Greetings! Continuing our post from last week, we’re going to be briefly going over how to build a more unified and effective user experience.
The User Experience is oft written off as being too detached from conversion. User experience is an overarching gauge of conversion at a myriad of different points (Detailed a bit more below). As such, it is dangerous to silo its’ components, focus on one piece, and neglect another, expecting the integrity of expereince (i.e. optimal conversion) to remain intact.
So, what are the elements that make up user experience and how can we increase the conversion through them? Below is a list of some (not all) of the points that make up the overall user experience and how you can more effectively tune them for optimal conversion.
Content
You’ve got a product that does something specific and appeals to a certain type of person. Make sure that your copy is engaging, congruent with your product’s goals, and reflects the expectations of the visitor. The last point is a bit more tricky, but helps you know if your SEO is attracting the correct individual for your product.
Design
This is probably the most challenging point for site owners. Everyone has an opinion and it’s said that beauty is subjective…true, but usability is not. Usability is foremost, beauty is second (in most cases). Make sure you are asking and focused around information architecture and user flow before even thinking about esthetics. We are heavy proponents for functionally beautiful sites, and would love to see more, but sadly efficient usability is normally absent in most cases.
Social Media
Many of the same principles apply here as they do for content. Make sure you remain focused with your engagement, exude personality, and are genuine.
Vision
What is making sure all of these points remain in unison? Vision. You CANNOT silo these components without an overarching vision. If you do, more often than not, a disjointed experience is the outcome. You need to develop an overarching vision for your content, design, social engagement, how they interconnect, and each of their respective goals. The vision can remain high level to start, but should quickly have a web of interconnectedness that will provide a rich and congruent experience for your visitors.
Iteration
Nothing can be stale. You have to be willing to make changes to any component at any point if the market, or your insight into the space, is telling you to change. Also, do it fast. As you iterate, make sure you are conducting, what we call, ‘micro customer development’ through some kind of feedback mechanism. We are building a tool to more wholistically understand your experience in an iterative, real-time, manner, but we also suggest checking out a few others that provide effective insights into your site and your user’s perspective of it. A few we recommend: KISSinsights, Uservoice, and Crazyegg.
To keep things somewhat brief we’ve only outlined, at a high-level, five of the points that go into user experience. We will be spending more time over the coming weeks diving into some of the different components that go into the overall user experience and how you can more effectively approach them to improve conversion.
Did we miss a component you would have liked to have seen detailed? Let us know! Post your comments below.
*To those looking for the ’5 links to improve the User Experience’ this week. We decided to focus our limited energies on this post as we felt it more important to point out some of the key areas for improvement that sites can focus on. Be watching our twitter feed for more links to improve your user experience*