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How To Use Google Analytics In UI/UX Design?

UI/UX Design - Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the most powerful marketing analytics platforms on the web. Businesses around the world use this platform to gain better insights on user behavior on their websites. For most web developers, their involvement with Google Analytics ends with just installing the base code for pageviews. But, there are more ways and features on Google Analytics that can be used by developers to better the website’s UI/UX Design. Here are five of the most important features in Google Analytics that you can utilize to improve UI/UX Design.

Events Tracking

The basic Google Analytics code only tracks page views by default. Therefore, if you want to track actions on your website, such as button clicks or form submissions, you’ll need to trigger a separate Google Analytics event to identify user interactions on specific parts of your website. Once the events are set up, they will show up in the Google Analytics UI under the Behavior > Events > Top Events report.

To make things organized and simple,  use Event Category to group events based on a specific function (ex. Page Engagement, Ecommerce). Event Action helps to identify the exact action the user made (Click, Scroll, Form Submission) while you can use Event Label to get the URL where the event was fired. Alternatively, you can implement these events using the Google Tag Manager.

Page Scroll Tracking

Other than tracking clicks and form submissions, events in Google Analytics can also be used for tracking how far users are scrolling down on your webpage. This can be done by adding the Google Analytics event code to fire once a specific element appears in the viewport. You can also set the code to fire if the user has scrolled a specific percentage down the screen.

Alternatively, in Google Tag Manager, scroll tracking can be implemented much easier by using the Scroll Depth trigger. Simply create a new trigger, select the “Scroll Depth” trigger type, then fill in the necessary details. 

Since now you have the scrolling details in Google Analytics, you can segment that data based on device or browser, time of day, location, etc. So, in case you’re deciding whether you can place a specific widget for a specific kind of user, you have some data to back up your decision. This can also eliminate the need to purchase separate scroll tracking software.

Behavior Flow Report

Once you’ve implemented events and timing hits on Google Analytics, you’d see them in the different sections of the platform. Now, the challenge is how you unite these different data points into one report that shows the entire user journey on your website? That’s wherein the Behavior Flow report comes into the picture.

This flowchart-based report shows how users arrive at the site and the subsequent pageviews or actions they take before dropping off. By default, the Behavior Flow report uses the Landing Page and the specific pages that groups of users go to. You can also change the Behavior Flow report to focus more on events. Simply click to the dropdown menu below the report’s header and select “Events” or “Pages and Events.”

When looking at data for larger websites, such as those with millions of page views, sampling may occur. This sampling is set in place to help Google Analytics crunch through all the data in a specific amount of time.

If the Behavior Flow report is not enough, you can also set up Custom Reports in Google Analytics. To set these up, go to Customization > Custom Reports, then click the “New Custom Report” button.

Custom Goals

Achieving tangible business objectives is important for any business. This can be as diverse as selling your company’s products online, generating sign-ups for a service, or even just to promote the company’s services. Google Analytics allows you to discover the kinds of user behavior that lead to conversions and which actions don’t. 

By collecting data based on a combination of pageviews and different events, you can get more in-depth insights into what users actually do on your website. Besides, you can isolate specific key actions as conversions on your website by creating goals.

To do so, simply go to Admin > Goals, and then click New Goal. You can then choose from a template or set up a custom goal based on a destination ‘pageview of a specific page), events, duration, or even several page views.

Once you’ve set up your goals, you can then use Google Analytics segments to analyze the user actions. You can compare the actions of users with conversions versus those who did not convert. This is available by default — simply select the Converters or the Non-Converters segments to apply on your reports.

Average Session Duration

How much time do users spend on your website is very useful information; thankfully, that’s also possible to measure with Google Analytics. By default, after installing the Google Analytics pageview tag, users can already get a metric called Avg. Session Duration. This metric is generally understood to measure the amount of time that a user spends on each visit to your website (a session).

However, this metric can be inaccurate at times. After all, Google Analytics really only measures Avg. Session Duration based on the timestamps of the data (hits) that it receives. This also explains why most bounces, or visits, on the website with either only one pageview or event in them have an Avg. Session Duration of 00:00:00.

Firing timing hits can help accurately calculate the amount of time a user spends on a page. That too, without recording another pageview or event. Once implemented, these hits will be visible in the Behavior > Site Speed > User Timings section in Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is one of the finest tools for UI/UX design that’s out in the market. It strikes a good balance between the end user’s data privacy rights and the need for businesses to collect data for actionable insights. Contact Us today to get more insight on UI/UX Design

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Mobile Apps Technology UI Design

How To Create An Agriculture App for a Farm Business

Agriculture App

Farming is one such occupation that has existed since the primitive ages. It has witnessed a lot of modernization over the past century, especially over the last few decades. Farming is no longer considered as traditional or conservative. Modern-day farming is innovative and is driven by technology. One would have hardly imagined the connection of mobile technology and farming a few decades ago, but it is a reality in today’s time. A lot of Mobile-Agri applications are being created these days, which positively impact the lives of millions of farmers. In order to create such an app, a good amount of research is required. Plus, there are a few design principles that help in creating the best Agriculture app. 

Design principles For Agriculture App

Keep It Simple

Yes, farmers do have access to smartphones today, but the majority of them have smartphones that are not too advanced. Moreover, even if they have advanced smartphones, the probability of them using all the advanced features is very low. Therefore, you need to keep the functionality and features as simple and straightforward as you can. The design must not dictate the content, and everything should be upfront.

The target group’s orientation towards functionalities on mobile devices is minimal, and hence, every feature of the app needs to be obvious. Keep the farmers informed at every stage and drive their confidence simultaneously.

Consider The Network Limitations

Farmers usually operate from the countryside, which may not have the best of network strengths. Therefore, it is necessary to make sure that the agriculture app is extremely light; it must have the capability to load faster even when accessed through a low-speed connection. The design assets must be kept to a minimum, optimally under 10 KB. 

