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Design Thinking From the Start: Planning CX With Strategy

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By Nathan Eddy
Building a customer-centric future is more important now than ever. Agile CX designs that can keep up with changing customer preferences are essential.

The race to customer experience (CX) excellence has been on for quite some time, but today it’s more apparent than ever that the online experience can really make or break a brand.

There’s very little room for error, and this is even truer in an economic downturn when customers are more cautious with their spending.

Having a customer-driven, solution-focused approach to CX design is critical to delivering the experiences customers want — not the ones you think they want.

Marketing and CX experts need to be aligned on what both see as the common customer problems, customer bright spots and the priorities to reinforce and fix those areas to best work together to incorporate design thinking.

Boosting CX Agility With Design Thinking

“The secret to increasing engagement and reducing dropoff is pretty simple: understanding what customers are trying to do, and how they want to go about it,” explained Niki Hall, CMO of Contentsquare.

She said the benefit of the design thinking approach is that is has a built-in strategy to test, troubleshoot and improve — key attributes of CX agility, which has proven critical in the face of shifting consumer trends.

The short form of the design thinking process can be articulated in five steps or phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype and test.

“The whole design thinking methodology is underpinned by empathy — in other words, the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes,” Hall said.

When it comes to building standout experiences that can adapt to shifting consumer priorities, having that ability to understand customers in real time and to surface friction and bottlenecks along the customer journey is key.

“That’s the beauty of customer experience data — with a holistic understanding of why customers behave the way they do, CX teams are equipped to experiment, iterate and improve,” she noted.

Design Thinking Offers Consistent Approach

Chad Storlie, senior director and analyst at Gartner, explained there are two primary reasons why design thinking is important for CX.

“First, design thinking is built around the customer and CX improvements all revolve around determining and delivering to the customer needs along the customer journey,” he said. “Second, design thinking is a consistent approach for observing, understanding and delivering to customer needs.”

He said this consistent approach fits very well with other customer experience tools such as personas, journey maps and customer experience scorecards.

“Design thinking is not a ‘giant killer’ for instant customer experience success,” he cautioned. “It is a rigorous research and development process that must be fully adhered to, so customer needs are clearly understood, developed, tested and delivered for customer success.”

Customer Needs Must Be the Focus

Just like in customer experience, the success of design thinking is built within the clear and precise understanding of what the customer needs to be successful at the design point or at the customer journey stage, which is usually encapsulated within the empathize and define steps.

Storlie said these are the critically essential elements because if you do not fully understand what the customer needs, then all the following steps in the design thinking process will be flawed because you did not fully understand what the customer needed to be successful.

“For example, if I am building a mobile application targeted at rural farmers, I have key considerations for the daily work of a farmer,” he said. ”If I don’t make the application UX easy to use when the farmers are wearing gloves or when they are in a low availability of Wi-Fi area, I am fundamentally misunderstanding my customer base in my design process.”

Therefore, the design thinking process should really emphasize customer observation, customer “go and see,” and customer interviews to make sure that they have identified the correct customer needs.

A Companywide Commitment to Design Thinking

From Hall’s perspective, design thinking is more than just a tactic; for it to be impactful, it needs to be an organizationwide mindset.

“When it comes to building outstanding customer experiences, customer understanding needs to be at the heart of all decision-making, and across the organization,” she explained.

Design thinking provides a framework and methodology to ensure impactful action, but it really boils down to having a human-driven, solution-focused, iterative process — something that can benefit any innovation and troubleshooting strategy.

Storlie said design thinking must focus on the consistent end-to-end execution of a process that will deliver for the customer.

“Design thinking will extend into internal teams that need to have their own internal redesign process to meet the customer needs that design thinking steps have revealed,” he noted.

With this understanding, design thinking stakeholders must include the internal functional teams that are directly and indirectly involved with delivering the improved process originating from the design thinking process.

He pointed out the inclusion of all direct and indirect internal stakeholders also significantly increases the likelihood of adoption because stakeholders are identified and included in the design thinking process from the beginning.

“The inclusion of internal stakeholders also makes the design thinking team more effective because the internal stakeholders can provide their expertise and historical experience to ensure an effective design thinking product,” Storlie said.

Building a Customer-Centric Future

Hall explained business success in the customer experience era hinges on understanding customers and being able to adapt as quickly as their priorities and preferences do.

