The success of marketing often depends on how effectively you can tap into the emotions of your target audience. A well-designed website, good navigation, intuitive UX and easy to understand copy make things simple and give your visitors a sense of control.
This can be a strong and positive emotion, which builds trust and helps customers or leads see value from your content and see your brand in a positive light.
This article looks at the value that UX brings to your customers and your brand, and provide some great tips on how to ensure your UX gives users a greater sense of control.
Quick check: what is user experience?
A quick internet search for the term will return:
“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”.
This is an important definition, but it doesn’t go far enough. User experience is everything that happens to anyone using your website, app, or content; what they see, what they read, and how they feel about it all.
Beyond simply looking good
We all want to look our best. It’s the same idea when we talk about a business’s brand. You want your logo to look great, your website to reflect your organization’s values or passions. But there is something more important at play when you are trying to lead a prospective customer into a positive relationship with your brand.
Your brand image will determine how audiences perceive your company. But you also want to ensure the customer’s experience is one they will remember for the right reasons, whether they buy from you or not.
How many times have you been interested in a product or service, whether it’s a new tech solution for your company or a subscription to a satellite TV service for your home… only to be put off when you try navigating their website, reading their blog or ordering from their mobile app? There are usually a variety of reasons you can be put off.
These include:
- A slow-loading landing page
- An unintuitive sitemap or navigation path
- Esoteric descriptions or jargon-heavy copy
- No clear declaration of what the product is or what the service does
- Unattractive fonts and colour scheme
These barriers to good UX range from slightly annoying to downright unacceptable. But each are important in their own way. You could probably get away with clashing colours and comic sans if your site provides the right information and the product/service is clear and easy to buy. But make no mistake, UX and its success is a cumulative implementation.
Getting the basics right is essential and building upon that with great design is how you begin to attract more people to your business and convert a higher percentage of leads.
Here are some tips to help ensure your website and content evoke the right feelings in your users.
Keep it simple and essential
Think about a recent positive experience you had with a product you bought online. Chances are the experience was simple, straightforward and contained the essential parts to make the transaction a fully positive one. What this means from a UX point of view is, try not kill your lead with popups and offers that distract them from their original intention.
The point of UX is making the intention to purchase as simple, clear and well defined as possible. For example, forcing users to sign-up to a mailing list or login to make a purchase is a needless barrier – one which can cause a negative reaction.
Give your user a feeling of control with great usability
Giving the user more control is a major part of ensuring a positive user experience. This is done by making sure that a user of your website can understand how the site operates immediately and they can accomplish their goal without any hindrance.
For example, improving the search functionality of your website. If your website contains a lot of content which is interesting to your users, they need a way to find what they are looking for. Making this function as precise as possible will improve the experience and help users achieve their objective on the site.
Editor's note: You can find out more about Fifty Five and Five here.
