We set about giving APPA’s members and the public retail trade a platform with easily accessible information, directives and an interface for member job postings. The new website additions would also include a complete update of their website's branding by solidifying a contemporary scheme and providing complementary assets such as graphic and logo designs. With our ongoing management of their website hosting and digital marketing services, we wanted to share with you the importance of focalising UX in relation to web design.

About UX Design

UX (user experience) is essential to the experience and functionality of your web design and hasn’t halted in its rapid development within the digital marketing and tech space. UX is primarily defined by the extent to which a product can be used by to achieve specified goals with the most effective and satisfactory results in a pre-determined context of use. So it makes sense UX design is a core element of formulating concepts to optimise website growth. UX designers seek a positive emotional response from users to encourage an organic growth in return rates of users to your website.

A satisfactory outcome in the context of the experience your website provides, is now more than ever strongly bound to quality design elements with a sense of continuity. In a world of rapid technological advances robust functionality has geared towards being something of an expectation as opposed to a goal in the digital marketing industry. However this is far from inferring functionality is less relevant than aesthetic properties, but rather instead highlights the urgency to ensure your digital projects include a developed understanding and inclusion of UX design in all of its aspects. Now what’s important to understand is how and why all these individual properties of UX design increase the optimisation of your website and its user experience to grow your online platform.

How UX Design Can Improve Websites

Using the project our creative agency team at Click undertook with APPA as an example for the significance of UX, we can analyse their new website and define the positive impact of the updated UX design we implemented.

UX: Navigation

One of the most important factors of a positive user experience is the ability to clearly navigate your website so they can easily access information about your company and its services. This is where UX design comes in, ensuring you have buttons, blocks, text and images relevant to your business clearly visible. Such as making sure the menu button is included in the header of your page alongside any other significant links such as contact information, social symbols and/or logos.

You’ll notice APPA’s landing page has all of the above displayed clearly with any text, links or images having a strong contrast to the background colour whilst remaining on brand. All of this has made the user experience of navigating the APPA website very straightforward. Alongside this any blocks of imagery or indistinguishable symbols are labelled with titles and small descriptions to avoid any confusion for the user.