Over the years, many entrepreneurs have come forward with different tools and strategies to help a brand in enhancing its growth and customer base but very few of them were able to provide viable solutions. One of the most plagued questions when it comes to gaining customer traction, customer retention, and profitability for a product is nonetheless “why user experience matters”?.
So in today’s article, we will be discussing how UX design is impacting a brand’s credibility and usage, how fussy designs are going to affect, and what are the prominent solutions for it.
What is User Experience Design?
User Experience Design is all about enhancing how useful, easy, pleasant, marketable, or addictive it is to use a product, be it a website or an app. Design is arguably the human endeavor that separates us from other species. In other words, from how you interact with smartphones to how you use your PCs, UX Design is everywhere.
UX is the term that combines all the aspects of a user's interaction with the company, its products, and services. Each interaction generates a user experience that either enhances or diminishes their positive perception of the brand leading to our next point of why it is important.
Why User Experience Matters?
The User experience is always matters and very important because it helps in the success or failure of products to the marketplace. It will not be wrong to say that, in today’s digital world, any user will maximum wait for 8 seconds before your website, app, or even operating system loads. Even brands like Microsoft and Google focus on the speed of their OS or Site respectively. If your loading speed is more than 8 seconds then it will most likely annoy your user leading to losing them. Not just that, from the business growth perspective, it will also be a waste of resources, time, and money that you have invested to bring them to your web page.
1. Impact of UX Design
As explained earlier, UX Design is an utterly vital part when it comes to impacting the customer’s experience in numerous ways. To help you understand its influence on your business let me share a few of the impacts that include: Gaining Traction, Conversion to Customer, Customer Retention, and Profitability.
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Gaining Traction
When you are new in business and want to grow it faster and better than your competitors, it is important to gain customer’s trust. Web design is the perfect element for that! It has to have a captivating content organization, staff photos, and a few testimonials from either clients or customers. This will assist you in achieving your targeted goal and make customers see that you are trustworthy. With impressive web design, you can not only tell your visitors that you have a smart-looking web page but also about the professionalism that a brand or business carries.
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Use Human Pictures
According to some research, the human eye is automatically drawn to human faces, instead of the other elements in the surrounding. You can use images of your team on the About Us page while showing the actual faces behind the brand. If you are selling some product, then make sure to use pictures that explain the interaction of the product with the people to help users connect them to your products.
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Share a Story
A website offers you the platform to create a story that revolves around your product and brand which leads to more new customers and returning users. It doesn’t matter if your story is a silly one or an inspirational one, having a story behind the brand will develop a new reason for customers to understand and explore your site even more.
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Responsiveness
Responsiveness is the key to success for your website. If you will design a website that does not diversify screen resolutions on different devices then it can harm the user experience.
For example, your designed web application is working perfectly on the desktop but when it comes to its usage on smartphones or tablets, all the elements be it images, content, menu, header, or footer, have been misplaced. Do you think it will do any good for the user experience?
So you must always keep your website responsive for different devices, make sure that the text is readable and all the elements are aligned perfectly. It will be a great point to achieve customers’ loyalty and enhance their experience with your website.
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Appearance
Assume if you are a visitor and land on a website that is disoriented and messy, would you like to further explore it? Obviously NOT! There are only two things that happen when you open a certain web page, either you like it or dislike it. Where a simple site/web page eases the interaction, a messy site ruins it.
Let’s just say, you have designed a website or app. Instead of the log out button or a standard switch symbol on that page, you have provided some other designer symbol. Then not just your users will get frustrated but will also avoid using your app or site again.
Besides, it is not a new thing but customers are attracted to graphics. With the right fonts and fascinating visual graphics, anyone can grab the viewer’s interest.
2. Conversion to Customer
Web Design is always impactful at increasing the number of conversions which is also one of the important aspects in the marketing of your website. Also, if you do not have an easy-to-use website then you might not have the required clients and customers which may cause your business to not be able to survive.
#Help Visitors in Searching What They Want
While the website look is important, there are other things that you always need to consider. The site’s usability is more crucial if you want to deliver an exceptional experience for the user. Understanding that there is highly important usability of the site for the customer, you need to consider some factors to improve the user experience.
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Simplicity
Most people that come to your website do not evaluate your stylish design. They are there to fulfill some action, or to get some particular bit of information. Therefore, if the website you are designing contains irrelevant elements just for design with no functional purpose, it will only overwhelm the visitors. Besides, because of these elements, customers will find it difficult to complete what they are trying to achieve.
From the perspective of experience and usability, simplicity is essential. You can employ the principles of design in various forms. Like:
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Typefaces
Whichever typefaces you choose for implementing on the site, they should not be too artistic but highly legible. A text color must be something that goes with the contrast of the background color.
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Colors
Never use a lot of colors when it comes to designing web pages. The maximum limit that you can reach for different colors is five that can be either plus or minus two.
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Graphics
Thinking about employing graphics? Then only use them if and only if they can help the user in completing their task.
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Content Organization
Closely tied to the simplicity principle, content organizing refers to arranging the elements of the website in a way that the most important part is at the top. Ain’t no user wants to go through a website like they are reading a book. They just need some snippets of information such as product categories, headlines, and other announcements to easily see and read the required information.
The design should be done in a way that attracts the visitor to complete the action you want, naturally and delightfully.
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Consistency
Not only should your content be organized but there must be consistency in the overall look of the site pages. When the color scheme, backgrounds, typefaces, and tone of your writing in all the areas are the same, you will get a more positive impression of user experience and website usability.
It doesn’t mean that every page should have the same layout. Rather, you can develop different layouts for certain pages like informational pages, landing pages, product pages, etc. With different layouts, you can help the users in understanding the information they will find on the suggested pages.
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Load Time
Another important thing that impacts web design is the loading time of a web page. It’s a well-known fact that people only have a small span of attention. They are most likely to never again access your website if it takes too long to respond or load. Moreover, an easy to load and light website can help you with Google’s search engine ranking. It makes it important to optimize every multimedia to not only save time for the users but also rank the website on top of the search engine.
3. Customer Retention
Customer retention is important for the ROI of a company. It refers to the ability of a business to retain its customers. High customer retention means that your customer will return to your company, again and again, to either buy or explore your products and services. If you want to increase customer retention, then user experience design plays an essential role.
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Survey
To ensure your visitors can easily use your website or if they are getting what they need, you must take their surveys now and then. These surveys will help you to understand customer behavior and you will be able to work towards your business goals.
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Feedback
Another crucial term when it comes to customer satisfaction and loyalty is feedback. By leaving a section for the customers to share their experience as feedback, you can reduce the problems that your visitors or customers are facing while improving their overall experience.
4. Profitability
For every business, gaining profit is essential. With the right user experience design, you will spend less and start gaining more revenue every passing month. All you need to do is to start working on the user experience and interface which will eventually lead to more trust and loyalty among customers.
Wrapping it Up!
User experience design is not a term that can be defined easily. But once you will understand the basic concept it’s fairly easy to apply. By focusing on the user experience, you can develop a site that’s efficient, and easy to use that encourages users to return again.
We hope that now you have acquired the essential knowledge of how web design can impact the customer/user experience and help your business to grow.
The process of UX design is never finished, you need to keep your optimized and tested to remain ahead of the competition while maintaining customer’s trust and loyalty for the long-term.
If you want to learn how to measure user experience and improve it then check out this blog.