Are you creating a positive experience for your customers?
Your audience is the most important aspect of your digital marketing campaign. A trend you’ll see continue to rise in 2016 and beyond is designing a user experience . As you’re designing a website or mobile app for your brand, ask yourself if your users will have a memorable experience and whether your message will leave an impact.
User experience testing and practicing is no longer optional. As quickly as a user finds your website, they will just as quickly bounce and move on if they don’t have the experience they hoped.
It starts with usability, cleanliness, and the value it brings to your audience. But it’s so much more than that. All aspects of your website contribute to the overall experience.
Every business and every website you interact with has their own way of expressing themselves. How are you going to make sure your voice is heard and your customers find what they need on your website?
User Experience Defined
If you ask Google what user experience is, they answer your question with “the overall experience of a person using a product such as a website or computer application, especially in terms of how easy or pleasing it is to use.”
In terms of evaluating your user experience, analyze how your visitors are interacting with the site. How do they navigate across the site? Look at how they consume content and how the design is working.
What’s appealing your customers? UX design works when you allow your customers to complete actions or find information as quickly as possible. When complying with the definition provided by Google’s answer box, you have the capability of expanding your business by appealing to new, pleased customers.
Guide the user through the funnel, helping them to achieve their goals while exceeding your goals.
Aspects Incorporated Into the Experience
When you land on a website, what’s the first thing you’re looking for? Accessibility, usability, value or credibility, or a heading tag showing what the page is about. All of your customers are looking for something unique. The experience starts with a usable design, appealing to the emotions and behaviors of your audience:
- Appearance
- Tone of Voice
- Visual Design & Layout
- Consistency
- Clear Call to Action
- Page Load Speed
In order to truly draw your users in, explore the use of clean concepts paired with appealing images and powerful content. Avoid any distractions that negatively affect engagement and are not necessary to your end-user.
Make sure your users can easily find relevant information to quickly make decisions. The ability to interact with your brand and your website captures attention and leaves your users with a positive experience. All elements of the interface make up the design. Establish trust for your brand by simplifying your interface, offering easy navigation, and quick answers to any concerns your visitors have.
Always continue to look for ways to improve the end-user experience. Test data sets and gather feedback from your customers, family, and friends.
A/B Testing
You may think that your design is appealing and attractive, yet your traffic and conversions haven’t increased. You never know how your visitors will be interacting with your brand. Test different variations of page designs to see which performs best with your audience.
Look at various factors and leverage how you can increase visibility of particular elements to gain more interaction. Which elements need to pop? Your call to action, contact information, icons, and heading tags. Make sure they stand out.
What Should You Test?
Look at aspects of your site that have a high impact on your visitors.
Alter the color schemes and the wording of your call to action buttons. Use clear icons, attractive colors, and different fonts for your text. Focus on the user. Your users are looking for two things from your website:
Test your landing pages and see which designs draw the most attention and interaction from your visitors. There are many tools and software you can use for your A/B Testing. Try Optimizely to see which areas of your website have the highest engagement levels.
The purpose of A/B Testing is to find issues and problems, and eliminate them from your design. How are you going to increase performance of your website? A/B Testing gives you the information you need to identify any problems so you can increase click-through rates and generate business.
What Do Graphic Design and UX Design Have in Common?
Emotional Design
Graphic design is about emotional communication through typography, color and images; serif fonts and dark, duller colors evoke seriousness, while san-serif fonts and bright colors tend to bring out a sense of joy or excitement. Graphic designers are hence very often emotional designers who elicit specific reactions in a user. UX design is also concerned with shaping the emotions of the user, although it tends to take a broader, big picture view of the entire user’s experience with the product. On top of focusing on the right typography and colors, UX designers are also concerned with motion design, the tone of the content, and information architecture, among others.
Creative thinking
Graphic designers and UX designers are both equally skilled at creative thinking. For graphic designers, creating visuals that adhere to conventions (and thus communicate effectively) while retaining a sense of originality (to stand out among the competition) requires some serious creative and critical thinking. In the same way, UX designers have to create products that solve users’ problems—and sometimes, conventional solutions aren’t always the best or most appropriate ones.
Prototyping
Graphic designers often create mockups and wireframes of their designs prior to delivering a finished design. It gives a chance for clients to offer feedback on their designs and for them to improve them without having to start from scratch. UX designers create mockups and prototypes too, but these tend to be less focused on the “look” of the product and more on the “feel” of it. Is the prototype useful? Is it usable? Is it desirable? These are the questions a UX designer wants answers to.
