In this blog post, we will discuss UX psychology and what you need to know to design a positive user experience.

Part 1: Understanding User Behavior

The cornerstone of UX design is understating user behavior. Even the most stunning and cutting-edge product can fail if it doesn’t adapt to how users behave. UX designers should consider the following when designing for user behavior.

1. Users have short attention spans, so if they can’t find what they’re looking for right away despite having access to so much information, they quickly move on. To avoid causing users to become frustrated, keep your interface straightforward and simple to use.

2. Users prefer consistency because it makes it easier for them to interact with your product when design elements like font, color, and layout are consistent. A sense of trust in your brand is also fostered by this familiarity.

3. Users are motivated by their emotions, even though they may believe they are acting rationally. Create positive experiences and establish a connection with users using emotional design.

Part 2: Understanding User Motivation

User motivation is what persuades users to use your product. You can develop a product that not only satisfies users’ needs but also keeps them coming back by understanding what drives users.

Here are considerations UX designers should take into account:

1. Users want to feel as though they have accomplished something, whether it be finishing a task or achieving an objective. Use feedback and reward to give users a sense of accomplishment.
2. Users are looking for products that simplify their lives in order to save time and effort. To ensure that users can finish tasks quickly and easily, design with efficiency and simplicity in mind.
3. Users want to believe they are in charge of their experience. Allow users to personalize their interactions with your product and experience.

Part 3: Applying Psychology to UX Design

How can you apply psychology to UX design now that you are more familiar with user behavior and motivation? Here are some suggestions:

1. Conduct user research to better understand the motivation and behavior of your users. To learn more, conduct user interviews and surveys, examine user data, and track user behavior.

2. Utilize personas. Your target users are represented by fictitious characters. You can better understand the requirements, actions, and motivations of your users by developing personas.

3. Concentrate on user flows because they are how customers navigate your product in order to accomplish a task. You can find areas where you can make the user experience better by mapping out user flows.

4. Utilize emotional design. Emotional design is the process of evoking users’ emotions through the use of design elements. You can establish a connection with users and enhance the overall experience by evoking positive feelings like joy, trust, or surprise.

5. UX design is an iterative process, so test it out. Real users can be used to test your design, and you can use their feedback to improve.

Takeaway

To create a successful user experience, it is crucial to comprehend the psychology of user motivation and behavior. You can design products that not only satisfy user needs but also keep them coming back by keeping these principles in mind.

To develop a UX design that truly understands and is effective, conduct user research, employ personas, concentrate on user flows, use emotional design, and test and iterate.

The post The Psychology of UX: Understanding User Behavior and Motivation appeared first on Creativ Digital.

Switching from old school design techniques to a brand-new system can be a big change not only for the product but also for the whole organization.

However, adopting a design system helps teams to develop guidelines for delivering a fully functioning product and can help you get the most out of your team as it encourages collaboration.

Design systems are set up so that anyone can make use of them, and the underlying documents teach you how to. Design systems also include a governance scheme where ownership or contribution is clearly defined, allowing for unique user experiences, as well as providing teams with templates and examples on how to get started.

A design system can give you the following benefits:

• Lowered cost: having everything in one place reduces the work done by different teams
• Improved confidence: clear instructions on developing a user interface gives the team more confidence.
• Enhanced empathy: When designers all work on the same system, it creates empathy and a clearer understanding between teams.
• Defined principles: Design systems are crucial for people who are in design teams as they give each other guidelines for their work.
• Boosted Productivity: productivity improves after everything originates from 1 source.

Build Consistent Front-End Experiences

If you want to build consistent front-end experience, you need a well-documented and standardized set of UI blocks to help team members understand the basic foundation of which the UI is built.

This increases output speed and encourages collaboration between members to develop and implement features promptly. Additionally, conflicts are less likely to happen when companies can ship features faster compared to when they are without a design system.

Factors To Keep In Mind When Using A Design System

• Take advantage of open-source to simplify design. It may be the case that your company can’t afford to build an entire system from scratch. Instead, use open-source when you can and follow certain best practices for building these systems.
• Protect the product with documentation. Documentation must be comprehensive and up-to-date. Clear, step-by-step instructions can help neophytes get acquainted with the framework, while detailed examples make the process more efficient.
• When designing products, teams should follow predefined rules and adhere to patterns. Enforcement can help teams avoid wasting time and helps to speed up the process.

Control Quality and Maintainability

Design systems have a number of advantages including quality and maintainability and reducing the number of designs to which you are exposed. Always be on the lookout for ways to simplify your life in order to limit the number from design work not regularly used.

• The release process is made more efficient with an AI-enabled design system, which allows teams to release products faster. This has the benefit of keeping up with competitors and providing compatibility for teams that choose to roll back their work. The CI/CD should be automated and all information about releases is sent across channels, so all teams are informed.
• Feedback loops are important for determining what needs to be improved on, and how issues should be addressed as soon as possible. Effective feedback loops will ensure that a backlog of unresolved items doesn’t consume the team’s attention.

Keep Developers and Designers in Sync

If we want to deliver a good-quality product, developers and designers should be in sync

• Collaborating is essential for product development. To make sure everyone understands the rules, maintain an open dialogue with contributors. A high level of maturity across disciplines should make incorporating new ideas easier. Having a streamlined pipeline for pull requests and a dashboard for bugs and features will keep employees informed about what’s going on and what needs to be done next.
• You must collaborate to work efficiently, and your team should feel open to give their opinion. If they do disagree, they shouldn’t be afraid to ask teammates for input or help resolving conflict. Create a strategic plan with a timeline so everyone knows what needs to happen next. Design systems should also be updated as your project progresses, in case you encounter any roadblocks, otherwise new teams coming on could have the same issue.

