In the digital age, consumers have more power than ever before. In this hyper-competitive landscape, brands need to find a way to differentiate themselves to create a standout customer-centric experience. This begins with good web design. Flight Centre UX UI Designer, Rob Mondolo, explores how he uses user centered design to deliver a competitive advantage.
Good web design starts with users. You need to understand who your users are and what needs they have before you can start setting up goals for each page. Ask yourself the following questions:
Of course it’s important to consider design elements such as colour choices, typography and visual communication, but ultimately, good web design starts with understanding your users’ motivations.
The content of your website is the reason someone is on your site in the first place, so user-friendly content and navigation is critical. It’s important to understand your typical user’s journey by digging into the analytics and seeing where traffic is going. By doing this, you can see what pages users are looking at and where they eventually end up at the end of their journey.
Optimising and A/B testing the pages that get the most traffic will help generate crucial insights into how you should structure the content and navigation for your website. Grouping similar content into primary, secondary and tertiary is also useful if you’re starting from scratch.
Information architecture (navigation) can potentially be one of the most difficult things to master on a site, so test, test, test before implementation. There are a number of UX tools that can help you inform your decisions, like Hotjar, UsabilityHub and UserZoom.
Something I have learned over time is that people love to give you their opinions! You can leverage this by asking for feedback to improve the customer experience. At Flight Centre, we use Usabilla to measure our net promoter score, customer satisfaction and allow users to leave comments. Listening to what our customers want allows us to make informed decisions and prioritise projects within our business.
Surveys are another good way to validate things you have designed or help you uncover new insights. With Usabilla, you can also run targeted survey campaigns if you want insights about a specific page. Running surveys gives you access to really insightful information and allows you to make quick design decisions.
You need to approach design requests from clients objectively. Consider your personal preferences and knowledge, but remember that just because you like a certain component of your design, it doesn’t mean everyone else will.
The same can be said for client requests. It’s important to manage expectations in a way that allows you to meet the clients’ needs while also providing the best user experience. For example, a client might want a larger logo, but this will impact screen real-estate on mobile devices and won’t provide much value to the user. From my experience, if you can prove that a decision will impact conversion and ROI, they will listen to your advice and accept your alternative.
At Flight Centre, we have a great culture backed by a supportive and encouraging environment. Our website is kicking some massive goals and is only in its infancy stage, so we still have massive growth to come, with exciting projects on the horizon. The difference between Flight Centre and a start-up or agency is that you get to see projects through to the end and nurture them to be a success.
Want to tackle some of the design challenges we’re working on at Flight Centre? Check out our job opportunities to find out more.