Create a Visual-Heavy Agriculture App

We already discussed the limited internet speed issue; hence, it’s vital to keep the visual assets light. However, let’s not forget the fact that our target audience has a low orientation towards reading, which requires to make the app visual-heavy. Include a lot of life-like illustrations so that farmers can easily relate to them. This gives the freedom to control the size of the assets. Consider using relevant effects, like watercolor effects and hand-painted images to connect better with the users.

Design Around Familiar Apps

A thorough study of the target audience is essential. It helps in understanding the usage patterns and behaviors. Farmers are generally familiar with apps like Google and YouTube. This should drive the design and functionality of your app; try to match the usability accordingly. For example, a card-style layout for the agriculture app that’s very similar to Google Feed will improve usability. This will help in offering the content upfront so that the farmers can associate with the app instantaneously.

To take advantage of these technologies all a farmer needs is a smartphone with internet access and a mobile app. Here’s a list of some important features you should include in your agriculture mobile application to make it a useful tool for farmers.

GPS and Location-Based Services

Mapping allows farmers to use lots of location-based features, including tracking drone investigations and seeing local weather forecasts. A location-based service can also help to divide a field into polygons. Each polygon is investigated separately and locations that need extra attention are pinned. With maps, farmers can also locate their speciality crops, pesticide applicators, and more.

Drone Integration

Drones are becoming one of the most important and popular agricultural technologies. With drones, a farmer can see where crops are healthy and weak so they can make adjustments precisely where they’re needed. Thermal cameras on drones can help to detect water leakage and find out how much water crops get. Moreover, drones can spread pesticides and deliver soil samples to a farmer from anywhere.

Broadcasting and Video Calls

Video streaming and broadcasting are also great features for an advisor app. They allow advisors to answer common questions and allow farmers to join live video sessions. Broadcasting also helps farmers share their experience and useful tips, creating a community inside your application. 

Camera and Machine Vision

Visual information and machine learning are the core of some agriculture applications. It allows farmers to effectively recognize plant diseases at early stages, identify weeds, check nitrogen levels, and evaluate leaf damage. The biggest challenge in machine learning is getting enough data for the system to learn. However, there are ready databases of plants, their diseases, and so on. You can use these databases and cloud-based approach to build an agriculture application and help farmers.

Integration of Weather Forecast in Agriculture App

Though technology has made farmers less dependent on the environment, the weather is still an important factor when it comes to growing crops. Weather forecast integration is a useful feature for an agriculture app.

Analytics For Agriculture App

Analytics help farmers to determine how successful their precision farming strategy is and how to make it better. Integrating analytics is a great decision for most agricultural apps that help with managing work processes. Analytics should be informative and give valuable insights on resources, crop health, changes in weather conditions, and so on.

Read about reducing the bounce rate for your website here

There are many types of agricultural applications that solve different problems and help farmers work smarter and get better results with less effort. If you’re considering entering this emerging market and you want to make your own farming app, you should start planning your application as soon as possible. Our team of experts can guide you.

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UX UX Design

Handy Tips To Help You Achieve AI-driven UX

AI-Driven UX

Machine learning and AI-driven UX design are inseparable as they are both invaluable to improve the quality of product experience. Machine learning is built upon complex algorithms that learn from different data sets or human interactions. Over a period of time, it gains insights to act on a certain instruction or predict outcomes on its own. AI-driven UX and Machine Learning-based Predictive User Experiences are incredible playgrounds for UX designers. It is the challenging combination of technology and people that make it so hard to design seamless experiences. Designing AI-driven UX is the process of designing meaningful AI-driven products or services; it comes with many challenges

The design makes the products more accessible to the user. From the perspective of a designer, it is their ability to keep the user in mind and deliver positive interactions that matter the most. With more AI in UX design, designers will have to know more about data and how an algorithm responds to a specific data set. For example, if you are designing a fitness app, you need to study the health care data to make more credible assumptions. The data can say a lot about where the user belongs to, age groups, locations, body types, etc.

The future of machine learning will depend a lot on how designers apply their own knowledge and the effectiveness of AI to bring a better user experience for every individual. Here are some design principles you need to know before designing good AI products:

Design For Humans

The key purpose of AI is to serve human interests. It should help humans in making decisions, derive insights, and in automating our world. It is imperative for designers to maintain a human-focused approach while creating AI-driven UX. People should be kept in mind throughout every step of the process; right from discovering the problem, building models, iterating and calibrating the experience.

When you design an AI-driven experience, you are building calibrated trust with your user. The magnitude and accuracy at which AI helps drive the experience to cultivate trust between the user and the experience. This trust helps in creating habit-forming behavior, whereby people will be internally and externally more motivated. As a designer, you should always be eyeing to solve a particular problem, and if AI capabilities can solve it better? 

Keep It Transparent

AI derives meaningful insights from complex data sets to produce recommended actions. But, there are chances that the AI-generated content may not be accurate. This is seen mostly in cases when there is not enough data or feedback to learn from. We need to differentiate or mark out the content generated by an algorithm so people know that the data is not fully accurate. This way a customer will know whether to trust the data or not.

Explain How Machines Learning Works

Sometimes, it becomes incredibly hard to explain how machine learning algorithms have come up with a certain recommendation. But, we should let people know the reason why they are seeing such results. That said, we don’t need to give a detailed account of how a neural pathway works. A better understanding of how an ML system work is essential to keep people interested in the system. We should give users hints about what the algorithm does or what data it uses.

Build The Right Communication

We should understand how to make our design systems more practical and widely usable for all types of users. Sometimes, it’s funny how things turn up when people try to communicate with chatbots. Extensive testing can help us prevent awkward conversation issues. However, a designer needs to be fully aware of user expectations and communicate these issues to the developer so they can fine-tune the algorithms to prevent bad responses.

