Why UX Design Matters
User experience (UX) refers to the impression your website makes on visitors. Whether your site offers a good or bad customer experience greatly affects how your site contributes to your bottom line.
Your website needs to look fantastic, organise content intuitively and function seamlessly so users can find the information they’re looking for quickly and feel encouraged to engage further with your brand.
UX vs. UI Design
UX design isn’t the same as UI design. UX design stands for “user experience design” and UI refers to “user interface design.” They’re two separate but equally necessary elements when designing a digital product.
UX design is a broader term than UI design and means any consumer experience with a product. This doesn’t necessarily signify something digital and can refer to anything from post office boxes to street lamps. One of the most important things to realise about UX design is that it isn’t just visual. Instead, it encompasses the entirety of the user experience with something, from beginning to end.
UI follows UX when companies design their products. Unlike UX, UI is strictly digital in nature and includes how the user interacts with the product, which is the central tenet of interaction design. This can be used in the context of any user interface, from touch screens to apps to websites. When a customer has a way in which they can interact with a product, that’s UI design.
There can’t be UX design without UI design and vice-versa. Dain Miller, a web developer, uses this analogy to describe the difference between UX and UI: “UI is the saddle, the stirrups, and the reins. UX is the feeling you get being able to ride the horse.”
Common Elements of a Good UI
A good UI design has some common elements:
Enjoyment.
A UI should ideally be both easy and fun to use. This means implementing colourful graphics and animations that are engaging for the user.
Information.
A customer should always know what an interface is doing after and as they interact with it. For example, if there’s a period of loading, the user should immediately understand that the page is loading. This requires a UI designer to create graphics that indicate what’s happening while it’s happening. If the app is working, it must be able to communicate that to the customer.
Compatible with diversity.
A good UI can easily work with different populations and cultures, which means allowing for customisation and personalisation of the UI so that it can be used by as many different users as possible.
Forgiveness.
Users can make mistakes while engaging with a product. A good UI can gently guide them toward the correct solution and allow them to misstep without frustrating them. Undo and cancel buttons are a must, as is a simple explanation of how the user may have gone wrong.
Documentation.
Users who want to learn more about your product need an easy-to-find, dedicated place to do so, commonly with reference articles, FAQs and tutorials.
Consistency.
A UI must be consistent across the product design. If the user interacts with one page a certain way, they will expect the rest of the experience to work in the same manner. Without consistency, users can easily become bottlenecked while interacting with a product, which could result in abandonment if they can’t figure it out within a few seconds.
Simplicity.
Good UI design means the customer can easily understand and engage with the product’s interface. It has to act exactly as the user thinks it should, which means avoiding clutter, complication and confusing or unreadable graphics.
75% of users
decide within seconds
of seeing your website whether
they trust your brand.
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Form, Function, ROI
People who land on your website will notice the design and ease of navigation nearly immediately. Your website architecture, web design and user experience affect your:
- Brand credibility: Users decide whether they’ll stay or leave a website after seeing it for about 0.05 seconds. That means your site must make an excellent first impression.
- Ranking in search: Google’s RankBrain algorithm analyses factors such as bounce rate, pages per session and dwell time to determine how easy it is for users to navigate your site.
- Conversion rates: Clear calls-to-action and other strategic user experience and web design elements influence whether site visitors will continue engaging with your brand.
- Bottom line: Between search rankings and missed opportunities, UX and design have a profound (if not incalculable) impact on your business’s bottom line.
If you have a website, its UX is either helping or hurting your business. UX design services ensure your site is helping you achieve business goals by providing engaging experiences, insightful content and intuitive usability.
UX Audit and Design Services
Our team of expert UX consultants and designers tackle every element of your website’s form and function. From developing custom wireframes that optimise the end-user journey to creating graphical elements that put visual design to work for your business, our UX audit and design services were tailor-made for boosting:
Brand credibility.
User engagement.
Search visibility.
Conversion rates.
Website usability.
ROI.
Think of your site’s UX design as a roadmap for user behaviour. Tell us what you want your site visitors to do, and we’ll help you make sure they do it.
Brafton UX Design Services
Our UX design team uses heat mapping, A/B testing and other user research and audit methods to make sure your pages are serving a clear and deliberate purpose in the user journey.
When you choose Brafton’s UX services, your UX designer will work with a dedicated content marketing strategist to create a UX strategy that maps out how your digital marketing tactics and website design work together to boost your brand. Strategically planning your site’s UX guides the user flow patterns through your webpages.
As a full-service content marketing and UX design agency, we offer a wide range of services that can benefit your site’s performance.
Website Redesign
If your website isn’t using responsive design, isn’t converting, takes more than 3 seconds to load or is experiencing mysterious dips in search performance, it’s time for a website redesign.
At Brafton, we have a complete marketing team that stages end-to-end website redesigns or tackles individual aspects of your new site, depending on what you need.
- Content writers: Our wordsmiths create landing page copy that’s optimised to rank in search for specific keywords and strategically crafted with language that improves conversions.
- UX designers: Our web designers work with clients to create visually stunning graphic design and polished site aesthetics that align with your branding. They can also create wireframes entirely from scratch for custom website builds.
- Web consultants: Our consultants select cost-effective, templated layouts. They work with writers, graphic designers and web developers to make certain that wireframes, site architecture, user accessibility, mobile responsiveness and copy are all streamlined for SEO and for optimal UX/UI.
