When establishing a digital presence, UX/UI design matters just as much as your engaging content. Here’s why it’s so important.
UX/UI design can make or break your business. With 83% of mobile users leaving a site after 3 seconds, your design has to be top-notch to attain and retain visitors and potential clients.
Thankfully, those who leave after only 3 seconds only do so when your site doesn’t load. By improving the user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) of your website, you can protect your company from website bounces. Here are some additional ways that a proper and attractive UX/UI design can benefit your website.
UX/UI design can help pinpoint your ideal customer
Much like a customer profile, designers also use personas to reflect user types when testing UX/UI design. By digging into customer data and interests, a designer can test different website graphics and landing page flows to find the best format that converts for you.
This is vital not only for e-commerce stores but for B2B companies as well. What kind of service do you provide? If it’s shoes for women, what do the big players show on their websites? What kind of colors do they use?
If you’re in real estate, do you want your website to mimic the look and feel of a shoe company? Probably not. By investing in UX/UI design, you can appeal to your ideal customer’s wants and needs. Better yet, you can test different layouts and webpage flows to discover unique, inventive designs that your users didn’t even know they loved yet.
UX/UI design cultivates brand loyalty
The best way to cultivate brand loyalty is to offer a seamless experience to your user. Think of the DMV: everyone has a horror story about their local DMV. And yet, we continue to call, visit, and even wake up at 5 a.m. to get to the DMV before anyone else. Why?
Despite having negative experiences at the DMV, we all continue to use their services. Why? Well, there is simply no alternative option that can aid us in attaining drivers licenses or car registrations.
What about your brand? If you have any competitors, or if you are in a niche that can easily invite others in, then you need to value customer experiences to stay ahead of the pack. Hiring experts from a UX design company can be a cost-efficient way to ensure your website design is up to par and ready to generate returning buyers.
UX/UI design invites cross-platform visits
With the right UX/UI design, your website can be clean and appealing for both desktop and mobile users. By 2020, there will be an estimated 7.26 billion mobile users worldwide. That means that a website made for desktop-only will automatically lose potential visitors.
How does your website run on mobile? Are dropdown menus loading correctly? Are text boxes falling off of backgrounds? It’s important to consider how image and column sizing may vary across platforms.
By investing in UX/UI design, you can ensure ease of use across platforms and invite your most loyal customers back, even on a different device.
Design establishes your online real estate
Choosing the right brick and mortar location for your business is vital to attracting ideal employees and even connecting with your dream customers. Similarly, your UX/UI design will define your online presence and brand tone.
Much like decorating a foot traffic store, your online website will need fresh paint in the form of UX/UI design that entices and remains engaging. How do you want to come across to users? Is your company the place for employee benefits? Or maybe your self-cleaning water bottle is the safest option for cleanliness? You’ll want your visitors to know this right away.
Think about your unique value proposition and use that to fuel the UX/UI design and flow of your website.
Your website design can help define your brand
Your website UX/UI design doesn’t have to define only your website. Through testing different designs and page flows, you may find new arrangements that your ideal customers love.
These designs don’t have to live only online. Your website can be the ideal place to test new designs and ideas, with low overhead costs. Once you find one that works, you can expand upon that offline.
Think fliers, event decorations, and even customer freebies. All aspects of your brand, online and off, can be tested first through weekly or even daily website updates and A/B tests.
Good UX/UI design can affect your search engine rankings
We know that search engine optimization relies heavily on writing clear, concise copy that is useful to the reader. Did you know that your UX/UI design can affect your search engine result rankings just as heavily?
It makes sense. Search engines rank results by user engagement and resting time on a site. Thus, SEO methods focus on offering clear, accessible content on a webpage. Similarly, UX/UI design aims to better the user experience.
If your webpage takes too long to load or your photos never load at all, your page visitors will bounce. Page bounces negatively affect your SEO rating and your domain authority.
Lasting impacts of UX/UI Design
UX/UI design can define and set your brand up for success far into the future. Not only does good design get you noticed now, but contemporary designs that continue to change as themes and trends to suggest to your visitors that you are all about growth and opportunity.
Consistency in typeface, imagery, and legibility can also make your website and company seem more worthy of consumer trust.
Hiring the right designers or design company does require funding. But the flexibility and low overhead costs of continued website testing truly make design testing invaluable.
Website design can also increase customer loyalty, satisfaction and even search engine rankings. Take the plunge by pitching UX/UI design investments to your team today.
Photograph by Lisa Fotios