise, you risk numerous situations that can harm UX and frustrate team members. Frustrated workers tend to consider leaving for a better position elsewhere. If you want to keep top talent, strive to make them happy even in the small daily tasks. Here are some of the poor UX elements that might impact your staff.
1. Slow Page Loading
Tooltester.com looked at over four billion websites and found website conversion rates drop by 4.42% for every second of load time. The average load time for desktop is 2.25 seconds and 8.6 seconds for mobile.
One example of how a slow-loading website might impact your workers is if it takes a long time to boot up. Employee workflow gets disrupted as they wait for crucial details to load.
A customer service rep may have to deal with frustrated clients, as it takes longer to solve problems and get to the root of issues. The entire process makes your company look less efficient. Slow speeds can disrupt productivity tracking numbers for an otherwise hardworking staff member.
Spend the funds to optimize your website speed to keep people engaged. Data should appear almost instantly on any query so people can work without waiting.
2. Mobile Unfriendliness
If every second of load time reduces conversions, and your mobile site takes too long to load, you wind up with frustrated clients your employees have to attend to on service calls. A poor UX impacts everyone from the person trying to use the site from their mobile device to the associate helping an irate buyer.
Image being on the customer service team and getting call after call from people frustrated with the poor experience on mobile devices. You apologize to them, but the situation never changes, so they are still upset the next time they phone with a similar issue.
Churn in the customer service department is at an all-time high, and this churn rate could in part be due to a lack of excellent UX. Fix the issue by testing extensively. Ensure your website is responsive to various screen sizes, from smartphones to tablets.
3. Increased Interruptions
Poor UX can lead to additional interruptions. Employees may feel overwhelmed by juggling their workload while dealing with a temperamental website or database tools. While the average worker already gets interrupted approximately 50 times daily by coworkers and bosses, you now must add customers calling in because of poor UX.
For example, if a customer-facing website regularly goes down, clients might call their point of contact, further disrupting productivity. If the design needs to be more straightforward, less tech-savvy visitors may need someone to walk them through the process of using the site. The disruptions can eat into the amount of work completed in a day.
Sites that take too long to get to the point with clutter and distractions lead to poor UX. Clean up your front-facing site and keep only the essential elements. Make sure everything is clear and refine processes for shoppers.
4. Poor Navigation
Complex navigation leads to confusion for everyone, so limit the main categories to a handful and utilize subcategories for other tasks. The average team member is busy from the time they arrive at work until they leave. Small things such as navigation slow them down from going directly to the tool they need and can create bottlenecks.
Imagine doing your best every day and swatting away the minor frustrations of poor UX. Yet, you fail to earn a bonus because the tools you used slowed down your productivity and impacted your work. It is a recipe for losing a valued staff member.
Stronger, more intuitive navigation helps everyone on the team. Consider customized options based on the job description.
5. Lack of Security
Remote workers often worry about the personal security of using their own machines or exposing the business to hackers if using a corporate computer. There is a fine line between a ridiculous amount of security checks and enough for safety, but employees recognize the importance of firewalls and authentication methods.
The multi-factor authentication market is at $19.02 billion and growing. Your settings can mean the difference between a good UX for your staff and a poor one. For example, having to verify who they are every time they navigate to a new area of the site delays critical tasks.
Authentication should happen occasionally to ensure the person is who they say they are and the site is secure. Survey your workers to find out how frequently they should input a code or other verifying info without driving them batty.
6. Broken Pages and Links
Is your site and system riddled with old links that no longer work? As businesses grow, they update folders and file names, so it is easy to lose track of old links. Staff save crucial locations to their bookmarks to conserve time and navigate to where they need to be quickly.
Broken pages and links can frustrate employees beyond measure by slowing them down and making tasks take longer. Use a broken link checker on the website’s backend to locate issues. Add a reporting tool and let people note when something does not work as expected.
7. Accessibility Issues
Your team members have different abilities. A site that does not take someone who is colorblind or has physical needs into account might frustrate a percentage of your workers. They will leave for an enterprise willing to adapt so they can better complete their daily tasks.
Follow the Americans With Disabilities Act standards for your website. Go through a design checklist to ensure your site has alt tags, excellent contrast between the background and the text, and works with voice readers and commands.
Improve UX and Improve Employee Retention
In a world where people are open to changing jobs and competition for them is at an all-time high, anything you can do to decrease churn is a positive. Brands have complete control over their website design and which tools they use for project management. Talk to your workers about their preferences, make any necessary changes to improve productivity and reduce frustration, and watch your retention rates improve.
Eleanor Hecks is editor-in-chief at Designerly Magazine, where she covers web design, development, and business leadership topics. You can also find her work as a writer for publications like Clutch.co and Web Designer Depot.
