User experience (UX) consulting services

These days, with hundreds of ads, articles and news reports to process every day — ain’t nobody got time (literally) for a poor online experience.

We can do an audit of your website to identify the things that aren’t working, and find new ways to offer a great user experience to every new visitor who lands on your site. 

What is UX?

User experience (UX) is the overall experience a person has when interacting with a website, app or other piece of software. When we think of UX we think about how easy or pleasing it is to use something.

Why is UX important?

A great user experience is essential to the success and longevity of any business. 

Why? Because it contributes to:

• Greater customer satisfaction (happy, returning customers)

• Increased sales (happy, returning customers buying more)

• Brand advocacy (happy, returning customers who buy more telling other people that they should become happy returning customers of your enjoyable, efficient brand)

It’s an everybody wins kind of thing.

On the other hand, a poor user experience can be damaging to your business without you really realising it. The problem is, users don’t always complain about poor experiences — some post on social media (giving you the chance to make it right), but most often just go somewhere else.

And you’re left scratching your head, wondering what it was you said.

As usability expert Steve Krug says:

“Making every page or screen self-evident is like having good lighting in a store: it just makes everything seem better. Using a site that doesn’t make us think about unimportant things feels effortless, whereas puzzling over things that don’t matter to us tends to sap our energy and enthusiasm — and time.”

In short — great UX can turn your users into lovesick brand advocates who sing about what a wonderful company you are; poor UX can turn your users into angry ants who get fed up and move on to a different path.

User experience is usually just common sense

We take a common sense approach to UX.

The things that create a poor user experience are often simple enough to see, but they usually aren’t obvious to business owners until someone with a fresh perspective points them out. And that’s why it’s important to always test how well your website or app performs — because your potential customers don’t know your business or your website like you do, but they do need to understand it instantly. The experience must be intuitive and near automatic — don’t let complex flourishes or design fancies get in the way of a user’s progress. 

If you’re not sure where to start, have a think about your: 

• Website navigation — Are the things important to your business and to your customers easy to find (in less than a few clicks)?

• Consistency — Are your icons and labels consistent enough that it’s obvious what they are, and where users should go next?

• Trust factors — How does someone know they can trust your business? Are users’ details safe? How do they know their details are safe?

• Content — Are you using easy to understand everyday language? Are you using jargon or unusual terms and wording that will confuse your audience?

(These are just a few thought-starters, there’s plenty more to explore.)

We try to teach as much as possible as we go. Once you learn some usability principles, you’ll see the problems that we see for yourself (and you’ll jump up and down like we do to get them fixed asap!)

Why do some brands get it wrong?

More often than not, with competing opinions on design, miscommunication amongst teams, and the day to day pressure of running businesses, UX decisions fall by the wayside. Added to this, there’s often no clear plan, which leads to incremental, impulse-driven changes that unravel any consistency and generally make a mess. Before you know it, users are leaving your site faster than Speedy Gonzales.

This can’t happen. It’s just too critical to get it right — and with a little attention, it’s not that difficult. 

If a user has a poor experience, they’ll start to question if the brand really cares.  And no one wants to buy from a brand that doesn’t care. 

Great UX implicitly shows your users that you really do care. Instead of saying ‘we care about our customers’, you can show your customers that you care with a great experience that:

• makes it easy for them find the things they’re looking for,

• makes it easy for them to pay their bills, or

• has no broken links or dead ends, so they don’t get lost

As we all learned in school — showing is far more valuable than telling.

What do UX consultants do?

So how do we help businesses improve their user experience?

Well, first an audit, then constant iterative improvement.

Every website should follow UX best practice from launch, so we step back and consider the entire online experience with your brand from the user’s perspective, the moment we start working with you. 

We can adjust our process to carry out partial amendments to your website and smaller pieces of work, but using broad strokes, the full process for a new website follows these beats:

1. First, we get to know your business and analyse your audience, to understand what’s most important

2. Then, we couple these learnings with our past experience to consider site layouts and messaging, and make informed design decisions

3. We then build out wireframes to test and discuss with you, to make sure that the layout of our content makes sense for users without the distraction of colours or imagery. Wireframes are very basic layouts  that use simple blocks to show clearly how pages will be organised. They’re like blueprints for websites, but probably a lot easier to understand.and pull focus on what’s most important — your most important words, the hierarchy of your content (what’s higher, what’s lower), and the links and ‘calls to action’ that let users know how to navigate and where to go next. After that, we test. If there's an appetite to test the wireframes with real users at this point, we highly encourage it. But whilst that would be wonderful, we get that not every business has the time or budget for testing. It’s entirely optional to conduct usability testing at this point.

4. We build a website, set it live, and implement behavioural tracking on site.

5. We then get to test with real traffic. We monitor how real users are navigating your website and identify any areas they might be struggling with, so we can optimise from there.

Why do a UX audit?

In short — a UX audit will uncover obstacles and bottlenecks for users. Sometimes these are resolved by quite simple, fundamental fixes — vital best practice methods that must be implemented on any site for a great experience.

Our UX audit will uncover:

• What users might be struggling with — finding any areas that are confusing users and any dead ends

• How the site can be improved for user flow

• How the site can be improved for conversion

We’ll provide simple recommendations that can be implemented in any CMS (that’s a content management system like Wordpress or Squarespace), and (only if needed) more technical recommendations that we can ask a developer to do.

Ask us about our UX consulting services

If you’re not sure whether you need a UX audit, or just want to chat about how it all works — we’re here to help. Get in touch for an obligation-free chat.