User Experience: The Key to Digital Marketing Success

User Experience or UX design holds great significance when talking in terms with digital marketing. Among other interfaces, this ranks at the first place and the reason for the same will be discussed in the article.

Now, one might wonder as to what exactly does this “User Experience” mean and we are here to fill you in on the same. UX or User Experience, as the name suggests, is how a user feels when faced with a system/brand. This could be anything, a website, desktop or laptop software, application and other sorts of interaction. This same interaction between human and application/brand is what we call User Experience.

Anyone can dream up great ideas, but an idea is nothing until it’s realized, be it as a website, a physical product, an app, or a user interface.
Jens Martin Skibsted

How is User Experience made possible?

Every website and brand seeks to provide better user experience for their audience so that they stay loyal to it. This is made possible by taking quite a few into considerations and those will be talked upon in the following steps:

1. Building user profiles and personas

The main step is knowing your audience as everything would hinge on this step completely. Once you know the targeted audience, you would be able to develop experiences in tune with their emotions and voices.

For this, the user persona is created. It is a semi-functional representation of the customer. This is based on the market research and important information relating to the existing customers.

And once this user persona(s) has been developed, you have every information of the person your site/brand will probably be dealing with.

2. Testing of the interface

Interface testing is yet another step without which the rest of the steps have little to no importance. Once your interface is ready, it is put against various other interfaces, including your current one so the changes can be pointed out. Even a trivial change in your interface can bring about great results.

Design has long gone from tinkering and sketching auteurs in isolation to a powerful catalyst of growth.
Jens Martin Skibsted

3. Surveys and consensus of users

This approach is taken into account by almost all the website owners, application makers, software developers and others. In this, interviewing existing customers and potential customers can help you gain insight into their needs and wants so that the same can be well taken care of while creating the site.

There’s no objective standard as different customers have different tastes, emotions or attitudes towards the same thing so in order to extort information which fits their taste, they are dealt with separately.

The feedback, whether it be positive and negative, can profoundly affect your site in the long run.

4. Easy run through the site

Another step that you may need to pay extra heed to is the user flowchart. In this step, you will be faced with questions like “how you want the customer to move around the system”. Begin by deciding on how you expect your potential customer to move through the site and comparing it to how they actually browse through it.

Over here the user persona(s) will come in handy as it would make you aware of the user profile and things will be personalized according to them.

Once you have come to learn how a user uses your site, you would be able to make relevant changes to your site.

5. Sitemaps are important

Once the above points are considered, the next thing is to lay out clearly the hierarchy of the pages and subpages your site may contain.

A sitemap will map out everything vividly at one place and how your customer can go from one page to the other as per their wants and the number of clicks this may take. Since you have all the pages set out clearly, extra efforts like the pages you need to create content for and design, will significantly be minimized.

6. Wireframes and prototypes

Even if everything has been put in place, the site just cannot look appealing without investing into it’s design or visuals. Over here, Wireframes come in use by connecting the skeletal framework of web pages with the visual using paths and once the visual is all ready, you are almost there.

7. Different design patterns

Attractive designs provide consistency and through this you can find out what design suits your site the best. With user interface design patterns like deciding on a good UI element for specific tasks, based on how effective they are, can yield great results(in terms of experiences). A good design pattern can arouse various emotions in users and will give them a feeling of satisfaction upon visiting your site or brand.

8. Readiness to alter your site

The above steps direct you to the building of UX or User experience. If a user happens to leave a feedback, there should be a readiness to make those changes so as to personalize the site as per the customer.

Why is User Experience or UX design so important?

User Experience or UX is important as it fulfills the needs and wants of any user which is the whole purpose of any application/brand being introduced to the market. This is made possible by investigating deeper into the preferences of customers, what they need, their limitations and other pertinent things. These positive experiences get customers hooked to the application/website.

Moreover, an indulgent user experience pushes the brands/applications to great heights as there are the chances the feedback would be passed around in various places.

Final words

In the article, User experience has been talked about at length and why it should be a concern among website owners, software developers, etc. Better UX or User Experience is based on how well the site took customer’s profile and feedback into consideration and made necessary changes to the same.

The steps put forth clearly how UX can be built on your site and how much of an importance it holds to websites. The article can be flicked through when you think your website needs a more personalized kick to it and how this can be carried out.