Offer The Right Training Data To AI-Driven UX Designers

A UX team provides valuable guidance to the engineering team based on the insights collected from training data. While the engineers are focused on finding the best algorithm for the task, UX people help define user expectations to ensure the end product addresses needs more effectively. Google reportedly hires “content specialists”, experts in the domain of the product who help build training data set. In an AI-driven UX project, you need designers and developers to work closely with each other to design better products and experiences.

Test All Your AI-driven UX Products

Depending on the application and what data is available, there are different types of testing methods for AI products. However, Testing the UX of AI products is usually more difficult than for regular apps. You can Test the AI UX with methods like the Wizard of Oz testing. The Woz method is a popular method in the initial prototyping stage to check for any inaccuracies in product response.

Building an AI-driven UX for products has many benefits. it is able to predict user behavior and immediately understands the best options to perform the function. However, with the increasing adoption and acceptance of new AI-appliances, it is important to set the right expectations so people will know what they can or can’t achieve with the AI product. You should allow users to provide feedback at all times, and even come up with suggestions on how to improve the product.

Contact Us today for your design specific requirements

Interested in building a career in UX design? These tips will help

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Brand & Identity UI Design Web Design

How To Design Characters For The Web?

Design Characters

Drawing a character is one thing, but designing your own design characters is a bigger challenge. You need to understand the style they’ll fit into, who they are, what they’ll be doing, and what will simply look good. Being familiar with the best character design tips can help you use illustrations in web design in a smart way. Whatever solutions excite creative minds, the illustrative approach has always found its way to the web design sphere—whether we were all obsessed with flat principles or digitally reproduced real-life objects.

Using illustrations in web design has its own trends. For instance, showing cartoonish design characters in the hero section prevails nowadays. That’s because both old and young people love cartoons. They are not simply a fun or pleasant way to while away the time. One of the most important elements of good character design is simplicity. Simple character design means that more time can be spent polishing the entire scene or drawing other frames of animation.

Here are some of the best tips that will help you in designing amazing design characters for your websites:

Know Your Target Audience

At the start of your character design process, decide on who your character is trying to appeal to. Design Characters meant to appeal to small children, for instance, often have bright colors and are designed around the use of basic shapes.

If you’re designing characters for a client, often many elements are already decided. Understanding who your character’s target audience means that you can figure out how to design a character based on that audience’s tastes.

Be Human

Whether you have an online service that lets tech-savvy people be more efficient or just a web application that helps ordinary people run their businesses without hustle and bustle, chances are those people might find themselves confused while exploring your website.

To overcome this obstacle, use human design characters engaged in daily situations. The human touch in a “cold” digital environment will certainly make the website familiar to the user. 

Add Some Personality

While an interesting character design can make for some nice artwork, it isn’t enough. Work out a personality for your character. This is a great place to start, as the character personality often provides some great character design inspiration.

Make sure the character’s personality is at least as interesting as their appearance. It doesn’t have to be agreeable, but it does have to be interesting. A lot of the character’s personality will be revealed through reactions and interactions in animations and comic strips. It can also be shown simply in the way the character is drawn if this is a static mascot or something similar.

Be Crystal Clear

Sometimes all you need is to be absolutely honest and straightforward. In the case of website design, it is all about clarity. We all appreciate intricacy in projects. However, there are some situations where obviousness is preferable. What you see is what you get is the first rule of good relationships with the online crowd. Besides, this principle is also the foundation of one of the best character design tips you need to know about. To avoid confusion in the first place, you should use an illustration that clears things up from the first seconds.

Use Funny Animal Mascots

If, on the contrary, your business is self-explanatory and doesn’t need any introduction, you might want to make it stand out from the crowd with the help of smart character design. This is when a funny animal mascot can save the day by turning a banal website into an enjoyable project.

Funny animal mascots lighten the mood and make the atmosphere cheerful and pleasant. And, it lures viewers in with its outstanding charisma.

Use Colors Wisely

Color also does a lot of work in communicating a character’s personality. Normally, people associate darker colors like black, purple, and gray with bad or at least more shadowy types of design characters.

Lighter colors like pink, white, blue, and yellow are more often associated with good guys and pure intentions.  Bold red, yellow, and blue lend themselves to heroism thanks to a lot of use in comic books.

Don’t Forget to Add Facial Expressions

Even grotesque or very inhuman design characters can have facial expressions. Facial expressions depict the character’s attitude about the situation.

You can have muted or explosive expressions, depending on the personality you’re dealing with, but a dull neutral face rarely makes for good character design.  If you’re creating a character for animation or comics, you’ll need a sense of their facial expressions in a wide range of situations.

Try And Associate With The Audience

Unless you are building a website that concerns burning social issues such as famine or natural disasters, the playful factor is your loyal friend in a battle of winning over clients. You can create a playground where dynamic canvas lies at heart, but if you need to employ illustrations you can always try to use associations.

In such a way, you will give people some food for thought and remind them of some good moments that evoke positive feelings. Create a unique website where messages are skillfully supported by witty illustrations. 

Use a Superhero to Boost Confidence

Let’s be honest, we are used to equating ourselves with cartoon heroes: saving the world and doing all the incredible stuff. Even though we are now serious grown-ups, we all know that childhood habits die hard. And, we can use this for our good.

Cartoonish characters, especially superheroes, inspire confidence in people on a subconscious level. You can trigger this effect by using a hand-drawn self-portrait enhanced with some hero features.

Experiment With Various Styles

The illustrative approach is one of those things that have the ability to cooperate flawlessly with various mainstreams. Depending on the purpose and theme of your website, you can use different types of illustrations especially nowadays, when diversity is highly praised and appreciated. Take a look at two fantastic examples that prove this in practice.

