User Experience – What to Expect in 2019?
Providing your website visitors with the best user experience possible is a very hot topic.
In fact, as we explained in our SEO trends for 2019 writeup, the marketing and branding significance of UX is now so big that it’s becoming one of the key differentiators for online businesses. What are the things that you need to implement if you want to stay competitive?
Clean, Distraction-Free (White)space
The first trend is all about minimalism. As our Agency Creative and Managing Director Homam Alojail believes, the future of UX is simplicity – which is the key to making people’s lives easier. By leaving enough space on your website, you can point out and emphasize the most in important parts of your offer.
Moreover, by contrasting plain backgrounds with interesting colors and high-quality images, the website becomes more compelling and attention-grabbing. The whitespace helps drew the eye to things that are different – buttons, the said images, and web copy.
It’s worth mentioning that, on top of helping you direct the attention of your website visitors, whitespace is often perceived as sophisticated and luxurious – it’s no surprise that most top-of-the-range brands use it to position themselves as more upscale and expensive.
Naturally, the whitespace doesn’t have to be white. Just make sure that the colors you select for your website suit your brand and make the site attractive and easy to move around, without tiring your visitors.
Source: https://boostactics.com/
Video & VR Content
Don’t get us wrong – written content isn’t going anywhere. But thanks to the high-speed Internet (especially mobile), and due to increasing “noise”, with thousands of companies competing for their audience attention, more and more businesses start using video to the distinguish their offer and attract potential customers.
And it’s no surprise. A well-directed and scripted video can provide its viewers with a lot more information about a particular product than a written text ever will. Especially that a video combines text with visuals and sound, which makes the audience more engaged and the processing, understanding, and remembering information much easier.
At Brandwill, we believe that it’s important to go even one step further. Soon, businesses will have to merge their video content with VR and AR elements. This will allow them to create even more engaging content and provide their users with much better experience – naturally, as long as the result of such merge is both entertaining and informative.
In fact, we can already see the same trend in the mainstream advertising channels such as Facebook, where video viewership is now counted in the billions, and video ads are becoming a prevalent medium, often outperforming standard ads which use static content. And while the 360° Ads are not yet as popular, we are sure it’s just a matter of time before they become part of everyday life of every Facebook advertiser.
Microinteractions
Another great way of grabbing your audience’s attention and helping them better understand what your product or service is about (thus, simplifying their life) are microinteractions. Users love to play with dynamic elements – from simple buttons that can rotate or change their texture to sophisticated animations activated manually with the use of on-page active elements.
One of the biggest advantages of such microinteractions over the static content is that they make it possible for website owners to focus the attention of their audience on particular aspects of their offer. Why is that? Typically, visitors focus a lot more on the interactions which force them to actively participate in the events on the website than on a static content around it.
A great example of a fully interactive website is Museum of Mario. While it’s not necessarily using those interactions to drive sales, it’s a great example of what can be achieved with the use of a simple technology such as HTML 5. Naturally, if you’d like to implement microinteractions at your website to help you generate more sales, don’t hesitate and get in touch with us now.
Next-Level Personalization
Personalization has been around for quite some time. We’ve all seen the eCommerce classics such as geo-location targeting, product ideas chosen based on our browsing history or viewed items. Naturally, those are still just as relevant – we find it hard to believe they could be gone anytime soon, especially considering how effective those simple personalization ideas are.
Source: Amazon.com
Some websites go one step further and add dynamic content which includes your name and details about you right inside the copy of the web pages or opt-ins or provides you with different offers based on geolocation targeting. But to make the user experience truly competitive, web owners will need to step up their personalization game.
Everything counts – past behavior, such as the number of visits, their time on various pages, email opens, or the stage in the buyer’s journey. And it’s not just the website where you’ll need to work on personalization – nowadays even ad copy needs to be personalized to become effective at grabbing the attention of your users. Luckily, there is barely a thing for which you could not find a ready-made solution – you can even personalize your ads based on the weather outside of the viewer’s house.
Gamification
You may not realize that, but gamification is not really that new. Even a simple you’ve completed X% of your profile which you can see on LinkedIn or other similar sites is pure gamification in action. And there is a reason for that – it is estimated that it can boost your conversion rates by up to 7 times! So why do we consider it a recent UX trend?
Because there is still a huge gap between the businesses that use it effectively and those who haven’t even heard about it. A great example of websites that understand the power of rewards, instant gratification, and achievements are educational ones such as Duolingo or Codeacademy. This makes it an excellent time to introduce gamification into your sales funnel – no matter what industry you’re in.
Source: Duolingo.com
Storytelling that Includes Website Visitor
We all know how effective quality storytelling is – especially when it comes to building relationships and generating sales. But to make your website and, as a result, your message even more compelling, you might want to consider making your audience an active part of your story.
To achieve that, you can either use the already acquired data or simply ask users about their personal details right on the website, before the story “starts”. What matters is the outcome – engaging, personalized, and effective story that’s much better at encouraging your users to listen to what you have to say compared to a generic fluff that’s the same for everyone. In the end, we all like to feel unique.
Anticipatory Design
No matter how you design your site and which elements you use, you need to anticipate the needs of your users. Only this way can you provide them with top-notch user experience. That’s also why you should no longer think of a site as of a final product. Instead, think about developing a journey that your customers need to take to achieve their goal – satisfying their needs. Whether it means buying your product or using your service.
Your role is to structure the journey in a way that makes it easy for your website visitors to move one step at a time – so that they don’t get distracted and leave too early, and can reach the destination with little effort. That’s why the core principle of UX in 2019 will be to choose the best technology that’s available and use it in a way that makes the life of your web visitors simple.
Why Simplicity, Intuitiveness, and Interactions will Prevail in 2019
As we mentioned in the very beginning, the general trend will be to make the life of your audience easier and help them save their time. By offering them quality user experience, you can reduce friction and increase the chance that they’ll take action.
On top of that, the use of interactive content can help you “humanize” the digital experience of your website visitors. The Internet has been around for quite some time. People don’t want to browse static content any more – they want to interact with the site just as if they talked to a real person at a local store around the corner.
And if you use all that interactions as subtle suggestions, guiding your visitors towards the final goal (gamification), you will be able to instill in them positive emotions which they’ll then associate with your brand. And that’s the first step towards establishing a long-lasting relationship with customers that will keep coming back. Would you like to see all the latest trends in action? Check out our services and find out what we can do to help you boost your business.