Invest In A Passion For Innovation
I recall working for an advertising agency. While most of the team were free to run wild with crazy ideas, our Creative Director steered the ship towards realism. Shaping our collective ideas into a design that sold the product to the public. Without this pragmatism, client contracts would’ve been lost. We weren’t paid to make risky design choices.
From the perspective of a management team, you should relinquish a degree of attachment to personal goals. Because you will lose focus on your audience. The priority for business owners is to understand what people want. In the context of computer technology, there are also barriers and unknowns regarding people’s experience of the internet.
Brand Loyalty Depends On Usability
How people feel when using your app, either by laptop or smart phone, is very different to how they might feel about your brand’s values and beliefs. Brand loyalty and the usability of software are separate in the minds of attention-limited consumers. If your audience struggles to find information or buy a product from your website, then even the slight annoyance will infuriate them enough to go elsewhere.
People may love your brand, but are often oblivious to the reality that your website is unusable or slow. People experience stress when a process goes wrong, particularly when making an online purchase. Most things we buy are non-essential, so when there’s even a minor a technical glitch during checkout, we’ll try a different store next time.
Website owners can monitor analytics for high bounce rates, the first sign that there’s either a usability issue or content is hard to locate. Analytics allows us to easily track user journeys, useful for troubleshooting clunky checkout processes.
Usability Directs Brand Guidelines
Strict branding policies can blind you from design usability issues. Brand guidelines must be updated regularly to address drops in customer engagement. Is typography legible or readable, is there enough colour contrast? Include a usability guide for coders and software engineers, ensure code is lean and fast-loading to improve engagement.
Accessibility compliance can be included as part of your brand bible. Minimum WCAG compliance is Level A, which helps improve readability. Though this doesn’t cover content guidelines. Text must be easy to comprehend. So it’s wise to make Level AA your target. WebAIM provides WAVE, a free, quick checker tool for accessibility.
Keep navigation elements (menus) consistent and obvious, it’s how we anchor ourselves when landing on a web page. The reality is we rarely land on the home page, we find websites through search or social media, so almost always land on a section within the website. Every page is effectively a home page, so needs a primary focus, whether that’s a catchy headline, engaging feature image or call-to-action link.
Encourage People To Take Action
We rarely read lengthy articles online, we’ll simply scan a page for quick facts, which presents your business with a golden opportunity: to entice visitors to take action. But it’s common for business owners to oversell their brand. If a potential customer isn’t presented with simple, enticing actions, the chance to win their support is lost.
Projecting passion in your business through design is actually easy. Images, graphics or video play a big role in sparking emotions and conveying a belief system. Rely less on self-indulgence and more on selfless soundbites and easy actions. The most successful websites allow people to contribute or feel valued when they engage with a brand.