**A guest blog this week from the brilliantly talented Amy Walters of Bloom Creative, who tells us about how your website should be designed for a better user experience. Along with good copy written intentionally for your target audience, you'll have a winning formula for a successful online business presence!
Whether you’re updating your website, creating new social content, or making designs for print (business cards, banners, etc.) you want your audience to enjoy the experience.
When a user has a positive experience, and links that positive moment to your brand, it helps to build a positive relationship between you and them. Which, as well as being lovely all-round, can lead to better conversion and retention rates.
Sit in the audience
Before updating or designing anything with the user in mind, it all starts with knowing what your audience’s experience will be like. The best way to get that insight? Sit in the audience. By this I mean firstly test it out: imagine you know nothing about what you’re advertising and then visit your website as if you were navigating it for the first time and glance over your social posts/biz card/etc. too.
What do you notice? Is anything ‘clunky’? Slow to load? Hard to read?
What are the positives? How does each experience make you feel?
When you sit in the audience for a show, it’s not unusual to speak with the people in the seats on either side of you and hear their opinions. Do this too. Ask business friends, clients, even, to give you their insight and experiences of your website and content. Use this opportunity to get to know your target audience better too: their likes, dislikes, hobbies, etc. All of this information can help you to craft a user experience that’s best suited for your audience.
Design principles you can follow
There are several design principles that you can follow to create a positive user experience. Many of these are transferrable between your website, your social media content, your presentations & pitches, and your printed designs.
Embrace space so there’s room to breathe
Trying to fit too much ‘stuff’ – be that words, images, videos, animations, icons, whatever it is – into a small space is going to create a sense of clutter/busy-ness/claustrophobia. A simple fix to this is to give everything some breathing room. You may be afraid of white empty space for fear it makes your website or design look ‘empty’, but it actually does the opposite. By using space to your advantage, you can direct your users to what you want them to see (and what they want to see).
Direct your audience with hierarchy
Users of your website and viewers of your social posts don’t want to have to work hard to find the information, they like to be guided through it effortlessly – creating a positive, easy experience. What do you want your users to read as soon as they land on your website or see your new banner? Highlight this so that it stands out – make the text the biggest, the boldest, or a different colour. What do you want them to read or see next? Perhaps a short paragraph or an image? Think about where their eye will be drawn to after they’ve read your main heading. Take them on a journey through your design by using different text sizes, colours, and positioning.
Craft your copy
By using considered design coupled with well-thought out copy, you can direct your audience’s attention to the most important information and actions whilst delivering a reading experience that is engaging and enjoyable. Breaking content into smaller chunks with headings, subheadings, and bullet points creates ‘scannable content’ that allows your users to find information quickly. To enhance your user’s experience further, you can write on-brand copy that’s meaningful and memorable – and maybe include a witty pun or two if it suits your business! Less is more and helps you stay consistent
The more consistent you look, the more your audience will feel like they can trust you. Plus, they’ll be able to recognise you too (like a friendly face in the street!) To stay consistent, I recommend sticking to one or two fonts and a handful of font sizes. Similarly, stay within your range of brand colours too. If you have a set of brand guidelines, you can refer back to them to see where and how you should be using your brand fonts, colours, and assets to keep simple consistency across everything you create.
Check out our Grow your own: Brand Guidelines for help building and maintaining consistency. Use code GJCW20 for 20% off.
Can you see it?
You want your audience to enjoy looking at everything on your pages, and for this it needs to be easy for them to see and read. Consider your design again from your user’s point of view. Is it easy to read? Now consider that some of your audience may have colour blindness or be visually impaired and require a higher contrast or simpler fonts. Is it still easy to read? There are tools you can use to check contrast ratios and articles that suggest clear legible fonts for your text. What about your images and icons? Are they large enough to show what’s going on in the image? Is the quality good enough that nothing is blurry?
Try this Contrast Checker Keep it simple & tidy
Keeping your design simple and tidy, including keeping everything aligned neatly, allows users to focus on the essential elements without feeling overwhelmed or chaotic. To create a peaceful sense of order and professionalism, you need to maintain consistent alignment throughout your design. Proper alignment and even spacing ensure that content and visuals are well-organised, making it easier for users to scan and understand the layout and topics in your design.
Memorable extra touches
There’s creating a positive user experience and then there’s creating an EPIC one. The difference lies in the finishing touches. You could call these TNTs (tiny noticeable things). Years ago, I attended a talk by Adrian Webster, the person who coined the term ‘tiny noticeable things’. He explains: “TNTs are all the little, unexpected things that we do for others that show them just how much we care. They may be tiny and cost next to nothing but they are highly explosive – they create the biggest, longest lasting pictures in people’s minds, and make a very big difference.” He says we can “proactively look for TNT opportunities to surprise and delight customers”.
What TNTs could you include in your designs?
To give you some examples, when we were designing the Bloom Creative business cards, we went one step further with the design, adding a peel-off plantable flower that grows into wildflowers. Now, whenever we give business cards out we’re giving a gift too. But we didn’t stop there. When a new connection peels off the flower to plant it, they’re met with a hidden message underneath and a new call to action!
On a digital note, for our website users, we’ve recently added a new interactive touch – a custom-designed mouse in the style of our petal/leaf icon shape. The mouse changes colour when it hovers over something you can click on meaning we haven’t compromised on the functional user experience whilst making it look fun, nostalgic and on-brand.
Have a think about the extra touches you could add…
Design animations for your website that draw users through the page and entertain them at the same time
Add a personal touch after someone has filled in a contact form
Write clever & carefully crafted copy (make your audience feel welcome!)
A free gift (like the seeds on our business cards) with no expectations in return
What else could you do?
Remember to keep it simple
When designing for a better user experience, remember to keep it simple. Keep the experience simple for the user, remember that less is more when it comes to fonts and colours, give everything room to breathe on a simple page, and don’t compromise on accessibility.
Amy Walters is the award-winning Founder and Lead Designer of Bloom Creative. Amy enhances and supports the businesses she works with by providing them with specialist branding and design services. When she’s not working with businesses to better their branding or creating eye-catching designs for them, she loves to travel, explore and be generally creative all of the time!
You'll find her here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amybwalters/?lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_messaging_conversation_detail%3Bs%2F0ASk6NTZOITxGIPMj8HA%3D%3D
And here: https://www.bloom-creative.co.uk/