UI & UX – The Dynamic Duo Driving Your Digital Marketing Strategy

UI & UX: How to Deliver the Digital Experiences Your Visitors Will Love

UI and UX. User Interface and User Experience, to give them their Sunday names, tend to be used interchangeably. Although that’s understandable, they really are separate – but intimately connected – disciplines. Harnessing the power of both is the key to a digital marketing strategy that delivers results.

UI

User Interface. Here we’re talking about an application’s graphical layout: the items your visitor will interact with. These can include:

• Page layout and organisation
• Buttons
• Sliders
• Animations
• Images
• Text – and the fields your visitors might enter text into

We’ll be examining UI more closely in a future post. Right now, though, let’s look more closely at UX.

UX

User Experience. UX determines how visitors interact with UI’s graphical elements. Here we’re looking to create a logical, intuitive journey: an app or a multi-platform website that’s easy to use, holds attention and invites repeat visits.

The Epic UI & UX Voyage Begins

On this jaunt, if UI is about the important stuff in our backpack, UX is all about the journey itself. Above all, it’s about the grabbing of attention. The Wow Factor and – the clue is in the term – the experience.

Expanding on this, at Hookson, our UX design solutions always keep people in mind. And when we say people, we mean users. We apply brilliant UX design that makes websites and apps a joy to experience.

That might sound a bit fanciful. A bit fluffy. But a website that’s top for experience is often a website that’s top for results.

Suddenly we have a hard-nosed business device on our hands. Suddenly it’s easier to see that UX should be sitting at the heart of every organisation’s digital strategy. You’ll certainly find it flying high at the likes of Amazon, Apple and Google. And if it’s good enough for them…

So let’s get to it. Here are seven solid benefits you’ll experience by applying visitor-focused UX across your digital products:

Increase Engagement (and Sales)

Why not start with a classic business goal? Satisfied users visit, share and buy more. We get it: that’s hardly news. But UX is the number-one way to keep visitors happy and loyal. It does this by championing natural, organic and repeated engagement. And a strategy that mixes the potent powers of UX with traditional digital advertising is one that pays off short and long term.

Decrease Costs (and Frustration)

We’ve all been there. You trawl a website looking for specific information – an opening-time, say, or a street address. And you can’t find it. It’s either not there or, worse, it is there but only the most forensic search would ever uncover it.

Thoughtful UX makes search and navigation easy. For all organisations that makes for those all-important happy visitors. And for certain organisations that can reduce productivity-sapping calls to service numbers.

Attract Those Must-Visit Reviews

The better experience your website or app provides, the happier your users will be. Great UX, therefore, is your route to happy visitors. Organisations that go the extra mile are the ones that visitors reward with trusted reviews. These can go a long way to snagging brand-new visitors. And connected to this, great UI and UX should, of course, make it a snap for visitors to post those attention-grabbing opinions.

Unleash UX for A1 SEO

Fantastic UX can give your Search Engine Optimisation efforts a major boost too. The UX mantra of making visitor journeys a joy dovetails neatly with established SEO principles. These include:

• Writing super-focused product names and descriptions
• Making text scannable with smart use of sub-headlines
• Maximising H1 and H2 heading titles
• Making sure menus are clear and uncluttered
• Providing a sitemap
• Ensuring responsive design – so websites shine on tablets and mobiles too

Become the Clear UI & UX Favourite

Great UX helps websites, apps – and the organisation as a whole – stand apart. It’s true for even the most crowded markets. That’s because well-planned UX – the kind that’s logical, seamless and keeps people front and centre – can act like a visitor-magnet.

A quick exercise: think about the websites and apps you like, trust and regularly use. We bet each one of them delivers an intuitive and headache-free experience. That’s the result of UX that’s been deeply considered. And that’s the kind of UX we deliver at Hookson.

Foster a Customer Focus

As we know, UX as a discipline is hugely customer-focused. Subsequently, it places your visitor/customer at the centre of everything. This thinking is infectious and can make a real difference to your organisation, its decision-makers and its staff. That can transform a previously OK business into one that rapidly builds a reputation for unique customer care.

Treat UI & UX as Company-Wide Touchstones

When great digital UX is succeeding, it’s getting results, turning browsers into buyers, destroying bounce rates and pulling in enquiries. So don’t forget to apply what’s working across other communications. Press and print. Internal comms. Presentations. UX might seem like its exclusive to the digital landscape, but its common-sense learnings are a great fit in loads of business areas.