Final Thoughts

A design system will help teams replicate designs quickly. Teams can continue to use the same elements over and over, which means that the time spent for “reinventing the wheel” is reduced and lowering the risk of unintended inconsistency.

The post 3 Foundations of a Successful Design System appeared first on Creativ Digital.

But business value isn’t only for people looking to sell. It’s a concept every entrepreneur should be concerned with. This is because to consider business value, you need to analyze every aspect of the business, a process that naturally exposes what you’re doing well and where you need to improve.

Nearly everything you do in your business affects its value. No action is too small to avoid influencing the overall value of the business. This is because business value is in part determined by revenues. Most appraisers or brokers will start the valuation process multiplying your yearly revenues by 2.5. From there, they’ll adjust up or down based on some of the less tangible aspects of your business.

Since nearly everything we do is an effort to boost revenues, we can say that nearly all we do is also an attempt to boost business value. This makes boosting revenues one of the key ways to business value. And having the right web design can play a huge role in making this happen, just as having poor web design can put you at a serious disadvantage. Here are some ways appropriate web design can boost the value of your business.

The power of color

One of the first things we notice when we land on a web page is the color scheme, even if we don’t notice it consciously. The brain receives the information and makes several assumptions that affect how we perceive the content we’re looking at.

Now the psychology of color is something under debate, largely because these assumptions our brain makes are heavily influenced by our own personal experiences, diminishing the effect of the colors themselves.

But they certainly still have an impact, especially on first impressions. And with a website, where you’re doing all you can to keep people on your site clicking around, this first contact is critical. You need to make sure the colors you’re using on your site reflect your personality as a brand. This way, when people first land on your site, they will immediately begin making positive associations about your company.

Yet the purpose of all of this is to trigger an emotional response with your viewers. Despite the role of rational thought in bringing humans to the top of the food chain, we are still deeply emotional creatures. When we feel an emotional connection towards something, we’re far more likely to engage with it.

In a B2C context, you want people to feel something towards your brand so that they are emotionally inspired to buy from you. This is how you build brand loyalty, maximize Customer Lifetime Value, and profits, and improve the overall value of your business.

It’s important to remember that you can’t garner this emotional response from web design alone; you also need to have great content. But web design is your first chance at steering people towards the emotions you want them to feel. By getting your color scheme right, you can influence the assumptions people make about your brand, enhancing the connection they feel with you, and increasing the chances they make a purchase.

To give you some examples, consider that the color red evokes excitement, youthfulness, and boldness, whereas blue brings about feelings of trust, dependability, and strength. You can find more information about what all the different colors mean here.

Bounce rate and SEO

Performing well with search engines will make your business more profitable and valuable. A large chunk of the traffic that comes to your site will come from organic search, making it absolutely essential you optimize your site for SEO.

To do this, content needs to be your primary focus. You must work on making yourself an authority so that Google and other search engines will trust you with one of their top search engine results. This requires an acute understanding of your target audience and an excellent content marketing strategy.

However, design plays a huge role as well, primarily by helping you lower your bounce rate. Bounce rate is the percentage of people who leave your website without clicking any links. Google uses it as an indicator of the quality of your content. The idea is that staying on the site and clicking its links indicates users have found what they were looking for. Google then rewards this by placing you higher up in search results.

Again, content is big. But so is design. You average blog reader only spends 15 seconds reading an article, which means you have an impossibly short window to catch their attention, convince them to stay and inspire them to click on one of your links. The design of your site will have a big impact on these first few seconds, and it can play a big role in determining your site’s bounce rate.

To come off as an authority, you need to present your content and your company in a clean, professional and easy-to-read manner. If someone lands on your site and the first thought they have is “what even is this site?,” there’s a pretty good chance they’re not going to stick around.

Make sure your web design presents your content in the best light so that people will hang around and click on your links, which will give a boost to revenues and search engine performance, two drivers of high digital business value.

Don’t confuse people

Attention spans and loyalty on the web are limited. Doing anything to waste someone’s time is going to cost you. This all-important rule is relevant to web design, too.

Most web developers know that the more clicks you make people go through on their way to taking your desired action, the less likely they are to take that action. So, when talking about a digital business, where that desired action is almost always to make a purchase, your web design has a huge impact on revenues and values.

Essentially, if someone needs to travel too far to get to your call to action, they’re more likely to simply give up and search elsewhere for what they want. The same works in reverse. If it’s easy for people to get to the solution you offer to their problem, then they’re much more likely to make a purchase.

This is where beta testing is so important. When you build your site, or when you make some significant changes, make sure to test it out with people outside your circle before you go live. This will give you an indication as to how easy it is to navigate, allowing you the chance to optimize the journey people take to support higher sales and revenues.

Start making design build value today

While business value is traditionally thought of when it comes time to sell the business, it’s about more than just that. Building up a valuable business means putting together a healthy, growing company that is positioned to stand the test of time. Make sure you have the right design so that you can make the most of your site’s traffic and build a business that is the envy of all digital entrepreneurs.

The post How the Right Web Design Can Boost the Value of Your Digital Business appeared first on Creativ Digital.