The Differences between Graphic Design and UX Design
User-focused vs pixel-focused
Graphic designers tend to pursue pixel perfection in their designs. Ensuring that texts have perfect kerning and colors conform to brand guidelines often take up a significant portion of graphic designers’ jobs—and for good reason, too. UX designers, however, are primarily focused on users. They study the interface between users and the product, finding ways to ensure that the product answers to the user’s key needs. And they do so by conducting a lot of research—by talking to and observing users, creating user personas and stories, doing usability testing on the products, and many more. Graphic designers looking to switch career tracks will need to do a substantial amount of work finding out how to conduct user research (more about this a bit later on in the article).
Iterative problem solving
UX design is very much an iterative problem solving process, and it can be very different from what you’re used to doing as a graphic designer. It begins with the identification of a problem; this is often found through user research, and if it’s not, it will then be confirmed through user research. There is no point in solving problems that users don’t care about; they won’t pay to solve those problems, and that means your company won’t make money.
From the problem identification stage, more research is conducted into how best to solve the problem in a way that the user will be happy with—usually via observations, surveys, ethnographic studies, etc.
This research then informs the product’s design. Designs are then tested with users to see if the research led to the right solutions. The designs are constantly iterated until research confirms that they are good enough.
Once this happens the product is launched, but the design process is not over. The design will be continually tested and user feedback will be taken, thus beginning a new round of user research. Future improvements to the design will be made based on this feedback.
Multi-disciplinary vs specialized
Graphic design is a specialized discipline, and there is a certain level of craftsmanship and set of specialized skills (such as typography and color theory) required to produce great visuals. UX design, on the other hand, is much more multi-disciplinary and involves many schools of knowledge. UX designers have to constantly learn about human psychology, interaction design, information architecture and user research techniques, just to name a few, in order to create the right solutions to a user’s problems. Don Norman, the man who coined the term “User Experience”, explains that user experience covers “all aspects of the person’s experience with the system including industrial design graphics, the interface, the physical interaction and the manual.”
The Big Benefit of Graphic Design Experience when Moving to UX Design
Aesthetics
The biggest benefit for graphic designers moving to UX design is that they can make things attractive. A very common misconception about UX design is that good usability trumps aesthetics. On the contrary, good aesthetics have been found to improve the overall user experience of product—by making users more relaxed, creating a positive first impression, and generally just showing that you care(3).
Aesthetics also help designers communicate with the internal stakeholders in their companies. Ex-graphic designers can present research results in a way that makes stakeholders sit up and really take notice. Graphic design skills are often thought of as optional in UX research, but it would be hard to deny the impact of well-presented beautiful findings. If you do make the change, you’ll need to balance your tendency to make things gorgeous with the need for moving your design projects forward. There are times in UX design when a few scribbles on the back of a napkin are more than enough to get things going; don’t spend 3 days producing a poster when this is the case.
Conventions and trends
Coming from a design background not only means having a good grip on design terminology, but also that you’re likely to be familiar with the conventions and trends in web or app designs. Most times, UX designers make use of standardized conventions (like a toggle switch for on/off states, dropdown list for multiple options, etc.) because users have come to expect these interactions on a website. Graphic designers—especially if you’ve created prototypes in the past—are also familiar with such conventions. That means you’ll adapt more quickly to a UX design role than someone who comes from a non-design background. This might not sound like much, but communication is the core of any UX design project and being able to talk-the-talk is a big benefit.
Key Takeaways
Creating a memorable user experience results in a significant ROI for your business. UX is a benefit to your brand. The best way to attract repeat customers and grow your business online is by continually testing. Test daily, weekly, or monthly.
Your first impression needs to resonate. Appeal to your visitors, and focus on optimizing the experience and the value of your site for increased exposure to the right audience.
Find out what’s connecting with your audience and deliver a desirable design. Do just a little more than the rest, and explore new ways to personalize your brand. Through your website and mobile app design, think about the experience you are providing. This will lead to more downloads, more visits, and more interaction with your brand.
Use multiple approaches and methods to deliver your message to your audience. Provide easy navigation with a clean design that drives engagement. Engage users with top of fold elements to keep them scrolling through your site.
Designing an excellent experience is crucial. The internet is too crowded to blend in. The more consistent of an experience you create, the more you’ll reach your audience. The experience will always be present. How are you going to make that experience positive?
