These days, growing brand loyalty and a strong bottom line are both signs your website or app’s user experience (UX) is working. But how is this achieved?
As the name suggests, the user’s experience – i.e. putting humans at the center – is the focus. Designing enjoyable, effortless digital experiences is the new “customer is always right” of our digital age.
Was UX a Focus in Your Digital Product?
A generation back and you wouldn’t have known of UX as being a profession, but in today’s digital era, UX specialists are highly sought after.
The reason is simple; how people engage and relate to the global marketplace has evolved, and so we need guides to show us the best way forward to connect with those who would appreciate our product or service.
Beautiful Doesn’t Equate to Being Functional
Having an aesthetically pleasing website or app user interface (UI) may make you feel like you have a sexy brand on your hands. However, if it can’t be used intuitively, one small bump in the road can cause someone who would have otherwise loved your brand to leave in seconds.
Sounds harsh, but we live in an impatient era of diminishing attention spans, where busy people will gravitate to the most seamless experience. If that experience isn’t yours, you could be losing sales and revenue.
Let’s trade shoes to see what it’s like to be me.
Rapper Eminem waxed lyrical about the value of empathy and understanding others’ points of view: ‘But you’d have to walk a thousand miles in my shoes, just to see what it’s like to be me. I’ll be you, let’s trade shoes, just to see what it’d be like to … go inside each other’s minds.’
The best user experience puts you in the shoes of the people you’re aiming to relate with, working to ensure they feel comfortable when engaging your brand. You have to be ready for the fact that these people are not you.
Your audience could include people of all abilities, different levels of education and digital savviness, and people with more than one thing on their minds as they engage with your brand.
If you do it well, their experience with your brand won’t simply elicit feelings of quality, it’ll build loyalty by defining your brand as one with genuine values that resonate with people on an emotive level.
In Great UX, the ‘X Factor Is Human to Focus
For a business, one of the worst-case scenarios imaginable is having a prospective customer landing on your website or app, who genuinely wants to make a purchase, but ends up leaving with their wallet firmly closed, having had a poor experience.
Have you ever felt like you wanted to pay for something, but the business didn’t want your money? It was just too hard to find what you wanted? Or to complete the transaction?
Even in the B2B space, digital experiences can be painful and lead prospective customers to go with a competitor.
A website and product may look amazing, be enticing, and have caught their full attention. But without a clear journey to finding the information they need, and concrete actions to take if they are interested in the next step, they may come and go without giving your brand the chance to meet them and begin a conversation.
What if you’re a B2B company and this is happening to prospective customers every day?
Psychologically, we need to go deep.
Engagement relies on fulfilling customer expectations, and whatever your business offers or produces, you’ll be solving a problem or helping customers with some kind of challenge.
They want help, they want solutions, and you should make it easy for customers to find them.
UX looks at the emotional and cognitive expectations of your client base. How much information can overwhelm you? How many steps do they want to take when performing a process?
Is your platform’s navigation straightforward, or can it be confusing? Have you taken the multitude of different learning and thinking styles into consideration when creating your online portal?
How consistent is the overall experience? Is your content’s tone of voice supportive and caring?
Your customers might well be smart people, but this doesn’t mean you want the task of finding the product or service they need to be a challenge.
UX considers a user’s thoughts and emotions. How do they feel when navigating the site?
Do they have an opportunity to interact with your brand? Can they find what they’re looking for?
Is your site’s language easy to comprehend?
Is UX Just Another Buzzword Trend?
In any commercial venture, revenue, sales, and the bottom line are of uttermost importance, and in this age of digital transformation, UX design impacts business outcomes like never before:
- Website and app conversion rates: when customers engage with your product for longer, they’re more likely to result in a sale.
- Overall sales revenue: lost opportunities mean fewer sales. Increase revenue by ensuring customers see your platform as simple and easy to use.
- Brand integrity, trust, and ongoing loyalty: a positive experience when engaging with your brand results in increased customer retention and longevity of the relationship.
- Search engine page rankings: faster page load times together with lower bounce rates, users staying on site for longer, and visitors checking out more pages all inform Google that your site is an authority in your sphere.
- Time and money required to invest: The best UX results in less cost for your business, as you don’t need to fix what ain’t broken.
Technical UX: How the Walk Helped Enable the Enablis Website
Enablis is a formidable cloud computing and edge communication service provider that came to The Walk when scaling its operations.
The business required a well-researched, strategic website built with user experience in mind, as well as an improvement in their search engine rankings.
The Enablis Solution
The Walk designed a high-performance website with blazing-fast load speeds and UX refinements designed to resolve bottlenecks and potential customer drop-off points.
The Enablis Result
Website load times of 1.86 seconds (over 90% speed increase) and an improved customer experience enhanced by a content delivery network (CDN), which delivered assets based on the end-users geographical location where employed.
Good, better, best: Enablis’ result was achieved by understanding that great UX is the whole experience.
Want to see what optimal user experience can do for your business?
If you’re looking for a cutting-edge marketing team to make sure users seamlessly engage with your brand’s website, The Walk knows how user experience done right (or wrong) can either lead to a boost in business growth or lost revenue due to frustrated customers.
Get in touch with The Walk today to see for yourself how they ‘walk the talk’.
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