- Web developers: Our developers can assist with mockup construction, integrations, site launches and complex technical and coding functions.
Our experts have completed entire website redesigns for clients in a wide array of industries, including banks, manufacturers, software providers, health care providers, recruiters, retailers, educational institutions and many more.
When considering the UX and user interface design, our UX team pays close attention to how site visitors will navigate the site, ensuring that information architecture is intuitive and all resources can be easily accessed. Beyond meeting user needs, we also keep aesthetics and branding top of mind during the design thinking stage and throughout the UX design process.
We prioritise UX design every step of the way, because that’s ultimately how you drive desirable business outcomes on the web.
We have a complete in-house
marketing team that stages
end-to-end website redesigns.
____________
Great UX design is all about
guiding users through your
interface so they can easily find
what they’re looking for.
____________
Conversion Rate Optimisation
Your site’s user interface directs the outcome of end-user journeys. This powerful concept is known as human-computer interaction. The idea is that the wireframe – your site’s structure – interface design methodology and UX/UI elements can be optimised to boost user satisfaction, maximise the worth of all website touch points and, ultimately, increase conversion rates.
Some factors that our consultants and strategists assess in their conversion analysis include:
- Heat mapping, A/B testing and other UX research methods to discover high- and low-value touch points.
- Call-to-action marketing efforts, including CTA placement.
- Persona development to establish if you’re attracting the right target audience.
- Assessing how many conversion opportunities you’re actually generating.
- How your site’s visual design may be influencing user behaviour.
- Adherence to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
- The number of fields in your forms.
- Mobile friendliness of your forms and CTAs.
- How discoverable gated-asset landing pages are in search.
- Template and UX elements of your email marketing campaigns.
- Much more.
Great UX design is all about guiding users through your interface so they can easily find the information they’re looking for and, in the end, engage more effectively with your brand.
With intuitive designs, CTA marketing, accessible webpages and usability testing, we make sure all of your UX elements on desktop and on mobile are optimised for your user personas.
Technical SEO Services
You need to think of your sitemap and internal linking structure as the path that you want users to take because even if you don’t, Google will.
Search engines look at factors such as XML markup and metadata to help ascertain how useful each of your pages is to users, what function it serves in the user journey and how well it’s achieving that purpose.
At Brafton, our UX audit and design experts analyse and make recommendations for how to optimise all of the following:
- Internal linking structure: Every page on your site should have links to other pages elsewhere on your site. Strategic information architecture and linking structure are crucial for helping users navigate your website and locate what they’re searching for. Strategic linking structures are also optimised to improve engagement and conversions.
- HTML sitemaps: These sitemaps can help you better understand your site’s structure while guiding the user flow as people hunt for certain content on your site. High bounce rates (the percentage of users leaving after the first page) and many pages per session with short time on each page are indicators that users aren’t finding what they want. An HTML sitemap is a table of contents of sorts, or a visual aid for your site’s hierarchy.
A site that does not load within a
second earns 11% fewer page
views than a site that does.
____________
- XML sitemaps: Your site doesn’t just need to be intuitive for users: It must also be easily understood by search engine crawlers. An XML sitemap assists you in telling search engines what pages you want them to crawl.
- Schema markup: Schema provides search engines with additional context for each of your pages. This enhances how your pages display in search results. Specifically, the rich snippets that appear right beneath the page listing in SERPs will align more closely with the search query. In other words, it makes it easier for users to find the specific page or information on your site that they’re looking for via search engine.
- Page speed: Almost 70% of consumers say page speed impacts their decision to purchase from (or return to) a website. A site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load will see approximately 50% fewer page views.
Your site’s backend structure – and how well you translate that to front-end navigation on your site’s interface – can significantly affect the end-user experience.
And so can we, for the better.
Website Audits
In some cases, it makes more sense to modify an existing site than overhaul it entirely. In these situations, our consulting department can perform comprehensive website audits that include:
- Basic overview report: A high-level overview of the snags that negatively impact site performance and user experience.
- Quote to fix errors: An estimate for how much it would cost Brafton to correct any and all site mistakes.
- Scorecard: A proprietary ranking system that gauges each site error’s priority level and assesses the extent to which these issues are influencing site performance.
- Branded full audit analysis: A comprehensive, branded and formatted document that’s designed to be presentable to decision-makers and easy to read. This report contains hard numbers on all the problems affecting your site and provides personalised solutions to those concerns on both micro and macro levels.
- Competitor & social analysis: Competitor analysis for 5 business or digital rivals that includes assessments of organic and paid SEO campaigns, keyword rankings, backlink portfolios, social performance and more.
The most important elements of your site’s design are sometimes on the backend. Our Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum website audit packages can help you identify obstacles on your website that aren’t so easy to see.
Our website audit packages
can help you identify problems
with your website that aren’t
so easy to see.
____________
Mobile Optimisation
Google prioritises your site’s mobile version when it determines your ranking in search.
Why? Because more than 60% of all searches are conducted on mobile devices. Optimising your site for mobile-first indexing and for a mobile user experience has never been more important than it is today.
Our content strategists and consultants provide in-depth analysis of your mobile site performance (including the responsiveness of its design) and assess technical elements that could be negatively affecting mobile UX.
UX With Purpose
Your UX design is how you get your site to do your bidding and drive leads deeper into the sales funnel. Higher conversion rates and smoother customer journeys await.
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