Killer Marketing Can’t Overcome Poor UX

It doesn’t matter how good your marketing is if your website, App or product has poor UX people just aren’t going to want to use it. Find out how to overcome poor UX in this post.

Killer Marketing Can’t Overcome Poor UX

Photo by Fabian Wiktor: Pexels

 

If you own a business you probably also have a company website that you use as a lead generation or sales portal. For the majority of businesses, your website is your hub for marketing efforts on social media, email, and other sales channels. However, marketing can only take you so far. The true potential lies in your UX design and how well it captures the attention and provides ease of use to customers. Poor Ux can destroy this hub and wreak havoc on your business.

The following are some of the mistakes you should avoid making when it comes to UX design. 

Lack of User Research

Right from the top of this list, lack of user research is probably one of the most common causes of poor UX that can’t even be fixed by excellent marketing. Many companies make the mistake of assuming they already know their target audience and what their users need as well as how they can bring solutions to their problems. 

While it may sound nice in theory that a company knows exactly what its users need, in practice, it’s not really practical and efficient to just jump into new ventures without conducting any prior research on the company’s users. This research will help you establish the domain of the context or problem your users are dealing with and it will help you precisely determine what exactly your users want/need to solve their problem. These are just some of the questions that will help you find the answer you’re looking for:

  • What problem are we trying to solve for the company users?
  • Who are we trying to solve this problem for?
  • How do we know it’s an actual problem for the users?
  • What outcomes do these users want to reach?
  • How are they currently tackling the said problem?
  • How can we help them solve this problem in a way different from others?

Poor Content Strategy

When it comes to maintaining communication and messaging your users, this is where content strategy becomes extremely important. The problem arises when you use a hazy content strategy that will only make your communication with your users more complicated and hard to understand. 

For instance, if you own a company that sells clothes and you open up an app, it will be clothes shopping app. Therefore, you will naturally gear all of your content towards that category: clothing. This doesn’t have to be anything extravagant and has never been seen before. It’s just important that you make your content line up with what your brand is offering and the kind of experience and outcome your users can expect when entering your webpage or app. 

Here are some of the questions that will help you out:

  • What are our company users looking for?
  • What content do we need to show them?
  • When should our users see that content?
  • How will they receive this content?
  • How will they react and interact with this content?

Murky Information Architecture

Content strategy is about what your users will be seeing on your website. On the other hand, information architecture is about where they will be seeing this content and how they will be able to find it. 

IA’s purpose is to define the organization of your information. It creates pathways that your users will be taking in order to access your content and interact with it. When working on your IA, you will need to think in the order from general to specific. You will start from the most general thing like your brand or app, and then work your way towards more specific things or in other words the things your customers are looking for (content, articles, products, services). 

You need to ask yourself:

  • Where will our users find ___________?
  • How will they find ______________?

For instance, when you look up a certain item on a webshop, you will be presented with a wide range of options for the item you looked up as well as similar items you may be interested in. This seems easy and straightforward, right? Remember that this can be applied to anything, and the more specific the user’s query is, the more granular you need to make your presentation in order to help your user find exactly what they’re looking for.

Poor Accessibility

Another aspect of poorly done UX design that can make a huge setback for your company is poor accessibility. Though you may have amazing products and even better offerings, if your accessibility is not good enough, you won’t be seeing great results in sales. 

The biggest and most common problem is that most companies will focus on mass appeal, but that puts your accessibility at a great disadvantage. 

Firstly, around 26% of adults in the US live with some type of disability and your web design should be able to be accommodated to meet those users’ needs too. Secondly, accessibility is also about what devices can access your website easily. This means that you need to optimize your website for all devices including mobile phones. When designing a website, its functionality of it and how easily it can be navigated is even more important than the aesthetics of the website. 

These tips will help you out:

  • Make your site screen-reader friendly
  • Keep your navigation scheme simple
  • Go easy with the JavaScript
  • Make sure you have good labels 
  • Use semantic mark-up
  • Use accessible colours wherever possible

When taking care of your web design, you need to make sure it is SEO-friendly too. Web designers often work along with SEO experts to ensure that the website can get the visibility it needs and attract new customers. Hiring a professional SEO agency can help you get the most out of this expertise and help your website to grow and gain a higher search ranking. 

Too Many Interruptions

This step is usually not planned at the beginning, but later on, when monetization starts occurring, the users are the ones who suffer. 

This is solely due to the fact that you need to present your users with an offer they are willing to invest in if you want to get them to buy something from your company. 

Here’s where the problem arrives: if your users are scrolling through your content and looking for something, but then constantly get interrupted with tons of additional offers, they will most likely leave the page. As a result, your engagement levels will go down and you will most likely lose a lot of customers.

The way you can fix this is fairly easy: limit the number of interruptions on your page and make them predictable. This is the formula to success:

  • Let the user know about the upcoming interruption and give them an option to skip it
  • If the user chooses to be interrupted bring them back exactly where they were after they finish with the interruption
  • Make the process as seamless as possible

Non-existent User Support

Your users will come to face some problems eventually. That can’t be avoided. However, when that happens, your users need to be offered proper support.

Most companies will usually research, develop, design, and release a product, throw a party to announce it and then forget to do anything to support their users. The biggest mistake you can make is to release a product and not provide user support from the get-go. 

  • How will your users handle a potential problem with your service or product?
  • How can they troubleshoot this problem?
  • Who should they reach out to for help?
  • What kind of assistance can they expect?
  • How will your support staff interact with users?
  • What type of resolutions can they expect to receive?

Inadequate Outcome Delivery

Lastly, an issue with inadequate outcome delivery can also cause problems for your company. This usually happens due to disconnection between what users expect to get and what they actually receive. 

Imagine if you went to a restaurant and ordered your favorite meal but when the waiter arrives you get something completely different from what you wanted. The same goes for poor delivery in UX design when users don’t get what they wanted and what was promised to them. Fixing this issue will help you build a stronger and more trustworthy relationship with your users. They will be able to rest assured knowing that they will always get what they asked for. 

Conclusion

Overall, marketing is a useful tool to help your business grow. However, without an adequate and high-quality UX design, most users will leave the company and look for a solution and products somewhere else. Ensuring that your UX design avoids the above-written mistakes will help your business grow and reach wider audiences.