Read more about Style Guides for building a brand here

No matter how simple your character design is, question every choice you’ve made. In fact, this is even more important for simple character designs because these characters already have so few features. Characters are powerful tools. They are able to enhance and enrich user experience but still retain their playful and adorable nature. 
Talk to our team and discuss your design requirements.

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UX UX Design Web Design

10 Rules Every UX Designer Must Know

UX Designer

User experience or UX is a vast discipline. Anyone who practices UX design should be equipped with skills in many different fields. UX designer creates designs based on their knowledge, experience, trends, creativity, and gut feeling. While there’s no rule of thumb, or a fixed combination of ingredients when it comes to designing fantastic user experiences, here are ten golden rules which will surely help you in creating an excellent experience for people.

1. UX And UI Are Different

Swapping UX with UI, as if the two are the same, is a common mistake among many UX designer. It’s essential to understand the difference between the two disciplines. User Interface is the space where interactions between humans and a product occur, while User Experience is an emotional outcome after interactions with a product.

2. User Research Is a Natural First Step In The Design Process

It should come as no surprise that one of the most important factors you should consider when designing a product is the audience. If you plan to design a product your users will love, you must have an idea of what your audience actually wants and needs. And this means user research should be an essential part of the UX design process. It’s critical to keep your users top of mind before you start designing! This will allow you to provide value for people who’ll use your product and focus on benefits instead of features.

3. Test With Real Users

Designers often assume that people who will use their interfaces are like them. As a result, UX designer projects their behaviors and reactions to users. But thinking that you are your user is a fallacy. This effect in psychology is called the false-consensus — a tendency to assume that others share our beliefs and will behave similarly in a given context.

Most probable, the people who’ll use your product have different backgrounds, different mindsets, different mental models, and different goals. 

There is a technique that helps UX designer overcome false-consensus bias, called usability testing. If you want to build products that users love, then you have to focus on testing. Testing with real users allows designers to learn how to create products that are right for those who will use them. This may be time-consuming, but it’s the only way to be sure that you’re moving in the right direction.

4. Prototype Before You Build a Real Product

Skipping prototyping and putting a lot of effort into building an actual product is another common mistake among many design teams. When we put a lot of effort into creating something that we believe is great, it can be stressful to realize that our solution doesn’t work as expected when we release it into the wild.

Prototyping is creating a model of a product so that it can be tested. Prototyping allows you to test your hypothesis before spending time with an engineering team building the actual product. UX designer can use different design techniques for prototyping. One useful prototyping technique is called rapid prototyping. It’s a popular way of quickly creating the future state of a product, be it a website or an app, and validating it with a group of users.

5. Avoid Lorem Ipsum And Dummy Placeholders

Almost every product is based around content, whether that’s text, images, or videos. It can be said that design is an enhancement to the content. Yet many designers don’t take content into account during the design phase — they use Lorem Ipsum instead of real copy and placeholders instead of real images. While such a design might look great on a designer’s artboard, the picture might be completely different when the same design is filled with actual data.

6. Aim To Be Consistent And Straightforward

The hallmark of a great user interface is simplicity and consistency

In the context of digital products, simplicity means that’s it’s easy to understand and interact with a product. Your users shouldn’t need to read instructions to understand how to use an app or have a map to navigate through it. It’s part of your job as an interface designer to make things clear and subtly guide them from where they are to where they need to go.

Interfaces must also be kept consistent throughout a design. In an attempt to make designs appear more creative and memorable many UX designer intentionally add inconsistencies in style. For example, different color schemes can be used on different pages on a website. Such design decisions often cause confusion and frustration in users. Thus, it’s always important to keep the design element familiar, reinforcing the most important facets of your design at every turn. Remember to apply the Principle of Least Astonishment to your product design.

7. Design Must Be Usable And Accessible

Design for a diverse set of users that will interact with your products

When it comes to design, designers often obsess over the look and appeal instead of functionality and accessibility. Most of us try to make things look beautiful. Quite often, this leads to a situation where aesthetics become more important for UX designer than usability. Of course, aesthetics are important, and we definitely should try to make our designs appealing, but only after we have usable products. The most important job of digital products and services is to perform a function.

8. Design Is An Iterative Process

It’s important to understand that UX design isn’t a linear process. The phases of the UX process (ideation, prototyping, testing) often have considerable overlap, and usually, there’s a lot of back-and-forths. As you learn more about the problem, the users, and the project details (especially any constraints), it may be necessary to revisit some of the research undertaken or try out new design ideas. Don’t think that it’s possible to make your design perfect right after just one iteration. Instead, refine ideas to the point where you can test them with real users, collect valuable feedback, and iterate based on this feedback.

9. Preventing Errors Is Better Than Fixing Them

Whenever possible, design products to keep potential errors to a minimum. To err is human. Errors often occur when people engage with user interfaces. Sometimes, they happen because users make mistakes, and other times they happen because an app fails. 

Whatever the cause, these errors, and how they are handled have a huge impact on the user experience. Users hate errors and hate the feeling that they triggered such behavior even more. Thus, you should strive to either eliminate error-prone conditions altogether or check for them and notify users before they commit to the action.

10. There’s No ‘one’ Universal UX Process

UX process is a make-it-or-break-it aspect of UX design. Without a solid UX process, a designer could be completely moving in the dark. A clear and concise UX development process, on the other hand, makes it possible to craft amazing experiences for users.

Read more about how to prevent mistakes in UX practices here

Many designers believe that there’s one universal UX process that can be applied to all projects. Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all UX design. While it’s possible to define individual steps for each project, a precise UX process should always be selected based on project requirements — each project is unique and has its own needs. This means that to create the best possible user experience a designer should be ready to adapt their design process based on project specifics. 
Talk to our team now – learn more about the rules of UX designing.

