User Experience Design or UX design is the process for improving the satisfaction of your website visitors by making your site more usable, accessible, and pleasurable to interact with.
When you consider that nearly 80% of buyers will quickly bounce from a site if they don’t like what they find, and will quickly choose another site, you can see how UX design would be of prime importance to all ambitious marketers.
What is User Experience Design?
UX design is developed by asking three important questions:
- Who are your customers?
- What are your prospects’ business goals?
- What technical constraints must be overcome? This includes creating the same stellar UX for all visitors, regardless of the devices they’re using to access your web presence.
For B2C marketers, UX design is easy, as those folks want to make a purchase in the shortest amount of time possible.
For B2B marketers, you have a bit tougher mountain to climb, as organizational decision making may involve several people in varying key roles that will each have their own opinions and buyers’ journeys.
Thus, the B2b buying process can take weeks, and so UX and UX design are paramount if you hope to keep your prospects on the hook up until it’s time for them to make a positive buying decision.
Here are a few concepts to ponder and actionable tips that will help you keep your user experience design on point for all buyer personas interested in what you have to offer.
What is UX Design?
UX Design is about improving a product in such a way that it enhances the user’s overall experience.
For example, UX web design is about constructing a site that is easy on the eyes, simple to navigate, and intuitive when it comes to seeking out critical information.
UX design also makes it a straight-forward process to buy from you, regardless of time duration or the quantity of decision makers.
Take a look at the site for Batterii, which helps brands learn more about their customers.
The homepage is minimalistic, offers a simplified menu and clear calls-to-action.
To boost UX even further, the site plays a video on the homepage of various customers using the service. Not only is everything easy to find, but the site is a joy to visit, which is at the heart of effective design UX.
Corinne Sanders, who works on the UX design team at EssayWritingLand, put forth an excellent definition for UX design.
She said, “The user design has to be based on a psychological background.
Your aim is to strengthen the process of branding, while providing the best possible experience for the businesses that interact with your business. Whether it’s intentional or not, UX design always happens.
The question is: are you doing it properly?”
Design Thinking and User Experience
The concept of design thinking and user experience boils down to how well you understand the plights, demographics, and needs of your buyer personas.
You must know your customers inside and out, what motivates them to learn more about your offerings, and what causes them to buy.
Web Design and User Experience
Once you are intimately familiar with your buyer personas, your next step is to design a website that improves user experience. UX web design is streamlined, pretty, and optimized for conversions.
Most importantly, UX web design conveys various truths about your company and offerings. Effective UX design tells prospects and customers that:
- Your products and services are of the highest quality.
- By investing in your offerings, your customers will experience long-term benefits.
- Prospects are in the right spot, and your offerings are ideal for decision makers just like them.
- Your business is legitimate and offers ongoing and helpful support when needed.
How is all of this done?
By following web design best practices, learning as much as humanly possible about your audience, and developing a web presence that simply makes sense to the end user.
Benefits of User Experience Design
When user experience design is done effectively, it helps you capture your website visitors at the very moment they enter your marketing funnel.
UX design then keeps your visitors interested as they are guided to brand content and conclusions through a simple site architecture, engaging images, attractive layout, obvious button placement, and other key UX elements.
How to Develop Your User Experience Design Process in 6 Steps
Here are a few user experience design steps to follow when you want to improve your UX design for better engagement and to achieve your conversion goals.
Understand
Ideally, you will know what your visitors want before they need to ask for it. This is done by creating fully-fleshed-out buyer personas complete with demographics and the challenges they face.
Your organization may have several buyer personas you’re attempting to convert.
In that case, a buyer persona profile should be created for each type of prospect, complete with their roles, objectives, goals, challenges, and any other details you can uncover.
Research
Don’t assume you know everything about your customers.
Dig in and conduct surveys. Do your due diligence on social media merely listening to your prospects conversing. What needs do they convey? What challenges are they vying to overcome?
These necessary details can help you fine-tune your UX design for even greater results.
Sketch
Once you understand your customers, you’ll be better prepared to sketch their buyers’ journeys.
This means you must be able to outline a 360-degree journey profile that includes all the technology visitors might use to access your site.
Earlier we spoke of UX design and technological constraints.
Here is where that concept is of the utmost importance. Visitors to your site may find you through Google, home assistant devices like Alexa, the various social channels they frequent, email, and other digital avenues.
Don’t worry if you get it wrong originally or if the sketch of your journeys happens to be lacking. You can and are encouraged to update your sketches as you go.
Oftentimes, you won’t understand the true journeys of your audience until you’ve allowed enough analytics data to populate.
This requires trial, error, and the constant analysis of your visitors and their interactions with your UX site design.
Design
With your sketch as complete as you can get it, you can now incorporate those ideas into a fully-developed website.
Your overall design should make customers feel as though they are always interacting with your brand. From colors and images to layout and navigation, customers should begin to feel familiar and comfortable with your brand, and their ultimate buying decisions, the more they experience your UX site design.