“Consumers have never had more influence and agency over the digital experience, and this is only increasing,” she said. “A keen understanding of customers and the ability to drive intelligent and impactful action across the organization will be key to keeping up with the pace of digital transformation.”

Storlie added the real reason that customer experience and marketing professionals should be excited about the growing appreciation of design thinking is that it is another important step placing the customer at the centre of an organization.

“The transition from a product-centric approach to a customer-centric approach is a challenge for every organization,” Storlie explained. “The use of design thinking is another important tool that helps an organization understand, create options, test and deploy solutions that will make a real difference for customers.”

By Nathan Eddy

Sourced from CMSWIRE

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How Omnichannel Marketing Feeds Into Stronger Customer Experiences

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By Jennifer Torres
Omnichannel marketing is the key to meeting customers where they’re at and ensuring cohesive experiences across channels and devices.

It’s midnight in Arizona, and Martin can’t sleep. He opens his iPad and begins scrolling through a collection of flat screen TVs on the Walmart website. Within ten minutes, one catches his eye, and he drops it in his cart and finalizes the purchase.

Across the country in Florida, it’s 3 a.m., and Emily is on her smartphone eyeing a set of golf clubs a local pro shop advertised in an email. With a flick and click, they’re hers.

Once relegated to after-work hours or weekends, shoppers now make purchases around the clock — while at work, lunch, during their commute, on vacation and when they can’t sleep at 3 a.m.

And they often switch between multiple devices throughout the day. There’s the work computer, a personal laptop, home desktop, smart phone and iPad. And that doesn’t account for brick-and-mortar shoppers that want an in-store experience.

Brands can meet these customers where they are by offering products and services across various online and offline channels — on a website, app or social media account, via email or text, at retail locations and public events. Companies can capture it all through omnichannel marketing.

What Is Omnichannel Marketing?

Customers desire a positive, seamless experience — no matter the path they take or device they use. Omnichannel marketing seeks to enable that desire by creating a cohesive, unified journey for each customer across all brand channels.

Cohesiveness across channels is a critical component. As opposed to multichannel marketing, which includes multiple channels that remain separate, omnichannel allows all online and offline channels to work in unison across touchpoints, devices and departments. With it, customers can bounce from smartphone to laptop to retail store and have a smooth experience.

Major Retailers Embrace It

Many large retailers have already incorporated omnichannel strategies, making the customer journey easier and more convenient.

  • Starbucks provides an app for use both online and in-store, incorporating a rewards program that allows customers to avoid lines and order ahead, gain free refills, use birthday bonuses and earn points for free products.
  • Amazon aligns its experience across a retail website, streaming service, mobile apps and connected Alexa devices and smartwatches.
  • Walgreens unifies its brand between in-store and online purchases through a customer loyalty program app that provides rewards, discounts and information about in-store events and sales.
  • Home Depot offers an app to help customers find products online and in-store, also including live chat and image search.
  • Disney app and loyalty cards allow visitors to check ride times and book tickets without standing in a long line.

Social Media Sells

With an active, integrated presence on social media accounts, brands have the opportunity to create a community.

A report from Statista predicted that by 2026, worldwide sales through social media platforms will reach $2.9 trillion — with the most influential content for buyers coming from posts made by acquaintances and connections.

McKinsey & Company reported that, with 60% to 70% of consumers researching and making purchases online and in-store, omnichannel is here to stay and will continue to grow. Their research also revealed that social media channels influence all age groups — particularly younger customers.

Outstanding Omnichannel

If the message a brand sends is unified and consistent across all channels, it better be a good one. Knowing what’s important to consumers today can help organizations create the best communications and serve to reflect their commitment to providing a positive customer experience.

Salesforce’s 2022 analysis of consumer and business buyer data revealed several factors worthy  of consideration when creating an omnichannel platform, including:

Favourite Channels

  • Phone
  • In-person
  • Online chat

Channel Surfing

  • Customers turn to an average of nine different channels to communicate with companies.
  • 57% of customers prefer to engage through digital channels, but 43% prefer non-digital channels — meaning satisfying customers generally requires great experiences both online and offline.

Loyalty

  • 83% of customers say they’re more loyal to companies that provide consistency across departments.
  • 71% of consumers switched brands at least once in the past year. The top three reasons were better deals, better product quality and better customer service.

Experience

  • 88% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services.
  • 94% say a positive customer service experience makes them more likely to purchase again.