Categories
UI Design UX Design Web Design

7 Valuable Real Estate On Your Website

Real Estate

The primary goal of any website is to sell its products/services, market its brand, or grow an email list. Regardless of the type of website, you’ll need to get visitors to pay attention to your message to achieve success. There are certain locations and pages or Real Estate on a website that can be extremely effective to convey your core message and grab user attention on the most important things. These locations are highly valuable to you. You should work to maximize the impact that you can create through these areas. In this article, we’ll look at 7 different locations on your website that can help you to achieve your desired results. 

1. Homepage

The homepage of your website is the most important real estate as its the first page seen by users; it’s seen by a lot of people. Using a static homepage gives you full control over the layout of the page and the content/message that visitors will see. You can use your homepage to grow your email list and get more exposure for your products or services.

WordPress makes it very easy to set any page as your homepage/frontpage, and if you’re using a drag-and-drop builder like Divi from Elegant Themes, you can easily create a custom layout for your homepage without even needing to touch the code.

2. Site Header

The site header is obviously a location that has high visibility. Most websites that are monetized with ads will include a banner ad in the header because it is usually one of the higher-performing ad zones. Of course, if you’re not monetizing your site with ads, you could use this space for other purposes, like getting more exposure for your own products and services.

3. “About Us” Page

The “About Us” page is one of the most frequently visited pages on many websites. People who visit your “About Us” page are there to learn more about you, your business, or your site, so they are interested in what you have to offer. Your page shouldn’t be boring and it should include a call to action, like an email opt-in form.

One of the most common mistakes with “About Us” pages is to simply provide some boring biographical info without asking visitors to take any action. If you have products or services to promote, you could use this space for those purposes instead of an email opt-in form. Regardless of which approach you to take, the “About Us” page is valuable real estate that should be maximized.

4. Navigation Menu

You also have full control over the links in your navigation menu. If you use WordPress, you’ll be able to easily create a custom navigation menu. It links to any page on your site, or even pages on other sites. Most navigation menus typically link to things like category pages, but you can also include links to the most important pages on your site, whatever that might be.

You can also use dropdowns to add specific links. For example, you may use category links as your primary menu options. Then, use dropdowns to increase exposure to some of the most important content in each category.

5. Top of blog posts

The area between the post title and the start of the content is also highly visible. This is an area that is used very often for advertisements because it is a great location for getting clicks and making money. Sometimes the ads at the top of the post will be aligned to the left or right so the start of the blog content wraps around them.

While this location is often used by blogs for ad revenue, you can also use it for other purposes. If you have your own products or services to sell, you could create an internal ad that leads visitors to a landing page if they click on the ad. You could also use a simple text-based callout that gets visitors’ attention and drives them to some specific page on your site.

6. In-content

Although the top of the content area is valuable real estate, so is any area within the main body of the content. People who are reading or scanning your content will notice any ads or promos that are included within the content. This could include banner ads or simply text-based ads. If you want to promote your own products, services, or other pages on your site, you may have more luck with a text-based ad than an image because many visitors tend to tune out images that look like ads.

If you use a text-based ad within your content, be sure to format it to stand out. You can use bold or italic text, set a background color to make the text appear to be highlighted, add some CSS code to put the text in a box with a different background color, or a border.

7. Confirmation Page

If you’re using a double opt-in approach for your email list, subscribers will need to click a link in an email in order to confirm their submission. What happens when visitors click on that confirmation link? In most cases, the visitor is led to a boring page that says “thanks for confirming your subscription” or something similar.

Read more about Contact Us real estate page here

Again, this is the perfect time to get a relevant offer in front of someone. Loaded Landscapes uses a double opt-in approach. When a subscriber confirms, they are taken to a confirmation page that thanks to the visitor. Then, once again includes the promo video for their best-selling product.
Focusing on the most important real estate on your website allows you to convey your core message. You can impress the audience and improve your conversions. Still, confused about how to best use these areas? Talk to us!

Categories
Blog Brand & Identity Technology UI Design UX Design

A 7 Step Guide To Start An Online Store

Online Store

Having an online store has turned from being a good idea into a necessity over the past decade. You may be thinking of turning your physical store into an online store, setting up from scratch, or working a physical store with an online version too. You’ve got the vague plan, the ideas, the motivation, and the reasons. But, the most important thing that you need to know is ‘How to execute?’. You could, of course, sell things directly from an online store or social media and send out via delivery services, it is certainly not unheard of for people to make a decent living this way. There are, however, a number of options to consider when starting an online store. In this article, we will cover the seven most critical steps for starting an online store, which will get you going.

1. Choose a CMS Platform

The first step is to decide if you’re going to design and develop your own website or use one of the many specialized e-commerce platforms available to sell your products? Please do some research, think about it, and analyze your options thoroughly. Which content management system is going to meet your needs best, both in the short and longer-term. Are you going to use a general website CMS like WordPress or Drupal or an E-commerce CMS such as Shopify or Magento? The general things to consider while choosing the CMS includes – 

  • Set up cost and maintenance
  • Ease of use
  • Features
  • Transactions costs
  • Hosting costs
  • Support

2. Choose a Domain

You will need a domain name, the web address for your web store. It doesn’t have to be your brand name, but that helps. There are tools online for you to check name availability and price. Availability tools such as namecheap.com, GoDaddy are easy to use. You simply type in your chosen name to see if it’s already been registered and if not what are the price ranges of different options. You will be presented with variations too.

Your domain name should be as short as possible, easy to remember and to associate with your business. The domain extension is also important (.com, .net, .ai, .co.uk) as they add some authenticity and trust to your store. However, they are usually more expensive.

