1. Collect Detailed Demographic Data

Ask “Do customers even want this project?” or “How does my product/service meet my customers’ expectations? After that, do market research on who might need your product or service. Discover their daily habits and compare them to your product or service. Think about in what way will it help improve their lives. UX focuses on getting to know a specific demographic and building a product/service that will enrich and engage those users. The goal should be to get them to purchase initially and continually engage with your business. Use Google Analytics and keep track of who is already visiting your website pages to start. Look for their location (do get more local engagement or distant engagement?), age, gender (including non-conforming), profession, and lifestyle (what other items or brands do they purchase from).  

2. Build Strong Customer Relationships 

UX incorporates extensive knowledge of the customers to gain an understanding of why they use the products or services they do. This helps you build what customers need, as well as what they want. Getting to know the habits and expectations of your target audience means you can speak to them more easily. Hit specific messaging points that will bring them into harmony with your company’s mission. Social media and information sharing define consumer tastes. So, if you get stuck don’t be afraid to ask directly through email surveys or social media polls or questions. These two effective marketing avenues could be considered a successful user experience in themselves. 

3. Create an In-Depth Competitive Analysis

Examine the landscape of products and services that users may choose to use instead of yours. It is vital for creating the right set of features that will make your business different from similar brands or services. You want to fill in the gap that your industry has yet to solve. This type of analysis helps your marketing team recognize what features resonate with potential consumers, and therefore should be emphasized in your marketing material. Start with a framework to guide your assessment. Frameworks usually include these items:

• Mission
• Elevator pitch
• Products offered
• Strengths
• Weaknesses
• Brand differentiators

After establishing a framework, select targets based on what other options your customers have. Prioritize which competing businesses you want to keep a close eye on and those that currently offer a product or service most like yours. You want to monitor them in the long term. Also be on the lookout for partnership opportunities with your competitors. Sometimes your strengths and weaknesses balance each other out. 

4. Make Sure There is Adherence to a Core Idea 

Your product or service must serve its central goal. Every feature and interface element needs to serve the core of the product/service. Follow good UX practices, like staying true to your core messaging at all your company’s brand touch points. From your website and offline to social media, your marketing material must look like it belongs to your company while simultaneously relating to you target viewers. Regularly audit your marketing material to make sure every piece has purpose and is fulfilling the mission of your company. If you are busy, start with hiring a digital marketing agency once a year to consult and discuss your marketing material. They can help with one area of your marketing that you are neglecting, or they can simply provide thoughtful questions to help you improve your client’s experience. 

Let us help include thoughtful UX into your business’s marketing strategy! Call 248.528.360

The post 4 Necessary Elements of UX Design for Your Marketing Plans  appeared first on Miller Media, Digital Marketing Agency, PPC, Industrial Web Design, WordPress.

1. What is the core flow of your user’s experiences?

How easy or hard is the experience suppose to be? Is it a website with games where tension is exciting, and friction is expected or it an ecommerce site that needs to be simply navigated to make the end-user happy? If you integrate a new feature, does it help or hinder this process? If unsure continue testing, if everything is working fine, launch!

2. Is the user’s ability to do a particular action going to determine the success of the launch?

In ecommerce, if a client completes a purchase by clicking a cart button that means the launch was successful. For a service-based company, a contact form was successfully filled out and sent to the correct email, it means the launch is successful. These processes should work smoothly. At least one test should be conducted on different browsers and devices to make sure everything if functionally correctly. If the buttons aren’t working notify the developer, and test again until it works. Once everything is working, launch! 

3.  Is this an area where we anticipate users could have difficulty?

Identify any pain-points a user may have. This may include the user interface design. Is the design accessibility-friendly? Is the design suitable for the target audience? Check if designs work on both on mobile and desktop. Are there any important instructional elements running off the page? Does one feature work on mobile, but not desktop? If possible, have someone from your target market or a group for your target market test at least once, identify any issues, and fix any problems in the front-end or back-end until 99% successful. 

4. Does this change the way current customers are accomplishing their tasks? 

Is this going to impact what customers are currently doing? Newer is not always better. Sometimes people can go too far into innovation that no one knows how to navigate your website. Make sure the basic principles of design are being followed. If a feature proves cumbersome for existing users to adapt to, it may be worth another look. You may need to replace it with an easier or more commonly used feature. Testing will also let you know if you need to invest in an onboarding experience to transition users accustomed to the previous version. This will come in handy for updates being made and whether you need to invest in instructional usage. For example, when we upgrade a php website to WordPress we send an instructional video or pdf for the use to refence for when they make updates. 

5. Is there already an industry best practice? 

For example, do you know that a green button signals success and a red button stops users from continuing? This does not need to be tested. If a feature is common knowledge and you already checked it functionality it does not need to be tested further. You should be ready to launch right away. 

6. Is what you are looking to test a matter of user preference?

Light mode vs dark mode is a good example of how certain users prefer different set ups but isn’t explicitly impactful on the overall project. If is your first test has a split percentage of reactions, it may be a simple user preference that you don’t need to spend too much time focused on. Your focus should be elements that focus on the main goal that will bring success. If unsure test one more time and if the percentage is still split move on or launch anyway.   

7. How much effort is this test going to take? 

Do you have the timeline necessary to undertake this effort? Always have due date for the project to be done, especially if you already spent money on it! Limit the number of tests that can be done. If the project is failing discuss a pause to the project and see it there is a way to exit the project or re-organize the timeline. This should be rarity if you discussed the timeline in the first initial discussion, but chaos happens and it wise to develop a web strategy with testing at the beginning of the project to avoid time wasting. 

Develop a web UX design with us! Call 248.528.360 

The post 7 Questions to Ask Before You Test Your UX Design appeared first on Miller Media, Digital Marketing Agency, PPC, Industrial Web Design, WordPress.