Emotion

  • 62% of customers feel an emotional connection to the brands they buy from most.

A recent Forrester report indicated that while customer experience rankings decreased for 19% of brands in 2022, the highest rankings were achieved by brands that provided customers with “high emotional quality” across their experiences.

And happy customers are a forgiving bunch — with data revealing that 54% of customers who feel happy, valued and appreciated are more willing to forgive brand mistakes.

Omnichannel in Action

Karla Medrano, a registered nurse and founder and operator of SGM Medical Marketing, said omnichannel marketing isn’t just about using every available channel for marketing, although that’s important too. It’s also about breaking down an organization’s various customer-facing channel-based silos.

“Being omnichannel is about taking a consumer-centric view of marketing tactics,” Medrano said. “In other words, the consumer’s experience comes first and your organization needs to be seamless in its branding, messaging and online and offline presence.”

When tasked with assisting AmbitCare in developing a stronger digital presence, Medrano employed an omnichannel strategy.

AmbitCare, a provider of free resources to physicians, caregivers and patients affected by rare diseases, had an inadequate social media presence. Medrano’s agency began to define content pillars and cohesive messaging across all channels to help potential patients learn about services. They also created content for the Spanish-speaking population.

After 60 days, said Medrano, the total net audience increased 81.3%.

Recently, her team implemented an omnichannel marketing strategy for a health/wellness start-up app specializing in post-partum. It’s still in the testing phase, but so far, Medrano said the results have been promising.

The app creators came to the agency with the issue of poor adherence rates; they wanted to find a way to help participants finish the program. Medrano created video content, personalized email templates and a system to respond to questions and concerns in a timely manner.

As a result of this strategy, Medrano said adherence rates improved by 40%.

“My omnichannel approach via texts, emails, video content and therapeutic communication to help moms through the program made them feel heard and supported,” she explained.

Omnichannel Oversights

According to a McKinsey & Company report, while the right omnichannel approach can potentially increase brand value, a disjointed or disorganized strategy can destroy it.

Medrano said that a few common errors in the omnichannel strategy include automating everything and thinking that being on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., is enough.

“Sometimes people need to know that there is a human on the other side so they can feel supported,” Medrano said. “A brand can have 10 channels and have rotten customer service vs. a brand that can have three channels and have quality customer service that includes a chat box, timely email responses, personalized attention, courtesy calls, flexible pay options, SMS and more.”

She said another mistake is not asking for customer feedback and not providing staff with proper training to ensure a cohesive conversation, tone and branding.

“Leadership doesn’t interact directly with customers, so they don’t always know what works and what doesn’t,” Medrano explained. “Every single interaction customers have with your brand…should help them feel heard and supported. Otherwise, you can potentially lose customers, receive bad reviews and lose revenue.”

Branding Blunders

With over 15 years of experience guiding large consumer brands to develop customer experiences that deliver shared value, Freelance CX Strategist Jenny Neilsen offered her list of the recurring mistakes brands make in their omnichannel marketing strategy:

  • Brands trying to scale their high-level brand messaging across channels without considering the devices or experience. Each marketing asset should be helping to move the prospect through the funnel, not just shouting the same tag line at them.
  • Saying they do omnichannel, but there is little coordination between in-house teams and agencies executing or designing the assets. All that equates to is running a lot of advertising simultaneously with little cohesion.
  • Not using what they know about their audiences to execute a smart campaign.

“Brands need to understand and use online and offline data points to deploy personalized experiences across channels and physical locations,” Neilsen said. “Every brand has hurdles when it comes to the shape and location of their data, so they either need to roll up their sleeves and make the data work for them manually or invest in technology to help them do it faster.”

It’s Not for Everyone

As founder of Jennis Consulting Group and co-founder of Founders Compass, a mentoring consultancy for new start-ups, Steve Jennis places omnichannel marketing at the bottom of the priority list for start-ups.

He believes omnichannel marketing is good for customer retention because customers return to places where they have a good buying experience. But for a new business, he classifies it as a “back-end operational process that comes after marketing and sales have been successful.” A good product coupled with solid marketing and sales should come first.

“Without good marketing and sales, omnichannel is useless as customers don’t have a good reason to buy anyway,” Jennis said. “As such, it’s pretty low down as a priority for a start-up unless it gives you a real competitive advantage. But better products, marketing and sales will be more effective at that than channel choices.”

