DESIGNING THE PERFECT [USER EXPERIENCE] #UX
I. Why is #UX Fundamental to Contextual Marketing
What two objectives should a website with a good user experience accomplish?
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How can you ensure that the content on your website will be helpful for your users?
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Your website should be tailored to your users in order to attract them to your website and guide them down the path to becoming customers. A website with a good user experience helps its visitors accomplish their goals. So, understanding your users’ needs should first and foremost be in your user experience strategy.
The challenge of a good user experience is to align your business goals with your users’ needs. 
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By presenting content that will be that is relevant to the user,
that is, by delivering content that is relevant with the individual’s buying journey. 
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II. How to Deliver a Successful User Experience
How do you optimize content to make your website useful?
By paying attention to Buyers journey.
The Buyer’s Journey is a research process that an individual takes leading up to a purchase. Your website content will answer your user’s questions and you’ll help them progress towards making a buying decision and becoming a customer. The Buyer’s Journey contains three stages: the awareness stage, the consideration stage, and the decision stage. In the awareness stage, a prospect recognizes an issue that needs to be resolved. They begin researching the issue to better understand and frame their problem. In the consideration stage, a prospect has a clearly defined idea of the problem. Additionally, they have researched all of the potential solutions for their issue. In the decision stage, a prospect has evaluated all of the different solutions and must now choose a vendor to help them solve their problem. Your website can help keep your customers happy by providing the right experience and the right content to them. Useful content for your current customers can result in a sales transaction, depending on what the customer needs. 53% of marketers say continued communication and nurturing of their existing customers results in moderate to significant revenue impact. Why do you want to keep your website consistent from page to page?
Familiarity is something that humans inherently like. This phenomenon is referred to as the mere-exposure effect.
Psychologist Robert Zajonc defined this term as: “The more familiar we are with something, the more we like it.” 
Which design parameter is most important to creating an appealing website?
Simple can be appealing. When users can understand the page’s purpose and content at a quick glance, this can create a positive user experience for them.
Use the whitespace on each page to visually frame important information and shape the focus of the user. Also, a relevant image is also a great way to convey a lot of information and give the page some appealing visual interest. When ensuring that your website is appealing, keep the intuitive principle in mind as well. You’re solving one goal per page, so choose your layout and the elements on the page wisely. 
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How can you ensure that your website only asks users to take one step at a time?
Anticipate what top questions a visitor might have and provide content that addresses the right questions, one at a time.
First, No matter which page you are creating on your website, be sure that the page is for one visitor problem at a time. Second, only ask your visitor to take one action at a time on each page. Third, the content guides the user to their individual next stage of buyer's journey. If they’re on the About Us page, suggest for them to read a testimonial. If they’re on a Products or Services page, ask them to watch your case study video. How do you ensure that your navigation promotes the accessibility of your site?
Include a navigation menu in your header and footer. This will help to simplify navigation and help users stay engaged when they have finished reading a page.
Choose a navigation style: flat or deep. Simplicity is key, either way you choose. To keep navigation simple for your users, aim to have no more than seven menu items in your main navigation, and in most cases, have no more than three levels of sub-navigation. Don’t give your users too many choices–if you confuse them, you might lose them. 
How will conducting stakeholder interviews benefit your evaluation? Other people in your organization may reveal issues that they have encountered with the website or provide valuable direction for changes.
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What is a Style Guide and why is it necessary to create one?
The style guides help ensure consistency. Your style guide can include instructions for font choices such as family, size and color. You can include logo treatments like the example shown here, and page layout guidelines. By establishing design parameters, you’ll be able to provide a consistent experience.
You can also include guidelines for written content, like tone of voice or specific language that’s used when addressing particular buyer personas. This list of items is just to get you started with your style guide. Don’t feel limited to this select few. Your style guide will be updated regularly by designers and marketers in your organization. Take some time to make sure that your style guide is up-to-date or take the time to create one now. 
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How do you perform usability testing?Watching how a person uses your website will help you identify content areas that are lacking or missing entirely, navigation issues and you’ll also find out what questions people have.
It’s a good practice to recruit both your current customers and non-customers. The stronger the user mix, the more objective your results will be. Different audiences will have different experiences on your website. So think about your buyer personas and select audiences composed of similar people. To determine if someone is a good candidate or not, send the interested participants to a form called a screener. To make your testing as clear as possible, give your users one task. Pick a common problem, question or need that your users have when they arrive on your website, and ask your testers to walk you through how they would accomplish that goal. Don’t forget the key best practices for a positive user experience. Keep the website’s usefulness, appeal, intuitiveness, consistency and accessibility in mind as you design your usability test and evaluate the results. Be sure to ask each question the exact same way to each tester and try not to suggest answers or hint towards one. The easiest way to ensure good testing process is to write out a script and follow it every time. In addition, you’ll want to record the results (for internal use only, of course). Take thorough notes or record the session to make sure that you retain what you learn. Lastly, you’ll want to keep conducting usability tests until you aren’t surprised by the results. That will be your indicator of having a large enough sample size and testing the right things. |