User experience UX design.

Now that we know that web design has such a severe impact on user behavior, it’s worth digging deeper into the statistics. Take a look at the results of this survey from Marketing Profs:

The survey quizzed 2,107 people about the aspects of a site that will leave a bad taste in their moves if they’re done poorly. Third on the list is the use of fonts that make it difficult to read content, with 23.7% of people saying that they get a bad impression of a site because of this simple user interface mistake. An unprofessional design puts off 26.2% of people, too, meaning that about a quarter of your website’s visitors will think less of your business if you fail to create interfaces that are up-to-date and attractive.

Both UX and UI design combine to make your site visually appealing. From a user interface perspective, NEWMEDIA’s graphic designers ensure your visitors get a true feast for the eyes (and one they’ll want to keep eating) when they land on your site.

Let’s come back to the trust issue mentioned earlier.

Imagine that you’ve spent the last 10 minutes messing around on a company’s website. You’ve got a good feel for their design, as they use red and white for most of their branding flourishes, in addition to using a funny tagline and consistent logo on their web pages.

You’re impressed, so you decide to download the company’s mobile app.

The download completes and you tap the app, only to be presented with a weird gold and black color scheme. That logo that was all over the place on the website is nowhere to be found and you can’t see the tagline anymore. If you didn’t know better, you’d say the app was for a completely different company.

Therein lies the problem with a lack of design consistency. The user interface flourishes and designs you use to captivate customers on one platform need to carry over to every other platform that’s in your control, or you risk losing the trust of people who might buy from you. The stats prove that, too, as we see from this LocaliQ statistic:

Maintaining consistency in everything you deliver to your customers (from the look and feel of your websites to the level of service you provide) boosts revenue by 23%. NEWMEDIA’s UI design team ensures you stay consistent in everything you create.

Have you ever met a person who just drones on and on? You make the mistake of getting into a conversation with them to find yourself awash in a wall of sound from which there’s no escape. Minute after minute passes by, with no break in the verbal assault in sight, as the “master conversationalist” sitting across from you keeps on going. By the time they’ve finally finished, your mind has wandered to literally anywhere other than where you are right now.

That’s how you make your website’s visitors feel when you present them with drab colors, solid walls of text, and fonts that make it difficult for them to read what you’re trying to tell them.

A good user interface is as much about the space and color you use as it is about the visual and textual elements that populate the interface. Strategic breaks in walls of text and clever use of color to attract the eye play as much of a role in keeping a visitor hooked as the actual content you share.

It’s a balancing act, with every great user interface being developed from a strategy that meshes content with color, space, and text design. NEWMEDIA helps you strike the right balance.

The customer experience matters (from user journeys to customer service) because people like to talk. And you’ll find that they have a lot more to say when things go wrong than they say when everything runs smoothly:

There’s a lot to take in with these eTouchPoint stats, starting with the fact that the average person is three times more likely to tell a friend about a bad experience with a business than they are a positive one. That may seem harsh, but it makes sense when you realize that most of your customers expect things to go well. If your UX design agency hasn’t done a good enough job of mapping out the user journey, the customer gets frustrated and wants to vent.

Customers venting also has a severe impact on your bottom line, as these stats show us that four out of five customers (80%) won’t buy from companies that have negative reviews. And it’s also really hard to make up for a bad experience, as you need to deliver a minimum of 12 great experiences to make up for one bad one. Negative feedback (and the drop in business that results) tarnishes your company’s reputation. With UX being such a critical part of creating a good experience, it’s best to get it right the first time with the help of people who have UX design skills.

Knowing who you’re selling to (and, thus, who’s going to engage with your UX) seems like it should be the simplest thing in the world. And yet, research from HubSpot shows us that only 42% of marketers know the basic demographic information for their audience, meaning 58% of them are trying to shoot for targets that don’t exist.

The following chart highlights the scale of the problem:

In all cases, over half of marketers can’t provide the answers to the questions they have about their users. Over half (55%) know nothing about their target audiences’ interests or hobbies, while 58% couldn’t tell you anything about the products they may want to buy. A staggering 71% have no idea what problems their customers want to solve, which is mind-boggling seeing as every company is ultimately in the business of providing solutions.

If you count yourself among the people who don’t know enough about your customers, this stage of the UX design process is all about getting educated. NEWMEDIA uses a combination of techniques to learn about your users, including:

• User interviews
• Online surveys
• User testing
• Existing customer data

Collectively, the information gathered from these activities allows us to create user personas for your business, with each of those personas being representative of your ideal customers. The more we know about those customers, the better the UX we can create to serve those customers.

To continue our book metaphor, if the user flow is all about plotting out how each chapter flows from the one that came before, the visual design is all about the content in your chapters. In other words, it’s here where you make your user experience as pretty as it can be while ensuring that your graphic design elements flow together rather than creating the sort of cluttered mess we saw when looking at www.cruise.co.uk’s old home page.

This process starts with prototyping, which transfers your wireframes into your app or website so you can see for yourself how they flow together. From there, our UX design team starts adding the visual and textual elements that give your pages some sizzle to go along with the steak (i.e., the usability) that the wireframes created.

Prototyping often turns into an iterative process where we keep tweaking and changing until we find the right combination of elements to create a fun (and valuable) experience. Eventually, the prototypes evolve into something usable, putting you in a position to launch your UX.

As an aside, the prototyping process tends to incorporate multiple rounds of user testing that exist to see if (and how) the average person can “break” the UX. Those tests often reveal that you need to make fixes for problems you didn’t even know existed, in addition to potentially showing you how some users will want to use the UX for things you didn’t intend (which can give you some ideas for future tweaks).

It’s t-minus 10 days to launch and you want to do everything you can to send your UX hurtling like a rocket into the public consciousness. The alternative is a launch with no fanfare, resulting in your new website or app taking off with a squeak rather than an almighty bang.

Building up a buzz through advertising and marketing can help your launch, as can offering a pre-launch that allows early adopters to get a taste of your new experience. Pre-launches (assuming they go well) can also turn your early adopters into evangelists for your product, meaning they’ll tell other people that your UX is awesome.

There’s also some touching up to do before you press the big button that sends your UX rocket flying into the sky. For example, if you’re launching across both desktop and mobile devices, you need to test extensively to ensure everything looks and feels as it should across all. Having one part of the rocket working perfectly won’t mean a thing if the fins fall off somewhere else.

As nice as it would be to set and forget your new UX, the reality is that you’re going to constantly analyze and tweak what you have to make it even better. Some of that analysis centers on making sure your UX stays up to date. Take a look at some mobile websites from the early days of smartphones and compare them to the feature-rich mobile experiences of today to see how changing technologies can drastically affect what you deliver to your customers.

Other changes come in the form of little tweaks that make the experience better. Split testing (also called A/B testing) lets you play around with colors, layouts, and other design elements to see what gets the best responses out of your users. Speaking of users, they can also help with future-proofing your experience, as every suggestion or complaint you receive points you in the direction of something you can add to make your product better.

As with every stage of developing a UX, NEWMEDIA acts as your eyes and ears so you can keep testing and tweaking to streamline what you’ve created.