By Jennifer Torres

Sourced from CMSWIRE

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Connecting the Dots Between Product and Branding

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By Douglas Montague

How rethinking brand expression influenced Microsoft products and vice versa

Imagine a sheet of paper with a couple dozen tiny dots spread out on it. Their placement doesn’t seem random. You can sort of make out a shape, but there’s no obvious way they go together.

Now imagine a sheet with identical tiny dots, only each one is numbered. The dots may still look like a jumble, but the numbers indicate how they link together. You draw a line from one to two, two to three, and so on. Oh look, you’ve drawn a seal balancing a beach ball on its nose! Gold star.

Working for a big company sometimes feels like staring at thousands of dots and having little idea how to connect them. I’ve been with Microsoft since 1995, but I don’t think I understood how these dots could work together until 2015.

That’s when we changed our marketing strategy. Before, the product design team would build and design the experiences, and the marketing team layered a brand identity on top to sell it. With the 2015 change, branding was no longer a “layer” of marketing disconnected from the product experience. Instead, branding became directly tied to and influenced by the product. And maybe, just maybe, the brand could influence the product in return.

In the heavily siloed world of giant corporations, that was practically crazy talk.

One dot at a time

Simplicity became our mission. We first needed to build brand principles and the brand story (in other words, why we exist in the world). Then, we’d figure out how the principles and story inform the product experience. We theorized that connecting experience and expression among product, brand identity, and marketing, and extrapolating those principles into meaningful guidance across the company, would create a better experience for customers.

Numbers started to appear next to those scattered dots staring me in the face. The trick was getting other people to see them, too.

To show people the value of brand creative teams in marketing, we needed to have a lot more conversations with product design. First, we needed to understand what they were building and where they were headed. Second, we needed to create a visual identity closely tied to the product’s visual language, which a worldwide marketing organization could later implement.

Easy enough, right?

Thankfully, our senior leadership encourages us to work together for the greater good of the company, pushing away our own egos as much as possible to bring success to all. We call this One Microsoft. Particularly in our area, acting as One Microsoft is a necessity: we have a tiny creative team and can’t succeed without the assistance of other great creatives, so we need to understand each other’s business and create together. When it works, it’s magical.

Case study: transforming Microsoft Office

Rebranding Office was one such magical example. For the first time, we looked to product teams for cues to lift the brand identity and create simple, scalable guidance. We worked directly with product design, an approach that we’d take later with Azure and HoloLens 2.

Our approach had five steps:

  1. Create the brand story working across brand strategy, engineering, and marketing, including a deep dive into product design principles and future principles.
  2. Conduct an end-to-end visual audit of the entire customer journey.
  3. Identify visual patterns and cues from the product, and from the parent Microsoft brand, to create a visual identity for the brand expression.
  4. Build creative principles and theories around color, illustration, typography, and photography, then stress test across all communication touchpoints in the marketing funnel.
  5. Create a simple design system that designers could scale worldwide without much creative oversight.
Three large black boards with print outs of the current Office branding.

Three large black boards with print outs of the current Office branding.

Boards from one of the many visual audits done in 2016 for Microsoft Office.

Our audit concluded that Office needed a more sophisticated yet simplified visual identity connecting our product experience and marketing communications. The marketing teams were doing their best; they followed the Microsoft brand guide for reference, but the broadness of the guide and visual system made it difficult to implement. We pared down the brand system in the name of simplicity.

Office brand guideline examples including personality, colors, and font.

Office brand guideline examples including personality, colors, and font.

Pages from the Microsoft Office Brand Guidelines.

Our collaboration effectively linked the pre-purchase marketing communications to the post-purchase ones. For example, we used our marketing expertise at engaging users to improve the first-usage experience (for example, the “how to” videos that introduced users to Office online). In that space, the product team focused more on UX, not the kind of branded moments within the product where you can tell a story.

The fifth step in that process was perhaps the toughest, simply because of scale. Several hundred marketers worked on Office, each with their own budget, each choosing their own creative. Because of that, and their concern that we’d just scold them for doing things wrong, none of their work went through a creative review process. We not only had to change how people worked, but we also had to assure them we had their best interests in mind.

In time, people from other teams understood that we weren’t focused solely on creative, that we wanted to help them meet their business objectives and performance metrics. Again, it comes back to that One Microsoft principle of trusting each other and helping each other succeed. Product teams started seeking out our involvement, and marketing trusted us to make more things on their behalf.