3. Choose a Design or Create Custom Design

You’ve got to get your store designed, developed, and up and selling. There are basically two options, you can either make it yourself or go for custom professional design? It will depend on cost and your technical abilities and time constraints too.

If you decide to go for the DIY approach, there are templates that you can use, depending on the platform you’ve chosen. This will, without a doubt, make your life easier. However, you are going to be more limited and will still need technical skills and flair. 

If you go for custom design and/or development you can then decide if you are going to go down the professional agency route or the freelancer route. You will get a professional-looking, functional online store that will satisfy your needs. 

4. Add Products

So once, you’ve got the online store planned you need to get your products uploaded onto it. If you’ve gone down the professional route then you will be guided every step of the way and supported. If you’ve chosen the DIY route then follow the specific CMS guide for your store. Unfortunately, it isn’t just as simple as listing the products. You’ll need quality images, detail essential information, good layout and space, organization, and categorization. Part of this will have hopefully been achieved in combination with your design decisions.

The web store needs to be easy to navigate, customers don’t want, indeed won’t spend time trying to figure out where to look for what they want. They’ll move on – lost sale. It needs to be clear, clean, functional, filtered, and fast. Look at the stores you like to shop on, look at your competition, what do you like? What do they do? Get feedback from friends, colleagues- and more importantly listen to it. There is simply no point in spending time, effort, and money on a site where people can’t access what they want to buy.

5. Optimize Your Website

Search Engine Optimization is one of the ways people will find your online store. Until you are a global brand until your marketing or reputation is dragging people in, then you want to get the customers who aren’t specifically looking for you by name; so you want your store to be high in the search engine ratings. There are techniques that will help: site speed, keywords, page titles, snippets (the things that show in a box in google search results like a review, rating, etc.) all come together to boost your online store. Professional developers and designers will give you great tips and guidance here, they know the importance.

6. Set Up Payment and Shipment Process

Choose the payment methods and system wisely, read their terms and conditions, fees, etc; account for it in your costings. Assess the importance of a well known, well-trusted payment system, or systems for your store. Unless you accept the customer’s card, they are likely to find someone else who will.

Think carefully about how you are going to get your product to the customer and at what cost. Customers demand timely delivery and quality service. The last thing you need is poor feedback and reviews in this particular area.

Be honest and upfront about your terms and conditions, spell them out for the customer. Great customer service generates trust, return business and word of mouth spread plus those reviews that you are going to rely on.

7. Start Marketing and Selling

So it’s all in place. Now you need to really push the word, get your profile out there, and show the competition what you are about. You could hire an agency or adviser – there are specialists in all fields. You could do it yourself. 

Social media is one of the best, cheapest, and easiest ways of getting your brand out to the masses. Create profiles on all the major social media platforms don’t just rely on one or two. Create links to and from your online store, create regular and interesting content to build a following, keep it updated. 
We hope that these steps help you in setting your store online. In case you wish to get more details, please get in touch with our team.

Want to know more about how to improve your website design? Click here

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Brand & Identity Design UI Design UX Design

7 Best Practices For An Awesome B2B Web Design

B2B Web Design

The decision making and buying process of B2B web design is entirely different from that of a B2C website. B2B consumers will never buy anything out of impulse. B2B customers are making a greater investment and taking an increased risk, so they usually want to speak with a salesperson before they commit.

But that doesn’t mean that a B2B web design should just be a static brochure. Even though the website might not be involved in the drafting of a contract or the physical exchange of money, it’s still one of your best salespeople.

All B2B websites design should be focused on generating leads. Although B2B buying decisions might take anywhere from six months to two years to finalize, a sales-ready website must be set up to support that lengthy sales cycle. 

The information architecture, form strategy, conversion strategy, and every other component of the web design must reflect the goals and pain points of your buyer personas, attract high-quality leads organically, and encourage those leads to move through the sales funnel on their own. Here are a few hand-picked best practices that will help you in designing amazing B2B websites.

1. Do Your Research

Before you begin to think about your website’s design, it’s imperative to do some research to ensure you stay true to your buyer personas and map your content to the buyer’s journey. Focus on meeting their needs and solving their pain points.

Often the objective of B2B web design is to attract more visitors, improve the bounce rate, or convert visitors into leads. Aligning the wants and needs of your business with the wants and needs of your customer is a great way to ensure your website is accomplishing this goal.

2. B2B Web Design: Understand Customer Needs

According to a study, seventy-six percent of B2B customers feel that the most important factor in a website’s design is the ease of use and the ability to find the required information. Before you enter your website redesign, make sure you have well-developed buyer personas, and have a good understanding of their goals and pain points to inform your strategy and planning. Knowing what your customers want and how to speak to them will help you develop an effective content outline around which you’ll structure the rest of your website.

3. Concentrate on User Experience

After you establish who you are as a brand and who you want to attract, you need to think about exactly what you want visitors to do when they get to your page. Research from the Nielsen Norman Group has shown that a mere 58 percent of B2B websites had successful user experiences.

What are your goals? Do you want your visitors to check out your products? Would you prefer they visit your blog or download a premium content offer? It’s imperative to establish your goals and the anticipated conversion paths. Laying out a wireframe for a website is the best way to define a visitor’s flow. It also helps the designer build the pages. In some cases, it might even make sense to conduct user-experience research on your wireframes. Wireframes are a critical initial step in creating a compelling user experience.

4. B2B Web Design: Think and Write Like a Human

Think of your website as part of your sales strategy and use it to introduce buyers to the solution you provide for their pain points while explaining why your business is best at providing it.

This doesn’t mean you need to cram industry jargon onto every page. Use the same vocabulary that your buyer personas use in the solutions they’re seeking. Don’t overload them with information. Instead, state what your business offers simply and clearly.

5. Ensure Good Page Load Speed

Speed matters more than ever right now. As mobile devices with poor bandwidth continue to become more popular, Google now considers page load speed as one of the most important factors in determining your search ranking — and it’s a key component in creating a stellar user experience.

