Every business strives to improve so it can generate more sales and provide a better customer service, or rebrand in order to keep up with moving times.
In this article we talk about how we use lean UX to ensure digital marketing works.
Successful businesses prioritise continuous improvement; from increasing sales and better serving customers; to rebranding as their business, competition and market evolves.
In a digital world, no business can stand still and survive. A website should always remain the central information hub and a highly effective means for you to promote your business or services. Today’s market leaders abandoned the ‘launch it and leave it’ approach to website design; having gained early and advanced understanding of the prime importance of continuous resource optimisation.
Even with this knowledge, many companies still view optimisation as painful. Small businesses in particular may find ongoing financial investment off-putting. A common misconception is that UX is complex and that enhancing a website will be time-consuming.
There are complexities to the process, but there are also simple ways to use User Experience (UX) to achieve better results from existing digital strategies.
Do you understand the needs of your site’s visitors? Once you have knowledge and understanding of what customers want to do you will have insight into how to catch their attention. This is where research can really pay off.
- What do your customers want?
- What’s important to them?
- Do you have what they need?
- How do you reach them?
Making a list of the highest priorities of your customers is a great way to identify the main objectives of your company. Think lean. A short list of 5-10 items will help you to identify, analyse and prioritise your top tasks. Examples of top tasks could be:
- To persuade users to buy a product
- To create a clear market advantage
- To convince of a cost saving benefit
Many companies assume that user testing has to take a lot of time, money and effort.
It doesn’t.
Arguing against large-scale user testing, Jakob Nielsen asserts that the best results come from testing with only 5 users. Take a look at his findings - a textbook example of diminishing returns. His formula does hold best with comparable users; but even when testing multiple, disparate and distinct users, Nielsen still recommends small test groups of 3, as they provide overlapping observations and better outcomes than larger groups.
Use feature definition, rapid prototyping and wireframes to map the ideal journey for users and customers.
Defining essential features of an improved website function before any code is written will save time by formalising planning considerations and acting as an initial test by posing 2 questions... what is the customer’s identified need and how will it be met?
Prototyping ideas onto wireframes help everyone to see direction without distraction; before the investment of significant resources into an idea that might not even be what the user actually wants or needs. First, check that you are on the right track.
We find that Figma is great for collaborative wire-framing. If you’re a less experienced digital designer, Balsamiq or Moqup may be preferable.
Whether you’re creating a blog post or a whole new website, one of the first things to consider should be the words you use.
Creating accessible and engaging content, based on your users’ needs and your brand guidelines, starts with a title that is intriguing. A good title compels the reader to read on.
Once intrigued, you then have the opportunity to guide users along a user-friendly way.
Remember:
1 Be concise. If it's too long winded, it will not be read.
2 Include sharp images. Grab users attention. Mix it up.
Time can be saved by using design templates from sites like InVision.Templates are useful for small business owners who have no knowledge of coding. It’s important to think carefully about what features and tools you will require from the product, before making a commitment. Will the template offer the ability to customise and personalise in line with your brand; will it support e-commerce and secure payments; blogs, marketing and have SEO capability?
A crucial element of Lean UX: When you release; test your product or service; analyse the data and incorporate improvements in the next release. Tests should cover all departments that have contributed, plus the actual journey experience for real user groups. Further to the usual proof-reading, the creative team should check content and context for relevance and flow, form accuracy, image definition; font clarity. The technical team should check speed; transferability across platforms; URLs, meta data, analytics, traffic load and security.
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Many people ask the same question. Can you fix my website quickly? The simple answer is usually no. Only through a learning process can we improve.
Working with Higher Ground will improve your digital offering, but won’t solve all your problems the first time we work with you. Total perfection is an unrealistic aim within a continuous improvement and optimisation cycle.
With any website or campaign, the first iteration primarily delivers a goldmine of information. It’s actionable data: the key to a more successful second iteration.
Continuous optimisation is a fundamental element of strategy development. We’ll show you how it’s done - and the time you put into developing your own analytical skills will pay for itself many times over.
User Experience design doesn't have to be a lengthy exercise involving digital architects, customer behaviour experts and specialist research teams. Any business can improve its online strategy by using Lean UX intelligence which diagnoses and treats existing problems in bite-sized chunks; aligned with agile methodology allowing for organic growth.
You want your business to do better online and sell more of your products or services?
That takes:
- Targeted Search Engine Marketing to attract the right customers
- Lean UX to reduce bounce rates and keep users in the sales funnel.
Clear and concise information about your company’s products or services will be necessary. With regard to recruitment, your company’s ethos will also be of particular relevance: as generic job boards become less effective due to the growth of social media channels and organisations’ online career sections, companies have to work smarter to attract and secure suitable candidates.
Without a clear UX strategy an online business is at risk of remaining static; converting fewer users to customers as it falls behind its sharper, smarter and leaner competitors.
As a Manchester-based CRO agency, we’ve made and marketed websites for businesses of all kinds, from small start-ups to huge players like JCB Worldwide.
We’ve condensed all that experience into PAX, our unique suite of organic SEO and UX packs. Work with us and PAX will provide a framework - a tried-and-tested collaborative approach to improving your digital strategy.
This is all the SEO essentials and research we do as a first step for our enterprise clients, stripped down to the core as an affordable offering for your business.
Our SEO Fundamentals PaX assesses your:
Our SEO Fundamentals PaX provides:
- Read more about our Organic SEO Services here.
Advanced SEO, building on the research outputs from the SEO fundamentals PAX.
Our SEO Optimisation PaX:
Our SEO Optimisation PaX provides:
From research to customer insights: identifying your customers and understanding their challenges, perspectives and interests.
Our UX Research PaX:
Read more about our User Experience Agency here.
Building on the earlier work… delivering everything it takes to make your strategy succeed!
Our UX Implementation PaX:
Together, our PAX will help you get more from your digital strategy. And they won’t cost the earth.
Turn your website or app into a revenue generating machine.
We use User Experience (UX) design and Conversion Rate Optimisation to make sure your digital strategy focuses on what your customers care about most.
Call: 0161 706 1620