Keeping a good thing going

We emulated this turning point elsewhere. We worked directly with principal designers Paul Cooper and Lance Garcia to build creative principles (for everyone keeping track, that’s step 4) that ended up changing the patterns and UX of . Functionality informed brand choices, which reflected back on the site itself.

The front page of the Azure.com website.

The front page of the Azure.com website.

Azure.com

The same goes for HoloLens 2, which was perhaps our most daunting task. The product team had worked on it for two years by the time we stepped in to begin branding, so we had catching up to do. (Yes, not ideal.)

HoloLens 2 works in mixed reality, a new medium for most users. Because of that, people need more than product photography or UI to understand how it works. So, I partnered closely John Nguyen and David Wolf from the product design team to come up with a solution. We were inspired by prismatic light in holograms and by the way the product sensors understand the world and generate a 3D map. We believed that this prism and map would tie the marketing and the product experience together in a beautiful way. The product experience largely informed the elegant brand we created for HoloLens 2 and subsequent marketing materials.

Four expressions of the HoloLens branding.

Four expressions of the HoloLens branding.

HoloLens 2 Prismatic Color Blend used in illustration, full-bleed backgrounds, and HoleLens 2 wordmark logo.

These marketing materials turned out well — so well that they influenced the product. Romiro Torres, the creative director for HoloLens 2 UX, was working out the visual expression and experience of how the device maps a room. He integrated the same visualization into the product experience, so users see the same visualization we created for marketing when HoloLens 2 maps the room they’re standing in.

HoloLens 2 Room Mapping from the launch announcement in Barcelona

Chances are that doesn’t sound like a big deal to you, but it felt huge — that “maybe, just maybe” moment I mentioned earlier. If you listen closely, you can hear silo walls cracking.

Those are the kinds of moments we strive to create every day. They become a lot more likely when teams spend the time to truly understand each other. Branding makes that easier. It provides that layer of customer clarity, connecting the dots so that marketing and product can take a step back, look at the lines, and say, “Wow, a seal balancing a beach ball!”

By Douglas Montague

Microsoft Brand Creative Director. I don’t believe creative that has commercial success tags it with an odious suggestion that is stinks. Views are my own.

Sourced from Medium

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The road to UX is not always straight

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By Kristin Sinko-Smith

About a year ago, I made the transition from marketing to UX. I studied psychology and marketing in school and launched into a marketing career after graduating. I enjoyed what I was doing, but I wasn’t sure it was the right career path for me. By lucky happenstance, I discovered user experience and immediately fell in love.

Although we use metrics and other bits of data in marketing to influence people, I often felt like I was playing a guessing game. Would this LinkedIn campaign perform well? Would this particular email resonate? I felt like my target audience was behind some sort of wall. I could occasionally glean something from past successes or recommended approaches, but I didn’t truly understand them. The idea of pursuing a career that was focused on the users and integrating their needs into a product was very intriguing.

But it was not an easy transition. From the time I discovered UX to finally landing my first role, it took about two and a half years. There were highs and lows, from completing different courses to almost giving up on the job search.

That’s right — I almost gave up. User experience can be a really tough field to break into. Which was especially disheartening because I kept hearing about how much the field was growing and the gap in talent to match that growth. After completing initial research on my own and completing a UX class with General Assembly, I eagerly scoured job boards to see what was available.

But I found two huge issues. The first was the quality of job postings. As I mentioned, and as you probably know, UX is a growing field. And while that means lots of opportunities, it also means companies may not totally understand what they are hiring for. The number of postings I saw that included everything from UI, to UX design, to UX research, to front-end development was terrifying. Sure, there are people that will have skills across the board, but it’s a very rare person who can do it all well.

Another issue was experience. A lot of companies just weren’t willing to take on a junior person. They wanted someone who could jump right in and hit the ground running.

I despaired for a bit, but then I changed my way of thinking and decided to take a slightly different route. At the time, I was working for a small non-profit. It was a great place to begin my career, but I started looking at marketing roles within larger companies that also had UX teams. I thought perhaps I could transition to UX once I proved myself.

So, I landed a job at a much larger company. Shortly after starting, however, my company was acquired and there were a lot of changes to manage. I felt myself pulling away from UX again in order to stay afloat. I lost my way for a bit.