Today, your website is expected to be fast, sleek, and convenient. Be mindful of the details on your website that could affect page load speed, like high-quality images and JavaScript. Think about what you can get rid of or alter to improve your page speed. 

6. B2B Web Design: Engage Your Customers

Building your business and gaining trust is all about developing relationships. This can be done through content production, such as having a great blog. But effective design also plays a big role. 

Use heat maps to determine information placement. Visitors use one of two distinct reading patterns when visiting websites – the F-pattern and the Z-pattern. By tailoring your content placement and structure to these two patterns, you can be sure that the most important information is being conveyed clearly. 

Focus on a minimalist design to create an uncluttered, easily navigable experience. Ensure your CTAs across the site are using consistent color and design. Highlight social engagement – sharing and responding to your content not only encourages engagement, but it also boosts your page rank and increases your market reach.

7. Present Consistent Branding

One of the most important pieces of building effective user experience and building trust is presenting a consistent branding. It’s advisable to have a style guide for your business. Style guides touch on all aspects of your brand and establish a precedent for color management, images, fonts, logo use, voice, and tone. Before you begin developing your website, writing your blog, or even making social posts, it’s not a bad idea to establish a simple style guide.
In the past, B2B websites were online brochures, built to look good and nothing else. But as B2B buyers, search engines and the web have evolved, this approach has become obsolete. Today, your B2B is your best salesperson. You need to make sure that it provides a good first impression and that it continues to offer seamless, satisfying experiences to your prospects and customers in the long term. Want to discuss more on B2B web design? Talk to our experts.

Want to know the difference between B2B and B2C? Click here

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Brand & Identity Design SEO Technology

5 Tips To Improve Website Readability

Readability

The copy is the backbone of your website; we all know that. But, do users really read the copy on websites? Do they have an attention span long enough to read all the content you want them to read? The answer is NO! According to past research published by Nielsen Norman Group, 79% of users scan any new page they come across and only 16% of them read word by word. The same holds true today, with users finding time to read only 28% of the copy on an average visit. The human attention span has dropped drastically over the last few decades; today it stands at eight seconds only. Therefore writing an engaging copy to convert your website visitor into a customer is a crucial task, and these tips will surely help you in improving the readability of your website content.

1. Ensure The Perceived Benefit Outweighs The Perceived Cost

Readers always do a cost-benefit analysis before they read anything (unknowingly mostly). They ask themselves two things:

  • How much time and effort would reading this web page take?
  • What useful information/solution will I extract from this web page?

If the perceived benefit outweighs the perceived cost, they read.

Hence, it is essential first to identify your target audience. Everyone has a liking to their own style of writing. But, does that style suits your target audience? Understanding the readability level of your target audience is the primary exercise that you must do before putting your pen to paper. 

One of the effective ways of writing is to use the inverted pyramid style of writing. In this approach, you make your point right up and then go on to explain the specifics. It helps users easily scan the main points and then decide for themselves if they want to go into the details. Further, use contextual headings, subheadings, and keywords in bold so that the user can scan what you are offering. 

The other effective approach is to use the APP (Agree, problem, preview) method. You start with a statement to get the agreement from readers. Once the reader agrees with it, the handshake is made. Then you state the problem and make a promise to solve it. This is where the user is assured of the value from the post. And, then we present a preview of the solution and how it will change things for the better.

2. Use Words That Users Can Comprehend

Users get comfortable with your writing when you filter out unnecessary jargon and trim down on fancy vocabulary. Using words that users can relate to is the key. Readability tests such as Dale-Chall use a list of familiar words to gauge readability. However, in order to use words that your user is familiar with, you have to be familiar with your reader first. Give a little thought to the audience you are writing for, and try to keep your copy in sync with their cultural and educational background for better readability.

3. Use Legible Typography

Copywriters and content specialists cannot do much about visual design. A copy-friendly visual design uses default typefaces, backgrounds, and layouts that improve the legibility of your copy. Use contrasting texts and text hierarchy. The text color should appear distinct against the background. Use headings and subheadings and bullet points to make the copy structured and organized. Shorter sentences and new paragraphs every 3-4 lines would also give your readers some breathing space— it might hook them till the end.

A short line height also increases the horizontal eye movement and exhausts our eyes. Scanning through the text becomes easy with the optimum line length and height. It also makes reading less strenuous for the human eye. Responsive web design takes care of adapting the line length to different device screens. You need not worry about fixing the line length with different screen sizes. Also, it would be best if you avoided smaller fonts as larger fonts are easier to read. The font size ideally should vary between 14 px to 16 px.

4. Follow The SUCCES Principles

Chip Heath, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and his brother Dan Heath, a Senior Fellow at Duke University’s CASE center, authored a book called ‘Made To Stick. In that book, they summarise conveying impressionable ideas in six principles:

(S) Simplicity: Avoid complexity in the language and structure.

(U) Unexpectedness: Make your copy interesting. Surprises could be interesting bits of information or surprising data, fun facts that are relevant, examples to illustrate.

(C) Concreteness: Be specific with numbers. Use stats and figures. Don’t use vague adjectives and long paragraphs. Listicles are popular for the same reason.

(C) Credibility: Data points and numbers are instinctive to grasp on. The user remembers them more. They also make your copy more credible.

(E) Emotion: Using emotion in your copy is to make it relatable – if readers relate, they remember. But be aware of the dangers of overstating a point.

(S) Story: Stories stick to users. Create stories!

Adding emotion and stories is subjective from copy to copy. Emotional copies may not go down well when what is required is a rational approach. Use these elements with caution, when feasible.

