Marketing your Website without UX is Marketing your Shop that does not have Doors

You read it right. You are telling the world that you have got a website that do wonders and magic for your 'valuable' customers, and when that valuable customer visits your website they are unable to find dunk out of it. Pardon my words, but this is how most people are doing marketing of their websites and web applications. If this is how you are going to do it, then it's better not to do it at all.

I always remind my team, marketing begins when your development and design team starts working on your website; it does not start when you start the marketing campaign. The reason: when you announce that you have a website, please visit my website, get benefited from my website before its too late, and all those fancy catchy lines you use for your website, then you better make sure that when your customer visits your website they are able to explore and enjoy your website instead of feeling lost and finally frustrated. If you are not taking care of the user experience of your website, it means you are doing your best to lose the customers - the customers that you yourself brought to your shop and then let them go because your shop does not have a proper door to enter, no ventilation either, and the aisles are placed on the ceiling instead on the floor. In this kind of situation, what do you expect your customers to do?

Before starting marketing campaigns for your website, eCommerce store, or web application, make sure you have worked well on the following areas.

Easy Navigation Bar

Easy navigation bar is such a vast topic that I can write an entire book just explaining how navigation menus can be made easy. The easiness of your navigation depends on how you design, stylize and structure them, which again totally depend on the content of your website. If your website has lots of information and places to go, it's better to use the mega navigation that can handle lots of links. Websites that do not have much content can go for minimalist design with just few navigation links placed neatly either on top or in the sidebar. Again, this choice has its basis in the nature of your website and its content.

No matter what type of navigation you choose, make sure that it covers the following points:

Should be Easily Recognizable

Visitors should not be struggling to find the links to different areas of your website or web application. Navigation should be placed in such a (popular) location on the website where they can easily recognize it. For example, if you place the navigation menu somewhere in the middle of the website, then you are definitely going to create trouble for your visitor. Use the location and styles for your navigation that are used by everyone; they are easy to remember and recognize.

Should be Bug Free

Visitors should not not be struggling to click exactly on the link. Add some extra padding around the link so that the visitor should be able to navigate even if they click in the near vicinity of the link. This makes your navigation fluid and smooth. Hover-to-expand-links should be perfect in timing; most websites do not bother to calibrate their hovers well, resulting in terrible user experience. With bad hovers, users are left unable to click the sub-level links, and in some cases unable to even view the links. Take good care of hovers and expanding menus

Should be Responsive

This goes without saying that everything on your website should be exceptionally responsive. Navigation menus are special items that should be taken care at high priority. If your navigation is not fitting the screen size of any of the devices, specially mobile ones, then you design and development are wasted already. All of the links on your navigation menu should hide on the mobile device, and instead a three-bar icon should be visible indicating the visitors that if they click this icon the navigation will be displayed. While handling multiple screen sizes, you can also try hiding some of the links instead of all the links based on the screen size. For example, you have 7 links visible on desktop, then on tablet they should be around four and the rest three hiding in the three-bar icon.

Design or Interaction Design?

For the most part of this century, organizations focused on the aesthetic side of their product (website, web app or mobile app) and that was all about designing that the product managers and designers knew. But now with increased awareness, of how usability impacts the sales and over all customer experience, product managers tend to incorporate the usability factor in the design. This growing trend has created a great shift in how Graphic Designers, UI Designers and Product Architects perceive Design. Organizations prefer UI + Graphic Designers over traditional Graphic Designers, which means that the designer who has the senses of both aesthetics and usability are more in demand.

Just recently, the growing pressure from sales and marketing teams is taken under notice. The challenge is that when these people visit their prospects or clients they experience a role-reversal; clients start educating them about the global trends in product designs and not only this but also about technical aspects of product design. The customers are now educated about the usability of a product; therefore, improving (not just the design but also) the Interaction Design of the product stands as the crucial task to complete before going out for sales and marketing. Without this, customers would reject your project right away just by looking at it - keep this behaviour in mind as well. 

There are dozens of aspects included in Interaction Design, but I considering the fact that Navigation Bar is one of the most dangerous deals of the trade I excluded that topic from this one and placed it at the top. In the field of Interaction Design you should primarily be focusing on aspects as follows.

Words

The words (language) that you use on the product interface matters a lot. Words should be to the point, clear and invoke positive emotions in mind. For example, in the information bubbles (tips, notes and warnings) it is better to include the possibilities that the user can enjoy in your app instead of showing the users dead-ends and terrifying warnings; this will keep the user in a comfortable zone. Another example related to a apps is that it's more appropriate to include emotive words like Hurrah for completing the job or Oops for a failure of job instead of using jargon words like Successful, Alert, Failed; this will ensure more user engagement and will not frighten them.

Colors

Colors is one the most powerful elements that can communicate without any image or text. They perform many functions including mood communication, visual categorization of content, seeking attention, highlighting important areas, creating visual relations between similar elements and content, and so on. Besides their function, on the technical side, their appearance on different devices matters a lot as every device handles pixels and colors in their own way; therefore, you might see orange color bit brighter on Apple and bit dull on View Sonic device.

For enhancing User Experience of your website, web app or software, you can ask a professional team like Web Development Labs.