After everything started to settle down (slightly), I felt myself drawn back towards it and I reached out to the UX team within my company. I was able to work on a mini research project, which invigorated me to pick my pursuit back up. I started attending local meetups again and also registered for the Nielsen Norman conference to attain a certification in UX Research.

At this point, I had been studying UX for over two years. There were times I felt like I might never make it and times where I had to solely focus on my marketing career. But even when I shoved it to the back of my mind, I never completely threw the idea away. As luck would have it, I met someone at the NNg conference who recommended me to her company’s hiring team. Her company was just starting to grow a user centered design team and they were more open to junior employees. They cared more about my desire to learn and passion for the field, instead of years of experience.

Everyone takes a different route or turn on their way to UX, but that doesn’t mean it won’t ever happen. Even if you lose the way for a bit, it’s possible to re-orient yourself and find the way there. Keep learning and meeting new people. There will be companies and job postings that aren’t right for you, but that doesn’t mean the job for you doesn’t exist. If or when you lose hope, keep walking.

By Kristin Sinko-Smith

Sourced from UX Collective

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Using Behavioural Intelligence to Improve Your Site’s User Experience

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Imagine you’re at an industry conference. It’s happy hour, so you grab a drink and turn to the attendee next to you. What do you do next? You don’t just throw a business card at them and walk away. If you do, you’re a lousy networker.

If you’re a good networker, you start a conversation.

If you’re a great networker, you take that conversation to the next level by adjusting the conversation based on their body language. If they lean in when you talk about search engine optimization but check their watch when you talk about paid search, well … then you talk more about SEO.

So the question is this: why aren’t more companies doing this with their website visitors?

Editor’s Note: This is the third and final part in a three-part series on why your audience clicks. Read the whole series here.

The Importance of Digital Body Language

Most companies just throw their digital business card at their site visitors, meaning they rely solely on web analytics such as Google Analytics to understand site performance — but web analytics only tells half the story.

Here’s an example: one of our clients thought they had a popular knowledge hub based on the data they were seeing in Google Analytics. But can you guess what happened when we applied behavioural analytics? Nothing. The hub was an abject failure!

It received a lot of page views (which thrilled our client), but the digital body language on the page made it clear that site visitors were not finding what they wanted or clicking on what was offered. They weren’t even scrolling far enough to see the majority of what was in the knowledge hub.

What our client thought was a wild success was really doing more harm than good. Instead of converting, users left with a bad taste in their mouth never to return.

If this client had only looked at Google Analytics, they would have continued to think the knowledge hub was a success and never would’ve made any changes. It took behavioral analysis to peek under the hood and discover just how bad of an experience the hub was for everyone arriving on the page.

How Behavioural Analysis Is Conducted

Behaviour Mapping

FullStory, MouseFlow, Decibel, Inspectlet and Hotjar are all applications that provide behavioural analytics for websites. Behavioural mapping includes everything from click and heat mapping to attention and scroll mapping. These tools are instrumental in finding out if your site is effective. By seeing where on the site people look, click, spend time and scroll, you gain a deeper understanding of what is and isn’t working.

For example, you may find that none of your site visitors scroll more than 50 percent down your page. If your most important messaging is at the bottom of the page, your visitors never see it. With this newfound knowledge, you can adjust your site accordingly.

Or, let’s say click mapping shows your users are clicking the same spot over and over and over again, but there’s nothing there to click. With this data, you realize your visitors are “rage clicking” — clicking a spot repeatedly thinking it’s a link when it’s not. Now you know you need to adjust your design.

Video Recordings

Some behavioural intelligence programs take mapping a step further by providing actual video recordings of site visitors. There’s no webcam involved (that’d be creepy), just a recording of their screen, cursor movements, navigation patterns, and the elements that get the most attention. Essentially, you get a live view of their digital body language.

This type of qualitative data is highly useful in providing insights the aggregate data may not reveal. Filtering the videos by campaign or traffic source or by the type of visitor (new vs. returning, etc.) can help you uncover new opportunities to improve the site experience for your visitors.

Form Analytics

Let’s say you’re collecting leads via a form on your site. Or at least, you’re trying to collect leads. But you’re not getting the volume you’re looking for.

When you look at Google Analytics, all you see is that your users aren’t clicking “submit.” You assume they’re not touching the form at all.