5. Drive Attention Using Images

The more you can break down the text pattern, the easier it is to read. Images are perfect for this. People also “get” visuals much faster than text. Relevant images solve the purpose of storytelling and emotional appeal. Also, images can be used effectively to shift the user’s attention to the copy on web pages. 

Not just images, image captions are scannable elements as well. They are read 50% more than the rest of the copy and have a recall rate of almost 100%. Write your captions to capture interest just as you write headlines to woo the reader.
Readers on the web do have a small attention span, but they read with a purpose. Your copy must be able to extract the purpose effectively to be highly readable. Our experts can guide you more on this topic. Talk to them now!

Read About Copy-First Approach of Designing a Website Here

Categories
UI Design UX Design

7 Handy UI (User Interface) Design Tips To Remember

User Interface Design

Creating beautiful, usable, and efficient UIs takes time, with many design revisions along the way. User interface design, which focuses on the layout of the functionality of interfaces, is a subset of user experience design, which focuses on the bigger picture: that is, the whole experience, not just the interface. In this article, we have collated a list of UI design tips that will help you create amazing user experiences and interfaces.

1. Understand Your Users Completely

You need to know your users inside and out. That includes demographic information, but more importantly, it means knowing what they need, and what stands in the way of them achieving their goals. Getting to that level of empathy requires more than a careful analysis of stats. It requires getting to know the people who use your website. It means speaking with them face to face, watching them use your product, and asking them questions.

Don’t stop at knowing what your users want. Dig deeper and find out what they need. After all, desires are just outgrowths of needs. If you can address a user’s deep-seated need, you’ll address their wants while also fulfilling more fundamental requirements. The insights you’ll uncover from analyzing data and speaking with users will inform every decision you make, from how people use your interface to what types of content you’ll highlight within that interface.

2. Clearly Define How People Will Use Your Interface

Before you design your user interface design, you need to define how people will use it. With the increasing prevalence of touch-based devices, it’s a bigger concern than you might think. People use websites and apps in two ways:

  1. Directly – by interacting with the user interface design elements of the product
  2. Indirectly – by interacting with user interface design elements external to the product

Examples of direct interactions are – tapping a button, swiping a card, dragging and dropping an item with a fingertip, etc. Examples of indirect interactions are – pointing and clicking with a mouse, using key commands or shortcuts, typing into a form field, drawing on a tablet, etc. Who your users are and what devices they use should deeply inform your decisions here. If you’re designing for seniors or others with limited manual dexterity, you wouldn’t want to lean on swiping. If you’re designing for writers or coders, who primarily interact with apps via the keyboard, you’ll want to support all the common keyboard shortcuts to minimize time working with the mouse.

3. Expect Users To Make Errors

People make mistakes, but they shouldn’t (always) have to suffer the consequences. There are two ways to help lessen the impact of human error: Either prevent mistakes before they happen or provide ways to fix them after they happen. You see a lot of mistake-prevention techniques in eCommerce and form design. Buttons remain inactive until you fill out all fields. Forms detect that an email address hasn’t been entered properly. Pop-ups ask you if you really want to abandon your shopping cart. Anticipating mistakes is often less frustrating than trying to fix them after the fact. 

When you’re writing error messages, make sure you explain the problem and explain how to fix it. The principle of anticipating user error is called the poka-yoke principle. Poka-yoke is a Japanese term that translates to “mistake-proofing.”

4. Place Your Elements Carefully And In An Appropriate Size

Fitts’ Law, a fundamental principle of human-computer interaction (HCI), states that: the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target. In simple words, the closer and/or bigger something is, the faster you can put your cursor (or finger) on it. This obviously has all kinds of implications for interaction and user interface design techniques. 

Make buttons and other “click targets” (like icons and text links) big enough to see and click easily. This is especially important with typography, menus, and other link lists, as insufficient space will leave people clicking the wrong links again and again.

Place navigation (and other common interactive visual elements, like search bars) on the edges or corners of the screen. This last might seem counterintuitive, but it works because it lessens the need for accuracy: a user doesn’t need to worry about overshooting their click target.

While you’re thinking about element placing and size, always keep your interaction model in mind. If your site requires horizontal scrolling rather than vertical scrolling, you’ll need to consider where and how to cue users to this unusual interaction type.

5. Follow The Standards

Don’t ignore industry standards in a quest to stand out from the crowd. Being highly creative types, designers tend to love to reinvent things—but it’s not always the best idea. Because a revamped version of a familiar interaction or interface adds “cognitive load”: it makes people think again about a process they’ve already learned. Obviously, you can reinvent the wheel all you want—but only if it actually improves the design.

6. Create Easy To Learn Interfaces

According to a published article, based on research, people can only hold 5 to 9 things in their short term memory with any reliability. It’s only logical that the simpler something is, the easier it is to remember in the short term. So, whenever possible, limit the number of things a person needs to remember to use your interface efficiently and effectively. You can facilitate this by chunking information, i.e., breaking it into small, digestible chunks. 

You’ll often see this on websites’ home pages, where short chunks of copy introduce a product or feature, then link off to a page where users can learn more. That’s called progressive disclosure. Avoid using “learn more” and similarly non-specific text in links and buttons because it doesn’t tell users what they’ll “learn more” about. Often, people simply scan a page looking for a link that takes them where they want to go, and “learn more,” repeated 15 times, doesn’t help. 

7. Simplify Decision Making

The simpler we make our designs, the faster and easier it is for users to make the decisions we want them to make. That’s exactly why landing pages and non-newsletter emails should only have one call to action. Sometimes, you actually do want users to slow down and consider their options. That’s why the tiled designs of Pinterest, Dribbble, and many blogs actually work well. After all, the more options you have to decide between, the more likely it is you’ll find one that works for you.
Hopefully, these tips help you with your next design project. Want to discuss more? Talk to our design experts.

Read more about the basic difference between UI and UX here