Here is Why your Business’ Social Media, Website and Landing Pages Don’t Work
Many people think that designing a website is a simple & fast task. They jump into the deep end of the pool expecting to swim and quickly drown, not even realizing what happened. Have you experienced this overwhelm?
You may be able to design, write copy, edit photos and upload a video, but there is one crucial thing that is missing from your website, social media and landing pages. What is missing is excellent UX design. UX design will dramatically improve the effectiveness of your content. I’ll tell you how.
UI and UX Design
First, let me explain UI design in a simple way for those non-design folks who are reading. UI Design is the content that you consume visually. Consider a coffee maker. You put the ground beans and water in the top and you consume the tasty solution of cloudy undissolved solids at the bottom.
Our eyes naturally gravitate to things that are moving. Watching something is the same as consuming it. In a coffee maker the liquid is moving, dripping and steaming. We consume the coffee visually and in the end we consume the coffee physically. What we watch happening during the brew process is User Interface design or UI.
There is one crucial part of this process that may not have captivated us. The coffee maker itself. The coffee maker is the User Experience design or UX.
Without the coffee maker there is no funnel, no filter, no structure and no pathway to lead the eyes through the consumable material. More simply said, without the coffee maker there is no coffee, no story and no experience.
Another Example
If a TV is the UX of the design, then the moving picture, screen writing, acting, audio and animation is the UI. TV has very similar content to websites. The difference is that what we are consuming on TV is being experienced differently than what is experienced on a website.
Side-note, people who jump into web development usually don’t consider a website as a combination of these 4-6 different types of art: writing, photo editing, video, audio, graphics and animation. These are all UI design. These art forms may be a struggle for some people, but there’s usually an even bigger problem with your social media, website and landing page.
The problem is UX Design and how people experience your content (UI Design). UX design is so important to marketing strategy.
UX design considers psychology and the science of how people interact with obstacles. It takes into account that people on social media are usually there for leisure and learning. If something is too difficult to understand, then they will move on to someone who can explain it more clearly.
The Goldfish Principle
There’s this thing called the goldfish principle coined by Dan Henry. It implies that people, like goldfish, only have a nine second attention span. We lose interest if we are not given a promise or topic sentence in nine seconds. In my work, I take this further. People typically want UI content that promises to answer their questions in nine seconds and then delivers answers in under one minute.
That is not a lot of time to answer multiple variations of who, what, when, where, why, how, & which. So, how can you solve your UX problems and create consumable content that drives conversions?
The Answers
Solving your UX problems can only be accomplished if you have ONE specific goal and message for your social media, landing page or website. What is the ultimate goal of your website? Where are you leading people to?
Creating quickly consumable content that answers the seven questions and leads you to one goal can only be done through both audio and visual means. Your pictures and your designs should speak 1000+ words.
This is the power of brand identity design. Your brand needs to speak for itself. Every design, photo, word and video needs to have a unique essence and personality in order to communicate visually.
If you are a personal brand, then your brand will only be as strong as you truly know yourself. If you have a professional brand then your brand identity needs to take on more of its own character traits. Branding strategy and UX design strategy go hand in hand.
There you go! Go forth, strategize and create!
Fariss
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