User Experience and Digital Marketing performance. 6 emerging trends in 2015
With the era of technology and automation, each year brings up new challenges, for both individuals and business entities. Nowadays, adapting to the continuous progress and generating value represent both the greatest challenges experienced by business developer and two main success levers. User experience has grown into becoming an imperative aspect that you will want to integrate in your online strategy, in order to increase the number of website visitors, to engage them to your website and, why not, to turn potential clients into loyal ones.
- “Responsive Web Design”
According to Ajeet Yadav’s article, 10 UX Design Trends You Shouldn’t Overlook in 2015, an important requirement that this year came with is website responsiveness. You will want to start working on your search engine optimization when you will find out that, if your website is not responsive, it will not perform well on Google.
The interesting part about this is that Google has started to use its influence to serve the consumers. As Google stated in their Responsive Web Design, they will not deem a page as mobile-friendly if users have to zoom in to see the content and interact with it. This will eventually affect your SEO and your website’s performance. unfavorable SEO.
- “Bigger Emphasis on Typography”
In the online world, competition is virulent, and companies are striving to offer the most enjoyable designs for the users. Yadav considers another important trend comes from the usage of fonts, as they also represent an important aspect to consider in 2015, when designers will use it as the centerpiece of their design.
Design should serve the purpose and function of the website, without any words. We can consider as a desideratum to understand an organization’s goals and its entire brand just by catching a glimpse of the website. In this area, consistency is essential, but companies usually ignore it. The whole website should look and function as a whole, otherwise you might create confusion in the users’ minds.
- “Psychology”
As Joel Marsh considers, users are very subjective, and UX experts have the responsibility to deal with their thoughts and feelings. As shown in his article, asking yourself a couple of questions might help, questions related to users’ expectations from your website, their motivation to be there and the feeling your website offers its visitors.
In this context, we can infer that the best practice is to think about the users’ needs first, and to design your website accordingly. At the end of it all, put yourself in your users’ shoes. Would you visit your website again and why?
- “Analysis”
In Marsh’s opinion, analysis is the designers’ weak spot, although it should be the main tool to be used when thinking about user experience. To this purpose, the questions he recommends to be asked by every UX are related to using data to discover the truth, the binomial objective facts – subjective opinions, as well as further improvement measures.
Some metrics we recommend you to analyze are # Unique visitors, # Time on site and % Bounce rate. The latter one is a very important indicator, as it measures how many visitors arriving at the website leave immediately, without opening any other page besides the homepage.
- “The Ascent of User Experience as a Business Strategy”
As Scott Plewes mentions, the importance of UX to the company’s business model and strategy has never been higher, as seen from senior position hiring, influence, decision making, process adoption and other similar aspects.
In these terms, we can translate UX as a strategy of gaining more costumers. Set objectives, measure their level of attainment, as shown above, and start tracking the activity (as shown above) and start improving your overall image. Deem user experience as a competitive leverage you can obtain over your competition.
- “Security & Privacy”
Both David Issa, in 5 UX Trends in 2015 and Mary Brodie, in The Top UX Predictions for 2015 state the challenges posted by the evolution of different apps or wearables, when it comes to data security. From this point of view, communicating the security and data safety policies to users, as well as investing time and effort into making the websites highly secure become essential.
Some additional pieces of advice would be to ensure you don’t make things more complicated than they already are, as people go for the shortest, easiest and simplest way for them. Keep it simple, clear, easy and user-friendly and continuously improve your website’s functional characteristics. If visitors feel confused, you will lose them. When designing your website, make users have their greatest user experience – it is no longer important to be good, it is essential to be GREAT. Do not promise content and features your website does not possess, avoid making users sign up before knowing what your business is about and always keep their experience in mind!
Eventually, any kind of competitive organization today wants to increase its % Conversion rate, more specifically the rate of visitors that take a certain desired action when visiting the website, such as purchasing a product. Offering visitors a pleasant experience through sleek, however simple design, responsiveness and high security standards does not contradict this final purpose. On the contrary, all these aspects, along with quality content, customized and targeted experiences and consistency will positively impact your % Retained visitors, % Net promoter score and, eventually, your entire digital marketing performance.
Elena Chițoiu. Junior Digital Marketing Specialist. The KPI Institute
Mihai Păculea. Head of Digital Marketing. The KPI Institute
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Tags: Digital marketing performance, Online Presence - eCommerce performance
