Useful Tips For UX Designer
Be it a website, mobile app or web application, user experience is the crux of product design. The usability, accessibility and efficiency of products are dependent on how well they are designed. As technology is rapidly evolving and continuously influences design trends, designers constantly learn, improve, and expand their design toolkit to remain up to date.
Here are some tips for UX designers that they might find useful to deliver better design results:
- Understand your target audience: It may seem like the most obvious advice but having your ear on the ground helps you understand needs and demands. UX designers can’t figure out the right UX design scheme without having user empathy. Customer journey maps are a great way to visualise the end user’s emotions, pain points, and questions. Knowing the audience and their customer journey helps designers recognise opportunities for improvement.
- Design for short attention span: According to a study, the average human attention span has gone down from 12 seconds to 8 seconds. Instead of overwhelming the audience with too much information, provide content in a digestible format so that people understand the information as quickly as possible.
- Practise responsive design: Google recommends responsive web design. Responsive layouts are fluid and it allows designers to build the best user experience for users of all kinds of devices, be it a desktop, a mobile phone or a tablet. Though responsive web design gives you less control over the design, it is still the way to create new websites.
- Every element should be visually distinct: Each webpage a single definitive purpose. UX designers should understand that purpose and ensure that the most valuable information on the page stands out distinctly. Here aesthetics, functionality and accessibility should all go hand in hand.
- Do not ignore micro-interactions: When designing a mobile app or a website, it is important to keep the big picture in mind. But it is equally important to not ignore micro-interactions. From liking a post to receiving notifications, from scrolling to call to action, there are several micro-interactions that users engage in every time they visit a website or use a mobile app. Though these are tiny design elements, you should care about them as these things make exceptional websites stand out from ordinary ones. The purpose of these micro-interactions is to delight the user and ensure that the website or mobile app that you have helped create is a welcoming one.
- Embrace newer technologies: When it comes to user experience, designers should leave no stone unturned to embrace new technologies. Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) has redefined the way users interact with websites. With AR and VR, users can be transported into an envisioned situation. For instance, virtual try-on technology enables customers to try on products using their smartphones. This helps in making a purchase decision.
- Be consistent: Design elements that will go together should have consistency. For instance, on a website, the cancel button is in a particular area of a dialogue window on a webpage. On another webpage, the button is located elsewhere. This results not just in poor user experience but also leads to confusion.
A website can create a lasting impression on its users. Whether you are looking to get your website designed or looking for creative content for your business, our UX design team understands your customers’ journey and create an experience that builds trust and loyalty from the first click. As a full-service digital marketing agency, we will take care of your website from development to ongoing maintenance.
E-commerce battleground in 2020 – Smart home assistants and voice recognition systems
Increasingly, we are using voice assistants on smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home and on our smartphones to carry out interactions with the internet. This is undoubtedly convenient for our daily lives, but as we move towards carrying out transactions and actually buying things on these devices, what is going to be the effect on e-commerce web development?
E-commerce and voice
Searching for and buying something online via voice commands rather than using a keyboard and mouse is becoming increasingly common. Consumers like it because it’s fast and it’s possible to multi-task.
You can tell your voice assistant to ‘order’ something and it will check your previous purchase history to suggest products based on your tastes. If it’s something you haven’t bought before then suggestions will be based on popular options bought by other people. Once you’ve chosen a product, the assistant will confirm the price and ask if you’d like to place the order.
The process doesn’t end there, however, you can also ask the assistant when your order is arriving and it will check with the retailer to confirm the delivery date.
Voice and businesses
Voice makes things much easier for the consumer, but what does it mean for e-commerce businesses? In the here and now, anything that makes the buying process easier is going to be good for business. In the longer term as voice assistants move into your car, your workplace and other areas, there’s an opportunity for businesses to build up a more accurate profile of their consumer’s daily lives and therefore be able to offer them a more tailored choice of products.
There are of course some key challenges here. The first is one of trust. Currently, fewer than half of consumers trust the product recommendations they get from digital assistants. [1] When people are looking for something new, they are more likely to opt for more traditional routes where they can see images and read reviews from other shoppers. There’s a privacy issue too, with people worried that the smart assistant is constantly listening and what they say may be getting recorded.
There’s also the issue of accuracy. When we speak, we express things differently from when we type. This means that businesses need to adjust their SEO strategy to better cope with these natural language queries rather than just focusing on keywords.
Voice technology may still be in its early stages, but adoption is growing and the accuracy and usability of devices is improving. People are still learning what the technology can do for them but are starting to adapt. Businesses need to make sure they are ahead of the game and that their online strategy makes their e-commerce voice-friendly or they will risk getting left behind by their competitors who do.
Does consumer empowerment help in the growth and success of digital advertising?
As a leading digital advertising agency, we use innovative techniques to harness consumer empowerment for the benefit of our clients. We are constantly developing new digital psychological techniques to drive sales on behalf of clients.
Today’s empowered consumers are online 24 hours a day, wherever they are, and on any connected device. The Internet fulfils multiple, disparate needs, from online shopping to chatting with friends, from playing games to reading the news. This has created opportunity and challenge for advertisers as they can now reach consumers throughout the day (and night) with appealing and exciting advertising formats.
Through digital advertising, marketers can now interact with consumers who are no longer just passive recipients of advertising content, but active contributors; they share, comment and like communications that appeal to them. The consumer now has a very active role in the advertising process and is empowered to influence others.
Some consumers have taken this to the next level by becoming “influencers”. Whether micro-influencers with a small but highly engaged audience or high-profile influencers with a larger but less clearly defined audience, influencer marketing has become an important element in today’s marketing mix and reflects the presence of empowered and evolved buyers who are influencing others on social media platforms.
Smarter digital advertising agencies are now utilising digital psychology to drive sales. We fully embrace this approach; with machine learning techniques which add a psychological layer to our Engage Engine™; we enable brands to truly empathise with their customers.
Our framework includes:
Care: Learn, Rework, Loyalty/Recency
See: Data Analysis, Customer feedback, Web Search
Think: Roadmap, Outcomes and Objectives
Do: Analyse, Measure, Strategy
Our techniques are contributing to the evolution of digital advertising:
Mobile and web e-commerce development: our work is focused around the user, driving enhanced customer engagement. Whether you have a radical new idea for your website or you would simply like to take advantage of our years of digital experience and insight, we are ready to help.
Data Migration, Marketing Automation and CRM: whether you need to migrate a modest number of customer records, your entire CRM database or thousands of product pages, we will help you to relocate your data to its new home safely and securely, maintaining its integrity.
Digital strategy: the output from any meaningful strategy exercise will be a clear and concise set of actions. We make tangible, actionable recommendations which can be delivered by you, your in-house team or by our experts.
Social Reach Advertising: for clients that aim to reach their target audience through the social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
So the answer is yes. Consumer empowerment can drive digital success. Why not contact a member of our friendly team to discuss your requirements and we will be happy to propose tailored guidance. You are just one step away from your new digital advertising strategy.
