The days when we used to consider user experience (UX) to be an area that only concerns designers are long gone. The role of creating a great, lasting experience is now vital for fulfilling business objectives. This makes UX a priority for both designers and marketers alike.
In this article, we are going to explain how UX impacts marketers.
UX Beyond Flexibility & More About Market Research
Let us begin with the appropriating relationship between user research, a key element of UX, and market research. Both practices are knotted in a complementary relationship to garner the best design decisions based on research output.
As correctly outlined by the folks at SimpleUsability, market research can help in measuring things like the loyalty that the target market has towards your brand and your product and the size of the market being targeted. UX research focuses on identifying the target users’ wants and needs – which in turn can help in the measurement and improvement of UX. As stated in this same article, the two fields then meet where it comes to specific techniques that help achieve their respective objectives such as the use of personas, analytics and competitor analysis.
Indeed, through market research, an app designer can get hold of the most relevant insights about the preferences of target users and can design the app accordingly. On the other hand, a good UX design helps the app to market as a tangible solution to the users.
A great customer-centric UX design helps marketers to reach out to the target audience for more insights about the UX design. So, good design creates the basis of market research that makes the design even better over time.
Marketing And Selling
The most relevant aspects of UX design are the ones craved by the intended audience. This is why it is incredibly important to know what your target users prefer and dislike before taking the design decisions for your product. It is through a customer-centric design only that your digital product can attract more users, drive engagement and boost sales conversion. If the success of an effective marketing campaign is ultimately evaluated through the number of leads it generates, a great user experience makes the biggest push for business conversion.
When considering to attract new users through superb user experience design, keep in mind the following aspects.
Usability Is Not UX And The Vice Versa
Usability is an inseparable part of the user experience (UX), and excellent usability is defined by the ease of use, performance and visual appeal of the user interface. User Experience (UX) has a much bigger ambit, and it deals with whole user interaction with digital products. User experience consists of usability, UI elements, user behaviour and user activities while using the product. Usability plays the most crucial role in shaping the user experience, but if other aspects fail to drive users towards the desired actions leading to business conversion, the UX will be considered as under-optimised.
Marketing Needs The Positive Push Of UX
A great user experience created for the target customers plays a pivotal role to ensure customer satisfaction and boost business conversion. A superb UX loved by your users is also the way to stay in the limelight while beating your competition. This is why UX plays such an important role within the marketing mix.
A Superb UX Gives Birth To Brand Advocates
A superb UX brings delight for your customers and this, in turn, can inspire them to advocate your product to others. This is a realistic scenario of how a great app becomes popular overnight as users speak about it, write about it and share it.
Strike A Balance Between UX and Digital Marketing
A too rigorous focus on business conversion often undermines the user experience of a digital product and this, in the long run, harms the product itself. On the other hand, when you consider a mobile app or website as a valuable marketing asset and accordingly give priority to generating a great user experience, it helps to make it more marketable. This is why it is essential to strike a balance between UX and digital marketing.
The Marketer’s Idea Behind UX Design
The gap between marketers and UX designers in conceptualising a digital product to ensure long term growth and success is steadily shrinking. The UX design team focuses on how users will engage and interact while using your product. The person marketing the product should also participate in design decisions to boost engagement and maximise conversion. Here are the essential tools that help marketers exercise the design elements to bring success to the product.
Customer Personas
Any digital product, even the ones having a few features, exists to attract a specific type of customer for particular reasons and objectives. This is why marketers need to create personas based on customer insights, demographics and other types of data. By building personas, marketers have the right basis for advocating certain design elements and changes that suit their audience.
To create or tweak personas based on precise insights, Google Analytics comes as a great tool. It is capable of segregating customers based on age, gender, location and other demographic categories. Having interviews with seasoned users of similar apps will also help you know the likes, dislikes, motivations and other factors for design decisions.
User Testing
You need to test real user feedback in the actual context of the app usage. We call it user testing. One valid strategy can be to start user testing with real users having some loyalty or high lifetime value – as these are easier to recruit and they already have some degree of experience in using your product. Watch how these users interact at different levels and use cases. Similarly, test using people from the representative target user group. Personas will help in identifying who these are. Such new users will help determine what they like and dislike most about your product.
After conducting a user test with 7 to 10 people, you can see the patterns of usage, likes and dislikes with different app elements. This is how you can know about the most significant shortcomings or barriers preventing engagement or business conversion.
Journey Maps
Instead of keeping track of different user experience loopholes and barriers for different users, you should use a comprehensive user journey map that covers all the touchpoints and interaction areas within your digital product. Such a journey map help you evaluate the user activities at all steps and touchpoints.