Implement
Obviously, you won’t truly know what your audience thinks of your UX design until you publish and allow visitors complete access.
Only then can you glean data from Google Analytics and other data platforms to determine the effectiveness of your design and overall user experience.
Evaluate
Once you’ve gathered enough data on your visitor interactions, you’ll have a better concept of user experience and satisfaction.
The more pages viewed, longer times spent on-site, and a bigger boost in conversions can be seen as clear successes when it comes to UX design.
On the other hand, if you aren’t happy with your results, it’s clear that you need to boost UX design even more. This is where testing comes into play.
Using platforms like Crazy Egg, you can see how your visitors are interacting with your site, then perform A/B and other important tests to see which elements might improve your UX design.
All of this can be done in real time, allowing you to get an accurate snapshot of UX as it happens.
User Experience Design Tips: Key Points to Consider in Your Website
To make your website more effective, put these UX design tactics into place.
Functionality
Care should be taken so that the website always operates as intended.
Buttons and links should always lead somewhere when clicked and there should be no errors of any kind.
You can determine if your site is working as intended by browsing as a prospect yourself.
Pretend you’re one of your buyer personas and traverse the site as they would. Many times, errors will come to the fore this way, allowing you to take care of them before more visitors are affected.
You can also determine functionality by watching web visitor recordings, which are provided by many web analysis testing tools today, like Crazy Egg.
Reliability
Visitors will not tolerate a site that is down for any reason. Therefore, your website should experience 100% uptime at all times.
Furthermore, your site should be ultra-fast when loading. There’s nothing more frustrating for visitors than a site that takes ages to load.
To make your site fast loading, ensure your UX design is lean and agile.
Whatever you do, get rid of any unnecessary bells and whistles, like fancy JavaScript that may look cool but doesn’t offer much in the way of value.
Instead, stick to the very elements visitors expect and nothing more to keep your site fast and constantly performing.
Usability
Excellent UX design is inherently easy to navigate. The site is intuitive to all users who land and interact. The design is uncluttered and streamlined for the user’s end-goal.
MailChimp has obviously done plenty of research on its buyer personas. The site is attractive, streamlined, and the calls-to-action nearly jump out at you.
Is your site this usable? If not, you may have some work to do.
Convenience
Along with having easy navigation, visitors to your site should be able to find anything they need nearly instantly.
Whether they desire content or to buy from you, your UX design should serve-up those elements precisely when visitors want them.
Knowing your audience intimately and knowing what they want will allow you to develop UX design that is a breeze to interact with and use.
Twitter’s website is fairly convenient. There’s an option to sign up or log in. Can’t get much simpler than that.
Pleasure
Given all of the above, here’s how you know your UX is effective.
Your visitors won’t have to think when they arrive on your web presence. They’ll find everything they need, right when they desire it, and converting is a quick and simple affair.
From gathering content and learning more about your company to interacting with your content or making a purchase, every action should take as little “work” as necessary.
Your success, of course, will come from your analytics dashboard. The more your increase in visitor interactions and conversions, the greater your UX design will be.
Now it’s time to put these steps to work for your website.
How to Become a UX Designer?
To become an effective UX designer, the first step is learning more about your audience.
No matter how much research you’ve conducted, keep asking questions of your customers, delve into prospect interactions on social networks, and keep A/B testing using top digital testing tools.
Start Using Crazy Egg Tools to Improve Your UX Design
Crazy Egg offers a free trial so that you can see how effective your UX design happens to be at this very moment.
Imagine getting a snapshot of how your visitors are interacting with your site as it’s happening.
More importantly, how would you like to record your visitors as they land and navigate through your site?
This way, you can see where roadblocks occur or where you designed your UX correctly.
With heatmaps that show visitor actions and the ability to A/B test various site elements in real time, you’ll have at your disposal the ultimate tool for UX designers.
Conclusion
To be successful in today’s digital market, you must focus on the user experience.
No longer can you get away with websites that are designed for vanity or aesthetic reasons.
Instead, every aspect of your web design should be tailored for your buyer personas, their needs, challenges, and desires.
Once you know what your audience wants, your website should then reflect those objectives.
Your colors should be based on your buyer personas’ psychological profiles. Your layout should be based on visitor preferences. And the roads to conversion should be clearly paved and easy for your visitors to figure out.
This type of customized UX design can only come from extensive research, both of your competitors and your buyer personas.
Yet, even with all of your research, proper website testing is the only way to hone your UX design over time.
With enough analysis and tweaks, your user experience design can leave visitors feeling excited to do business with you.
That kind of UX will, in turn, drive customer referrals, leading to even greater results and return on your marketing investment.
If your user experience design needs work, you now have several actionable steps to help you boost your results, please your audience, and drive more conversions to your bottom line.
Use Crazy Egg to boost your design UX today!
