It can seem challenging to stay current in our ever-changing world, but by designing for your audience, web designers can help attract the right viewers. When brands deeply understand their audience, they can create websites users want to visit and interact with.
Know Your Target
To stay current, you’ll need to know your target. This includes identifying their needs, interests, and expectations. Defining what your business is the best at will help you attract the right customers. Asking questions like ‘what is our core offering,’ ‘who would benefit most from our services,’ ‘what problem(s) are we solving,’ and ‘how are we truly unique’ will get you on the right track.
Analyze your business’ current audience, trends, and competitors. This will uncover insights into who will benefit most from your offering. Once you’ve outlined who your business currently serves, you can go after who it wants to serve.
Define what your potential customer looks like. Here you’ll dive into both demographics and psychographics. You can ask questions like ‘do they use social media, and if so, how,’ and ‘how do they digest content?’ Think about what elements, or moments, would lead that customer to buy. And then ensure they can take the right actions. Such as making a purchase, submitting an inquiry, or signing up for something. Remember, if web designers create too many hurdles, or if the web experience doesn’t spark interest quickly enough, your user will leave.
Audience First, Design Second
With so many websites — over 1.7 billion — clamoring for attention, web designers need intuitive designs and user experience to stand out. Web designers often create an architecture for websites that appeal to the audience, but they also need to be optimized for what the audience is looking for.
UX and UI: Two Different Things
User experience, UX, and user interface, UI, are two different things. UX refers to the collective experience a user has with a product, website, or application. It covers the performance, content, and design of a site. UI, on the other hand, refers to the visual elements a user interacts with and includes things like search bars, buttons, and sidebars. Essentially, everything a user sees on a website involves UI, including the layout. UX and UI go hand-in-hand because a good interface paired with good design leads to positive user experience. Typically, web designers oversee visual interfaces to create beautiful and easy-to-navigate websites.
Designing for UX means designing with user navigation patterns and context-specific features in mind. This also means there’s a beginning, middle, and end so that users can take action at each step. With UX, hierarchy order with the right visuals and content are considered. For example, notifications can be timed to when the user is most active, which supports engagement and a more custom experience for the user. Things like font size and color can even be adjusted based on demographics, and chatbots can be deployed to help answer questions quickly for users with limited time.
If your business isn’t ready to convert its entire website, you can start by adding details such as interactive elements and call-to-actions. Don’t be afraid of movement. Adding in purposeful and thoughtful animation, pops of color, and graphics can create an interactive space for your audience to enjoy.
Web Designers: Design for Your Audience
Today’s web designers need to keep up with trends while designing for your brand’s audience. If your audience is already defined, define it again, and follow it as it changes. Ultimately, if you built it (for them), they will come and ideally, come back.
Are you incorporating UX or UI trends in your web designs? What have you learned about your audience by studying user insights? Tell us in the comments below.