To help marketers dealing with the large journey maps, they must be accompanied with collaborative documents offering a panoramic picture of the entire conversion funnel that the user passes through. The map allows assigning different tasks to different professionals for making the interactions better.
The Top UX Factors Marketers Need To Pay Attention To
For any marketer, knowing the relevance of design elements is of paramount importance. How each design element can impact the marketing output and how they cannot have a decisive role to play for the user experience design.
Discoverability
Marketers first need to address how customers can discover their offerings. When looking for different types of content, the audience can browse, search with keywords or ask their social contacts. This is why the design elements must make content more discoverable through a search engine, app store, social media and other avenues.
Superb Visual Experience
Great visuals leave a permanent impression on our psyche and are considered crucial for satisfactory user experience as well as marketing output. Visual storytelling has an engaging effect on users and helps to promote a brand quickly. On the other hand, visual storytelling also makes the user interface look appealing.
Driving Brand Loyalty
Driving brand loyalty is one of the most important objectives for any digital marketer, and a superb user experience helps in achieving that. The ease of use matched with delightful performance and appealing interface help customers come back to a website or app more often. Gradually, this satisfying user experience helps them become loyal.
Common Traits Between A UX Designer & A Marketer
As of now, you must have understood that there are more common interests between UX designers and marketers than their strict role assigns them. These common factors or traits show how they can work as part of a smart team to deliver a successful digital product.
Optimise User Experience
While UX is more focused to ensure a glitch-free performance and flawless experience, marketing is more focused on making a lasting brand impression. Both objectives can be put together by delivering a memorable user experience creating a positive impact on the brand.
New User Acquisition
Generally, marketers are obsessed with the target audience and what they are looking for. By knowing what their targeted user likes, dislikes and prefers through market research, designers can deliver UX meant for the target audience and with every element, they are looking for. That is how marketers and UX designers work together to attract new users.
Boost User Engagement
Marketers focus on boosting user engagement by offering them the right means and tools to search and engage with content. By utilising the latest technologies such as AR, VR, AI, and machine learning, UX designers can help users in fulfilling their expectations and enhancing engagement.
Enhance Business Conversion
Marketers persuade users to buy products by offering the lucrative incentives and promotions that users expect. UX designers help marketers in this persuading effort by bringing out perfect page layout and design elements to push users towards taking positive actions leading to more sales conversion.
Smooth Customer Journey
Marketing does the outstanding job of bringing users on a website or app. Now, these users need to be impressed with the superb ease of use, appealing user interface and pleasing way to get what they want. This is what UX designers are responsible for doing after marketers bring traffic.
Content
Most users do not stick longer to a website or app that looks great but lacks useful content. So, content marketing is a crucial aspect in the mix of marketing and UX design elements. The UX designers need to optimise the readability and usability of the content.
Automation
Both marketers and UX experts need to have access to a variety of user information corresponding to their behaviour, preferences, dislikes and triggers. This multifaceted user data will help in the understanding of user behaviour and in serving users with content and UX elements in the right measure.
How A Marketer Should Understand UX & Work With The UX Designer To Serve A Better Design
The complementary role of UX design and marketing for the success of a digital product is already established. In the present context of digital products, they have to work hand in hand for delivering a superb user experience and garnering maximum marketing outputs.
While market research helps to know the customer in-depth, user research helps in identifying the most relevant insights for understanding the user experience. Together, they bring the marketers’ and UX designers‘ point of view to shape the right user experience geared towards more engagement and business conversion.
In this regard, market research and user research should consider the following aspects while shaping the right user experience for a digital product.
- Developers and designers need to address the specific needs of the consumers at every stage of the development of the digital product.
- The product development process should be aligned with an agile, interactive and consistently proactive development approach.
In this regard, marketers should continually enrich the UX design inputs with the right directives about what the consumers want. Successfully incorporating user insights and customer wants into the UX design mix is crucial.
Incorporating a multifaceted storytelling approach to UX design also plays a crucial role in the success of a digital product. For instance, you can always tell a brand story in multiple ways involving a variety of layout, images and copy into the mix. Now, for each storytelling option, embracing the right perspective to serve the intended users is what matters most for the success of the app. UX design always remains a crucial part of brand storytelling, and there the marketing message can only be carried forward through excellence of design.
Conclusion
UX is already a priority for many digital marketers across successful brands. The roles of marketers and UX designers continue to overlap into one another for shaping the customer-centric digital products of the future.
Want to learn more?
Are you interested in the managerial and strategic aspects of UX? The online course on UX Management and Strategy can teach you the necessary skills on the subject and earn you an industry-recognized course certificate to advance your career. If, on the other hand, you want to brush up on the basics of UX and Usability, the online course on User Experience might be a better fit for you (or another design topic). Good luck on your learning journey!
(Lead image: Depositphotos)
