So you’ve probably heard the term UX? But what does it really mean, and what’s so important about it? Well, the good news is that we’re here to break it down for you. Not only will you know what to look out for the next time you’re engaging with your favourite websites, but also how the team at Juno can help you build a WordPress website with top-notch user experience.
First things first, UX is an abbreviation for “User Experience”, and refers to how people interact with a product. From the look to the feel, the goal of UX is to create an easy, meaningful, relevant and flexible experience for the end user. However, whether or not an individual has a pleasant user experience is usually evaluated based on these four key criteria:
- Value: Does this product give me value?
- Function: Does this product work?
- Usability: Is it easy to use?
- General impression: Is it pleasant to use?
As the inventor of UX, Don Norman, once summed up:
“No product is an island. A product is more than the product. It is a cohesive, integrated set of experiences. Think through all of the stages of a product or service — from initial intentions through final reflections, from first usage to help, service, and maintenance. Make them all work together seamlessly.”
So, what’s the importance of having a good User Experience?
Put simply, your product’s user experience is imperative in fulfilling your user’s needs. In turn, this helps build a better customer satisfaction, conversion and retention journey for your business. However, if your product offers poor user experience, this can result in your users being unsatisfied with your product. This may cause your customers to turn to your competitors which may mean poor reputation and revenue loss for your brand.
UX Design Process
There are several steps to the UX design process. Because UX is centred around the “users”, our team at Juno have a well-defined and well-executed UX process in place to ensure we can craft the best user experience for your website.
Phase 1: Product Definition
Before we start any design, the first thing we’ll do at Juno is understand your product and it’s purpose. In this stage, we’ll receive your brief and have a kick-start meeting to set expectations of the product and stakeholders, which will help set the foundation for the final product. From there, our team of designers will go away and brainstorm concept ideas for the product and develop concept sketches of how your WordPress website might look and function.
Phase 2: Product Research
Since UX is all about user experience, we need to first learn more about your customers. This typically involves user research and market research to ensure we create the best user experience that fulfils your user’s pain points. Once we understand their needs and problems, our creative team can working on finding solutions that solve them.
If you already have an existing website that’s live, one thing we like to do at Juno is to use specific tools to monitor the user journey from entry and exit. This is a really great way for us to gather data on how your users are visiting your pages and conversely, why they are leaving your website. This helps us make better improvements to your WordPress website when it comes to designing the wireframes in Phase 4.
Phase 3: Analysis
Having collected enough research to understand your users in-depth, our creative team will then draw insights from our data to help us discover “why” they may want/think/need it. This phase typically includes:
- Creating User Personas: Realistically capture the different user types of your product, and how we can tailor your product, content and messaging to their needs, behaviours and concerns.
- Mapping Out User Journey: To better understand the interactions and goals of your product or service from the user’s point of view. By understanding your user’s goal, our team can identify all the different ways that your customer might interact with your website, which will help with creating the content needed to support the functionality of the site.
Phase 4: Design
Once we’ve mapped out the user journey in the previous stage, it’s now time for Juno to sketch designs and create wireframes of how your WordPress website will look and function. This is an important step for us to evaluate your website’s functionality and uncover any potential problems or missing features before we get too far along the design process.
A wireframe serves as a skeleton of the website, and is a useful tool that allows designers to visualise the basic structures of the page – from displaying main features, allocating space and presentation of images and content.
Phase 5: Prototyping & Testing
The prototyping stage is where we’ll start bringing your WordPress website to life. While this phase is less about the aesthetics, prototyping is fundamental in understanding the user flow and how your website will work in real life. By running testing sessions, we can uncover any issues that were missed and that the overall design does in fact work for your users. As a whole, this is the stage where rework and iterations will be produced in order to get create the best customer experience for your users while they visit your website.
Phase 6: Design
Once the wireframes have your tick of approval, our creative team will move onto adding the finer details to the design. This stage will be dedicated to fine tuning the design elements on the key pages of the website. The end goal of this phase is to show you a visual representation of how the final website will look so there’s no nasty surprises later down the track.
We’re ready to help take your business to new heights. If you’re looking to build a new website or improve your user experience on your existing one, our team at Juno will work with you every step of the way to create the perfect WordPress website for your business.
Give us a call on (07) 3186 0566 and we’ll get you on the right track.
If you have any other creative design projects, we can help!
