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If you have a website, mobile app, or social media presence, you have users for those digital points of contact. And if you have users, then those users come with certain expectations. Whether those expectations are met determines whether they interact with you, become leads, or eventually become customers.<\/p>\n
This means that, regardless of the type of product or service you’re selling, if you have a web presence, you need to think about user experience (or UX).<\/p>\n
What a UX Toolkit Is and Why You Need One<\/h3>\n
Let’s start with what UX is, as that is a common question we get from clients. One of our favorite definitions is from the folks over at Foolproof<\/a>, a UX consulting company:<\/p>\n Experience Design* is a design practice focused on human outcomes, particularly the level of engagement and satisfaction that the user derives from a product or service and the relevance of the experience to their needs and context.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n *Note: Experience Design, User Experience Design, and User Experience are typically synonymous terms.<\/em><\/p>\n So, UX is the practice of making sure that people can use any digital components of your business (i.e. websites, landing pages, graphics, social media profiles, social media posts, etc.), that they find these components\u00a0engaging, and that they are satisfied with their experience with these components. You also want to make sure that you’re designing your web presence for the actual users you’re trying to reach.<\/p>\n If there’s one key term to remember from the above definition, it’s relevance<\/strong>. If\u00a0a user from a target demographic you’re trying to reach searches online for your product or service and finds your website, but doesn’t find the content or design of your website relevant to what they are looking for, they will most likely abandon it in favor of another search result.<\/p>\n Of course, engagement and satisfaction are also key things to think about. Users evaluate relevance and engagement at roughly the same time. Engagement<\/strong> is a highly subjective measure of how excited someone gets when they first encounter a website. It involves everything from the typography<\/a> of your fonts to the emotional impact of your logo to how intuitive your site is to navigate.<\/p>\n Satisfaction<\/strong> is typically a measure of how users feel when they come away from your website. Do they feel their needs have been met? Do they feel let down? Did they find what they were expecting to find? Did all the interactions with your site work like they expected them to?<\/p>\n So, the UX of your website can be thought of as the\u00a0subjective experience your actual users have with your website.<\/strong><\/p>\n Now that you have a better understanding of what UX is, it’s time to think about how you can improve it for your business.<\/p>\n In order to improve the subjective experiences users have when they encounter your business’s website, you need to learn to think like your users. You may be very proud of your website. You may like everything about it. But do your users? And more importantly: does the subjective experience your users have with your website convince them to become customers?<\/p>\n To help you answer this question, you need to be thinking about the following components of your website’s UX:<\/p>\n A lot of clients we have individually worked with<\/a>\u00a0over the years have come to us with the impression that they don’t have to worry about UX. UX kind of sounds like an esoteric term if you’re not familiar with it. It sounds like something only big technology companies designing customized software need to think about.<\/p>\n We often start conversations with clients by explaining that if you have a website, then you have a specific user experience in mind. You want users to click on certain buttons, to read certain information, and to come away from your site with particular notions. If you didn’t design your website, then the user experience of your site was probably determined by whoever did. Your web designer made certain decisions regarding what users would expect when they arrived at your site, and these decisions influenced the final design.<\/p>\n Paying attention to UX means making these decisions consciously. If you’re working with a web designer, you need to make them aware of the people your website is targeting. The more specific you can be, the better. Also: if they don’t have plans to test a prototype of your website with actual users before launching it, you should ask them why.<\/p>\n UX is all about making data-driven decisions in order to appeal to a specific audience. If you don’t know what the specific people you’re trying to attract want from your website, it’s next to impossible to design a relevant, engaging, and satisfying experience for them.<\/p>\n If you have a website, mobile app, or social media presence, you have users for those digital points of contact. And if you have users, then those users come with certain expectations. Whether those expectations are met determines whether they interact with you, become leads, or eventually become customers. This means that, regardless of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"New Blog Post: The Sharpest Tool For Businesses Is a UX Toolkit","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14,38,40,41,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digital-marketing","category-tools","category-usability","category-user-research","category-ux","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5lzBX-1bK","builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contentgarden.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contentgarden.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contentgarden.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contentgarden.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contentgarden.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4572"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.contentgarden.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4572\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7331,"href":"https:\/\/www.contentgarden.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4572\/revisions\/7331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.contentgarden.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contentgarden.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.contentgarden.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Components of a UX Toolkit<\/h3>\n
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Just Remember:\u00a0You Have a Specific User Experience in Mind Whether You’re Conscious of It or Not<\/h3>\n
Need Help With UX?<\/h3>\nGet a Free 30-Minute Consultation<\/a>\n\n