Tailoring your web marketing strategy around your user’s experience is incredibly important to allow you to more easily differentiate your value proposition from your competitors and deliver messages that drive your ideal clients towards your business goals.
Why? It strengthens the bond
User experience design (UXD) utilises design thinking techniques that create websites to resonate and stay in the mind of your ideal client. It strengthens the bond between your website and your potential visitors. To do this we learn about the people you want to attract so we can get to grips with their perceptions, then adjust the design according to their psychology — which increases the chance of them using your site.
It sounds obvious, I know, but you’d be surprised at the lack of its practice.
A great feature of UXD is its focus on usability
Usability should be your primary objective when considering your website’s marketing strategy. A great feature of UX design is its attention to making technology better for the people who use it — creating user-friendly design.
Usability expert Steve Krug explains we shouldn’t be making people think. People want a great-looking interface and great product features, but if part of the interface doesn’t meet their expectations it can damage perception.
It takes a visitor 0.5 seconds to form an opinion of your website. And you’ve got 2 seconds to impress them — miss that mark, and there is a chance 113% will leave. If you concentrate on making your website usable there’s a good chance your audience will stick around for longer.
Make psychology your new best friend
UX design is the bridge between psychology and the usability of your website. Human cognition is used to drive design decisions that subconsciously make digital experiences feel less chaotic, bringing together principles of visual design that create the most engaging interfaces — that the subconscious isn’t aware of!
For example, Gestalt’s design laws help our brain make sense of visuals, including balance, colour and space. When we use a design and feel something is off and can’t quite put our finger on it — usually, it's because these design laws have been ignored, such as the misalignment of space shown below.
Designs inclusive of Gestalt make for seamless layout choices and are great goals to include in your usability testing.
Get to know your users
Usability is significantly impacted by what you know and don’t know about your audience.
As people, we’re complex. Our thoughts and the way our brain likes structure can be completely different, and that’s because our brain prefers shortcuts to make sense of the world around it. Yet this clash of our thoughts and brain dominance means we come with a host of cognitive biases and we’re not as logical as we might think.
For example the Choice paradox. As people, we think we like many choices, but when given a choice in abundance we’re actually paralysed by it. And when the mind feels so overwhelmed, to avoid making a decision we might regret, we’ll choose the easy way out — and that’s to not choose at all. This is why we often see elegance in simplicity.
As UX designers, we don’t assume what your audience wants from your website because it risks being wrong. Instead, we study your potential audience to learn limits and the choices they value, learning as we create and evaluate. In return, we get to know your website’s unique elegance in simplicity.
Being user-centred doesn’t mean a user-led design
We don’t ignore your needs. Without you, your site wouldn’t exist. Just because your audience is telling us they want something in a certain way doesn’t mean we'll design it that way. People do an awesome job telling us what they need, but they aren’t usually the experts at creating the right usable solutions that are inclusive of your needs; the best solutions come from a holistic approach:
- Assessing the root of the problem
- Based on your goals
- Placing the user’s needs and challenges through design thinking techniques
There’s more than one way to solve a problem; a UXD approach finds the most usable solution that complements your needs. This will give you a solid foundation and the best chance of success.
UX and business goals go hand-in-hand
Typical goals for most of our clients include increased conversion rates and improved SEO for online visibility.
Because UXD learns what your users need from your website, this positively impacts those conversions organically, so your goals and the client’s needs go hand-in-hand.
Although we don’t force your visitors down a conversion path, we will nudge if it’s one they may want to take and has value for them, guided by calls-to-action that allow them to continue their website journey with shortcuts to exit. Nudging users towards your conversions this way is great for cultivating a robust content strategy, but only if it leads to opportunities that delight your users and builds your brand’s credibility and reputation.
UX steers you away from the dark side
There is a difference between designers who manage projects that incorporate loyal conversions and those that intend to exploit human weaknesses and purposely mislead. In the digital industry, we call these dark patterns. A term coined in 2010 by UX specialist Harry Brignull to describe manipulative interface tricks that organisations use to mislead users into doing something that they wouldn’t normally do.
Sound familiar?
For example, have you ever tried deleting your Amazon account? Good luck finding the delete button hidden in their maze of steps.
Or the disguised adverts designed to trick you into thinking they’re something they’re not to entice a click.
Designers should be respectful of people’s digital space. In UX, we use the values of the UX community to manage ethical compliance and create healthy, optimised conversions that custom a helpful and human web marketing strategy. As web designers, we must take accountability and consider the impact of our values on society to ensure we don’t negatively affect people’s digital experiences or abuse our power of access to the open web. Since web designers are the gatekeepers between the information they publish and those using it.
The UX community are active citizens of the web
When we look back in history to 1989, Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web as a sharing community so that it was freely accessible to everyone.
Today, the web has taken on new capabilities; it not only enables the sharing of data but also empowers the collection and manipulation of it. The technology that connects us is also the technology that breaks us. The interactive web that we know today.
You may know this as the term Capital Surveillance. We see this interaction in the hands of tech giants who have become too powerful to control (here’s looking at you, Google and Facebook). This is partly because we sacrifice our privacy to them in exchange for convenience, but this convenience has made us vulnerable.
For instance, the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal, where our harvested data was used as a tool against us to manipulate our political influences. At what point do tech giants put integrity before profit-making?
And how do we control them?
I'd argue splitting the giants up into smaller market shares to allow competitors to gain market entrance, providing consumers with a choice of using a service with the most ethical value. But until we see de-monopolisation society needs to unite and tame the web.
To tame the web, Sir Berners-Lee has created a global web initiative, whose footprints I see within Google’s philosophy with algorithms that now rank websites based on the user’s experience.
The Web is under threat. Join us and fight for it
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
There is still a long way to go before the web becomes a more human place, but this is a great start and shows the power of a unified UX community.
Conclusion
As you set out to consider what it means to own a successful website:
- Lead your business goals with your users
- Learn about your audience
- Study your landscape
- Remain ethical
Doing so will improve your ability to tailor your website content and deliver your own personality, messages, and values that organically drive meaningful interactions and great user experiences. Ultimately boosting your brand awareness, converting more leads and setting your business goals up for the best success.
If you’d like to join our Holistic approach to web design, get in touch, we’d love to hear from you.
