USER EXPERIENCE
A positive user experience is not just expected by people nowadays, it’s demanded and to say that the potential success of your business depends on it is not an understatement. It does not matter how good your product or service is if your user experience is poor. 2Cubed understands that it’s vital that your business delivers a positive experience for your users and to make sure the user experience you deliver is a positive one we have an extensive checklist that we measure your website by.
So what makes a great user experience you might wonder? At its core a good user experience is simply how the user who visits your site ends up feeling about every interaction they had with your site when using it. Your goal is to make sure your user has a positive experience and that they were happy with the interactions they had, this will encourage them to visit again.
There are many ways you can make sure you are delivering the optimal user experience such as first of all making sure that the user is actually able to do whatever it is they set out to do when they enter your website, if they want to buy a product or access some information on a particular topic their path should be clear and concise, there should be no obstacles in their way, if a user has to think too much about where they need to go to navigate their way through your site to find what they need, the User Experience is lacking.
Other questions you need to ask yourself are things such as does my site take a long time to load? The loading times need to be reasonable and fast otherwise customers will get annoyed, an annoyed customer is not spending money. If your site has an e-commerce element is the journey between discovering the product and purchasing it quick and efficient? Again if this takes too long or becomes convoluted and unnecessarily complicated then you will needlessly lose potential customers on the way, it needs to be as few clicks as possible. Simplifying the customer journey will help reduce your bounce rate and help push site users down the sales funnel. Are site users engaging with your content? Do your blogs have an interactive comment section to encourage engagement which google will see and rank your site higher for. These things all compliment each other when it comes to providing a strong user experience. Sites that experience a high level of engagement while providing a high standard of user experience (UX) will be similarly rewarded with an improvement in their SERP positioning. Engaging, informative and targeted content helps minimise site bounce rate, gives your brand a sense of industry authority in the eyes of site users and is another of those all important signals of competency that Google’s Search Algorithm likes to reward.
At 2Cubed we possess a number of tools that we regularly use to ensure that new websites are meeting the industry standards in all areas. One tool in particular that we use is InvisionApp which is a collaborative tool where each visual element of the website is shared with our team and the client who can then comment on it and make changes of their own. We also have a seven stage UX Design process which centres around providing the ultimate User Experience.
UX DESIGN
So you have your site designed in such a way that you think it will deliver a positive easy to use user experience, job done right? Wrong! That’s only half the battle, User experience needs to be complimented with effective UX design. Having an efficient and effective and aesthetically pleasing UX design can be what makes your website stand out amongst the competition. According to Adobe, if your web user experience is not optimised, 80% will search for another site to complete their task. At 2Cubed we provide beautiful Bespoke Web Designs that provide a unique website to each and every customer, we never use a template so we can ensure each design is unique to the individual. We have our very own in house award winning Graphic Designer whose creative intuition and ability to conceptualise abstract concepts are central to our design capabilities and central to ensuring your website has the ultimate UX Design and is designed in the best possible way to provide your users with the ultimate experience.
2Cubeds 7 Stage UX Design Process
When it comes to creating and implementing our UX Design Process we take 7 Steps which are as follows:
- Strategic Planning
At this stage we outline the plan and strategy of the approach we will take throughout this process. The client will explain their vision for the website of how they would like it to look and what the ideal user experience they would like to provide to their potential customers.
- Wireframing
The wire-framing stage is where we really start taking the vision discussed in step one and actually start putting it into reality by starting the visual work design and using the information gathered to start putting together and building wireframe layouts to try and create the ideal UX Design for your website.
- Test site usability testing
After completion of the second step we will now have a wireframe that we have used to create a working prototype of your website, we can now start carrying out testing to get an insight into what the users experience will be like on the site. This is an integral part of our UX Design process and it really gives you a good opportunity to give us early feedback and to get a feel of what the experience will be like for your target demographic. We can then use this feedback to help guide the 4 remaining steps of our process.
- Design
At the Design stage we will create artwork for all the scenarios for the users that would be considered very important such as when they are purchasing a product or have to subscribe to a newsletter etc, these are the areas which will truly determine whether the user finds the experience positive or negative so it’s vital that these scenarios are designed always with the customer’s happiness as the prime focus.
- Building and Implementing
This is the step where we build our test website based on what we learned in the previous steps about what the ideal UX Design and User Experience would be and implement elements that will help realize this vision. The knowledge we learned from these previous steps will be our guide in this stage.
- QA
When we finish the building process in the last stage we now move onto The Quality Assurance (QA) stage. This stage involves us testing the site in a number of ways to make sure it’s not only functional but easy to use and interact with. This QA testing makes sure that we have the optimal UX Design and User Experience for your users.
- Client Feedback/Review
The final stage is where the project is fully revealed and opened up to the client to use and test for themselves, if any issues are spotted we will rectify them immediately. This is a stage for the client to provide feedback and to make sure the finished product matches or surpasses their original vision mapped out in step one. When they are happy with everything we will then launch it to the public.
2Cubed understand that without having a great UX Design and not providing a great User Experience your website is doomed to fail, avoid this and take the first step towards success by starting your journey with 2Cubed today! We offer competitively priced content writing and SEO options to all our customers, meaning your new website goes live with the greatest chance of success. To get in touch please see our contact page or give Jennifer a call on 051-440425 or 01 905 8114 to discuss further.