When you fire up the form analytics, however, you see something different: most visitors are filling out their first name and email but hesitating when you ask for their last name or their phone number or zip code. Now you know the form itself is the problem — not the arrangement of the page.

Behaviour-Based CTAs

A similar function can apply to behaviour-based CTAs. If you have a form at the bottom of the page but behavioural analysis shows your users never scroll that far, you might decide to add a behaviourally-triggered CTA — a CTA that pops up after a user takes a certain action such as when they start to leave your site.

We added one such CTA in our blog, requesting that visitors subscribe to our newsletter. The site visitor needs to scroll down 70 percent of a post before it’s triggered. Amazingly, we experienced a 300 percent jump in opt-in rate. Pretty sweet!

Polls and Surveys

If you thought we were done, think again. There’s still more that behavioural intelligence can do, like uncovering contextually relevant audience insights through polls and surveys. Let’s say you have a page that’s promoting a certain service. Insert a poll on the page that lets them indicate what they are trying to achieve. Or inquire about what brought them to the page. Or simply ask if they’re finding what they’re looking for. Apply conditional logic to the survey, and you’ll be able to customize the survey questions based on their initial responses, helping you uncover deeper insights.

Next Step, Excellent User Experiences

All of this awesome data helps you do three major things: 1) understand your audience better, 2) engage with them on a deeper level and 3) deliver a better user experience.

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Feature Image Credit: Tim Gouw

Sourced from CMS WiRE

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The Big SEO Ranking Factors for 2019

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Sourced from Design Beep

Google search algorithm keeps undergoing changes nearly every year. This has made the tech giant to place importance on certain factors out of the over 200 ranking factors. Truth be told, most of these factors are intertwined and it’s difficult for small businesses to keep up with them all. Here are the top ranking factors you need to know about as you implement the latest SEO techniques.

User Experience

It’s common for site owners to develop sites that search engines will find attractive while neglecting user experience. The importance of an exceptional UX can’t be underemphasized. It is one of the factors that usually encourage online visitors to spend more time on websites and leave satisfied. The experts at Tailored Media Marketing understand this and deliver top-notch services all the time. Some of the ways to enhance your UX include asking for customers’ feedbacks, using relevant keywords and supporting smooth navigation.

Quality Content

Most online visitors will choose content over direct ads any day. It’s better to invest a significant percentage of your budget on content creation and promotion. Ensure that you share content regularly and provide real value to your audience. Creating blog posts alone isn’t enough to generate leads in this era. You need to provide in-depth content and consider other formats like videos, infographics and case studies.

Mobile-First

Google expects every website to work seamlessly on both mobile and desktop. Webmasters that fail to take this factor seriously may end up receiving a penalty. You have nothing to worry about if you’ve already joined the bandwagon. In case you only have the desktop version of your site, make sure that you set up the mobile version too.

Backlinks

The dynamics of link building has evolved over the years. Avoid using any link until you’ve confirmed that they are from relevant and authority sites. Creating useful content, influencer marketing, and guest posting can increase your chances of attracting links naturally. The linkless backlink is a trend that is here to stay. It involves mentioning brands instead of including a link to their sites.

Technical SEO

Overlooking the technical aspect of SEO can make brands to lose customers and revenues. Hiring the Gold Coast Specialists will go a long way to fine-tune the different aspects of SEO. Apart from that, they can help you to carry out an SEO audit. Other steps that you need to take include obtaining an SSL certificate and creating a site map.

Page Speed

Google’s mobile-first indexing is already a thing and it’s risky to leave things to chances. Page speed is now recognized as a top Google mobile ranking factor. Websites that loads quickly tend to rank higher on search engine result pages. On the other hand, slow loading websites are bound to lose traffic and revenue as time goes on. Take advantage of SEO tools to check your page speed and choose a reputable cloud hosting provider.

Local SEO

Local SEO is a must for businesses that are targeting customers in their locality. This is because several online visitors search for local businesses on their smartphones. Start by listing your business on Google to boost your ranking. Your information such as your business name, address and phone number must be uniform across all directories. Don’t hesitate to ask your customers to leave ratings and reviews on the local listing.

Sourced from Design Beep

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UX/UI Designer Requirements — 5 Ways to Make A Difference

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By Trista liu

5 practical requirements to make you a better UX/UI Designer. Not just about design tools or resources, they make you more qualified to your designer job requirements.

