Crystal has been focusing on user experience (“UX”) for quite some time now and how it can benefit a simple brochure website or a large web application. It’s benefits to the end user is huge and what we have discovered is that if no UX analysis is made before a website design or development, the effectiveness of the website suffers greatly.

UX encompasses the better half of how a user interacts with a website, the architecture of the content/information, just about all of the visual design and over half of the content.

Lets just say that again, but a bit more clearly:

User interaction
Content Architecture
Information Architecture
Visual Design (navigation, interface design)
Content
Search Engine Optimisation (“SEO”)

That’s your whole website in a nutshell. You see, UX is all about examining “what goes on inside the user”. It takes an scientific and imaginative approach to analysing the content, it’s importance and how to display it and where.

By producing user scenarios of your target audience, a list of your most important content and wireframes to reflect the position and kind of content inside these positions, you have just created 80% of what you need for a successful website. After all, if your website is not performing a specific function like encouraging sales leads through contact, advertising your products to lead to an online sale, then what is the purpose of investing in a website?

What about an example?

Easily done. Let’s say you want a corporate, brochure website where your main purpose is to generate new business leads through potential customers contacting you through your website. Sounds easy enough, right? Let’s examine it from the customers point of view:

I am not going to contact you unless your company has what I am looking for displayed clearly (information about a product or service)
I have to know something about your company or it’s people before I feel comfortable with the idea of contacting you.
I must be able to contact you without filling out complicated forms. I hate online forms.
I really don’t want to dig through sub-menu after sub-menu finding out more about your services

Those four points (and there are many more) have one answer.

The more I know about your company and it’s people allows me to build up enough knowledge and therefore trust to want to contact you.

The longer this takes, the less I feel like contacting you. So time-to-information is a factor. This is heavily influenced by navigation, and what blocks of content you show on the home page.

What about “Choice”?

Finding the information, and the right amount of it with the ability to find more if I choose too is really important. But what if it is not enough for me? I will need to be presented with a choice to find out more about a service or product. By presenting the user with a choice to “discover more” you’ve now got an informed and driven customer. A customer who will more than likely contact you.

What about the design?

You could have hundreds of different designs for the same layout which help a potential customer contact you, but only the content itself remains the defining factor in it’s success. From a marketing and user experience standpoint, you’ve got a pretty good grasp of what content is being shown… now it’s a matter of striking a balance between your brand, visual imagery and your product or service.

A capable designer can stress the importance of whether a contact button needs to be in orange or green. They will understand that there is a visual path a user will follow because they have created visual queues where the eye will follow using colour, animation, graphic imagery and typography.

All of these in beautiful subtle (or unsubtle!) balance, combined with well thought out content targeted at the purpose of a user making contact. That’s the difference between a cheap “web development” company and the professionals (like us ;).