There’s no denying the importance of user experience (UX) optimization for marketing and sales. According to Forrester research, visit-to-lead conversions can be 400% higher on sites with superior user experience.
But even if you’re following all the important UX best practices, there are always new ways to disrupt your UX strategy and achieve exponential growth as a result. Here are 4 noteworthy UX trends to consider working into your marketing strategy.
1. Conversational Design
There’s been a lot of buzz about chatbots over the past year or so, so you probably know a bit about them. Using structured design and artificial intelligence, businesses can provide better customer service and more for their audience with chatbots.
While most chatbots today are used with messaging apps like Facebook and Kik, marketers can also use them on their websites in conversational design. Presenting new site visitors with the familiar chat experience is a great way to encourage them to engage from the beginning. A static landing page just doesn’t have the same effect.
The most popular way to use chatbots on your website is with a widget. You’ve probably seen these before when browsing the web:
But if you want to go all-in with conversational design, you can turn your landing pages into chatbots themselves. Landbot.io is a tool that does this:
Many businesses already use chatbots to customize user experience, recommending products and services based on consumers’ unique needs. And research has shown that both Millennials and Baby Boomers value the utility of chatbots, including 24-hour service:
It’s possible to build your own conversational flow maps to create a simple, rule-based chatbot. Or you can go all out and take advantage of AI to build something even more useful. Either way, you’ll be poised to benefit from conversational design for better UX.
2. Better Personalization
Personalizing your message based on demographics, interests and individual needs isn’t a new trend in UX, but it’s now possible to do an even better job of this thanks to new technologies and big-data insights. Businesses can incorporate better personalization into their design by changing their site experience based on previous site behavior, interests, and more.
The trendsetters in this area use their own data on consumer behavior and interests paired with AI and machine learning to recommend different products and content dynamically. Netflix’s customized categories and Amazon’s product recommendations are good examples of this:
This is just one way you can use new technology for better personalization. Today, mobile devices provide a wealth of consumer data businesses can use to improve UX on their sites and apps as well. Many businesses already use their audience’s location data to provide notifications and other personalized content to help improve UX and drive sales.
And that strategy isn’t limited to just location-based businesses. News apps, for example, can use geo-targeting to suggest more relevant local content as well.
3. Prioritizing Content in Design
Effective marketing content is designed to help users take action: Sign up for a newsletter, make a purchase, read and explore more content, etc. So, a website with good UX should focus on the content to make it easy for visitors to navigate and find the things they’re looking for.
That’s why cutting-edge UX design trends towards simplicity and minimalism more than impressive graphics and other design elements.
Let’s look at a few examples and compare. Here’s a sample of Buzzfeed’s site design:
Now compare that to Medium:
Medium’s design prioritizes showcasing the content itself to illustrate what their platform has to offer. BuzzFeed relies more on sensationalism and clickbait than content itself, which shows in the design choices.
Creating a complex design experience is okay, as long as you still prioritize the content you’re trying to present with it. Everyone doesn’t need to be as minimalist as Medium, but make sure you eliminate any design elements that make it difficult for visitors to consume or act on content.
Fully utilizing your white space is another important way to prioritize content in design. Mobile devices in particular make it easier for users to consume content in full screen. You need to facilitate this also by utilizing the space provided. Test how your content appears on new mobile devices (e.g., iPhone X, Galaxy S8) to see if there’s any way to improve your use of whitespace.
4. More Collaboration Between UX and Marketing
The most successful digital marketers understand that collaboration is necessary for finding new ways to improve user experience. Encouraging your UX and marketing teams to work together allows you to build a fuller picture of your audience’s behavior and needs.
On their own, a UX team will focus solely on on-site behavior, often with zero context on how audiences arrived there. It really only paints half the picture, as the marketing channels used to attract visitors can impact their on-site behavior immensely. For example, if marketers attract site visitors using a PPC ad with ambiguous messaging, it can lead to more directionless browsing on site.
When UX and marketing work together, they can get a deeper understanding of a user’s full experience with the brand, on site and off. This data can lead to important insights that can be used to improve both UX and marketing together.
Stay On Top of the Trends
Every year, there are new disruptive technologies and strategies businesses can take advantage of to improve UX and drive their marketing goals.
Rather than just sticking to the same tried-and-true UX best practices, it’s worthwhile to branch out and experiment with new ways of connecting personally with your online audience. These 4 trends are just a few examples of the many new strategies you can improve your UX and marketing.