While I was starting this article, I contemplated the board, trying to find a more appropriate entry to begin — should I make a list of UI UX designer requirements. Such as, “which books about design you should read?” or “which design blogs you must follow”. Or I can simply focus on the details instead of form a border perspective to talking about. Since there are already plenty excellent essays discussing about UI UX Designer Requirements from a big picture, I would like to suggest some practical tips and principles which may make a UI UX designer more qualified.

Obviously, mastering an efficient prototyping tool is a must

I am not going to tell you which prototyping tools you should choose, whether Mockplus or Axure. But you need to find the most suitable one for you. Time and practice r will take until you find the faster, simpler and smarter one. Meanwhile, your good design competence and rich specialized knowledge are required and advanced during your search.

A serious note for you, trying every prototyping tools before you made your decision. Just give them all a shot then you won’t miss, then stick to your favorite one and master it. So the UI UX designer requirements here is to practice more prototyping tools even though you already has one, it may surprises you beyond your imaginations.

Designer’s Toolkit: The Best Mockup & Wireframing Design Tools & Apps for UI/UX Designers

Supposing you were a real user rather than just a UI / UX designer is a big help

By “supposing” i mean shifting your mind into a real user. This kind of role reversal may build a shortcut to improve your design. Every UI / UX designer should stick with the principle that design with knowing its intention. Product derives from demand, this golden rule still works. If possible, trying to build a lasting and friendly connection with your user. It is very considerate for there are might plenty questions they will encounter during the application period.

Moreover, your user would even appreciate it more if you have always been kind and skillful when communicate with them. And in turn, they will stick to your product and give you timely and valuable feedback. You are the winner finally. Do remember the Do’s and Don’ts of User-Centered Design. So the UI UX Designer requirements here is being nice to your user and being as one.

Changing a little bit of your way of learning may works like a charm

First, a question-what is the book you recently read? If your answer is a book about design or just a design magazine. I would like to offer a book list you might be interested.

And there they are:

Art as Therapy by Alain de Botton

The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp

Interaction of Color by Josef Albers

The Good Creative by Paul Jarvis

Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon

Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace

Drawing Ideas by Mark Baskinger and William Bardel

Yes, they are more about arts and philosophies rather than teh design itself. My recommendation there does not mean you should just drop your design books such as Designing Design or Interaction Design. The fact is that design requires aesthetics, not only from the visual aspect but also from the connotation side. You just need to learn more. So the UI UX Designer requirements here is going to a library and buy some books. Then sit quietly and start reading.

Designer’s Books: The 10 Mind-blowing Best User Experience Books in 2017

Stop hanging out only with your designer friends will spark your inspiration

The term “confirmation bias” exists not only in psychology & cognitive science field. It actually is overwhelming in our daily life. We all tend to agree with people who agree with us. We prefer hang out with people share similar worldview. However, your view narrows as you limit your field. Meeting people with different perspectives draws a more completed and balanced picture.

Openness is an endless inspiration source which serves an important trait of a great designer. For example, when you design a food app, just get together with your best foodie friend. He or she will definitely provides you valuable advice which in result, will boost you work. So the UI UX Designer requirements here is hanging out with non-designers or with anyone who holds different beliefs, challenges you and brings new perspectives.

Learning from the best will make a difference

Human being is social animals, then just be as one. Do not against your nature to be a lone wolf, trying to do things “ in a pack ”. You must have been through this period, no matter you are a famous UI UX designer already or a new comer of this field, you must have learned from the best, and you are going to do with that. It is like climbing a mountain, you look at the peak and keep climbing, and finally you became the “ peak ” of some others. Learning from the best is a good a way helps you to absorb the wisdom and turn it into yours. So the UI UX Designer requirements here is to being modest and learning to learn.

I hope you enjoyed the read and even your light benefit from my article will courage me to keep writing. We all may found ourselves feeling insecure sometimes. However, i am not going to give up easily. I am not obligated to win , but i am obligated to keep trying. This requirement is for you and me both.

A note: The link of the books. Please check the following if you are interested:

Art as Therapy by Alain de Botton

The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp

Interaction of Color by Josef Albers

The Good Creative by Paul Jarvis

Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon

Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace

Drawing Ideas by Mark Baskinger and William Bardel

Originally published at www.mockplus.com.

By Trista liu

Sourced from HACKERNOON

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