The one essential design principle that spans across every platform of communication is usability. Consequently, user experience can make or break an advertising platform.
Any time you are producing content, you are communicating a message, and the ability of this content to be used and understood is absolutely essential to getting your message heard and remembered. This is why the user experience of everything from your website to your social media posts to your business card is arguably one of the most important design elements.
User experience is understood as how your audience experience or processes the information being given to them. For example, a website has its own unique user experience. From the way you navigate the page to the emotions your feel as a result of the pictures to the ease of finding the company’s address, you are having a user experience.
Despite the fact that user experience is essential to the success of communicating messages, enhancing your user experience is not very hard. In fact, it builds almost entirely off of the principles of segmentation discussed in the last blog post.
Therefore, the first step is to enhancing user experience is segmentation. This is identifying a target audience and understanding their needs wants and desires. Once you understand this, you can create a custom user experience strategy for your audience. After developing a strategy, there are three main steps.
- Define the information or message to be communicated. In this step, it is important that you decide what content needs to be included. This is when you need to take a serious step back and cut you thoughts down to the bare minimum. Be simple. What is the most important thing my audience needs to know? What information is required?
- Decide on and organize a delivery platform. After deciding on the content, the next step is deciding how you want to share that content. You need to combine your knowledge of your content and your knowledge of your audience to choose a platform that will provide the best user experience for your audience. For instance, if you wish to share news about an upcoming event, what social media site provides the best user experience for sharing it with friends and organizing an event? Is it Twitter through tweets and messaging or Facebook through posts and creating a group? Clearly, you would choose Facebook due to the marriage of user experience with content helpful to organizing a group
- Execute your plan. This is when you go ahead and create your graphics, images, text, etc. that supports your message and platform.
An important key to user experience is making your content purposeful and relatable. Following the process steps above will help make your content more purposeful by focusing in on segmentation and the specific needs of the audience. However, the actual final content created needs to be relatable and reflect this audience as well.
Through all of this process, it is important you follow the golden rule of user experience: don’t make things complicated. The more difficult it is to understand a message, the less the audience will be willing to engage with it. In a world of ever-increasing technology, people want things faster and easier. Be simple. Don’t overthink it.