These days, before someone ever visits your actual store or looks at your product in person, there is almost 100% certainty they took a moment to look up your website. They probably conducted a Google search, opened the home page or a product page, did a quick scroll to the bottom before deciding whether your product or services were something worth their time and money — all within seconds.
A UX design agency understands that these snapshot moments make up most web traffic. Reporting on website statistics, Forbes wrote that “the time it takes for users to form an opinion about a website is incredibly brief — just 0.05 seconds.”
Not just five seconds, but five milliseconds.
These reaction times, coupled with the reality that the website has replaced the store as the customer’s first point of contact, makes your digital storefront the most important tool in your marketing arsenal.
A UX Design Agency can build your digital image with the right tools.
Everything from a website’s color scheme to the graphics down to its useability all plays a role in forming a consumer’s initial impression of you. So, where do you begin?
Today, building a website seems easier than ever. With just a little research, you pull up a host of platforms like Squarespace, Weebly, and the classic, WordPress. Each system appears poised and ready to help you construct the perfect website to greet your customers. It may even make you question if you even need a UX design agency at all.
Yet as you start working through these website building programs, and publishing finished pages, you may find that sleek, seamless feel of other websites isn’t translating to your own page. Better yet, your website may convey important information, but does it really convey what your product is all about?
Returning to the opening image of that millisecond moment, is your website strong enough to keep your visitor engaged and interested? Sure, your website may say factually correct information, but that’s only half of your equation.
A UX design agency understands the potency of your website at every layer. While the facts are important to marketing, so is the user experience, which includes making your website not just informative, but attractive to viewers.
Depending on your industry, you probably aren’t an expert with web development like a UX design agency. Even with programs like WordPress, which help simplify the process, the reality is that you do not have enough hours in the day to learn about website development and tinkering on platforms to get the right look and feel while running your own business.
In a world saturated with millions of other websites, products, and advertisements, you can’t just rely on fill-in templates and a cohesive color scheme. Maximizing the effectiveness of your website is critical and trusting a UX design agency can help you stand out in a digital landscape.
What are you looking for in a UX Design Agency?
Once you’re on the path toward finding the right UX design agency, your mind may immediately jump to finding professionals who can deliver the most advanced features to your website. If you want to attract today’s consumer base, you need today’s best innovations, right?
Just a quick Google search of 2023’s latest website trends for user experience brings up a multitude of inventive and astonishing features like:
- Experimental Navigation: Rather than stationing the navigation bar in its usual spot at the top of your web page, UX design agencies are now considering more outside-the-box options, placing navigation anywhere on the site and mixing it with lively fonts and visuals.
- Scrolling Effects: Instead of normal up-down scrolling functions, designers are now toying with uncommon directional animations meant to engage a viewer who is mesmerized and desires to finish developing on-screen animations.
- Kinetic Text: When a UX design agency incorporates kinetic text, it follows the same emphasis on motion using words that follow their own dynamic programming, whether through their font, direction, or accompanying images.
- AI Presence: With the prominence of ChatGPT, AI has become an even more vivid reality. Additions like website chatbots have been AI run since before the program existed. However, now, AI is stretching its usefulness into the web design with agencies developing sites using its technology.
A skilled UX design agency can deliver any of these desired features and more stylistic choices like layering or cursor features. Of course, seeing these components on a live website leaves you enthralled as a viewer, but it simultaneously begs another question as you think about your own brand.
At the end of the day, these additions are still trends, meaning they attract users with their artistry. But what do they really communicate about that central timeless aspect of your business — your brand?
Find a UX Design Agency that starts with good bone structure.
While creating an engaging website is critical to your marketing strategy, you can’t put the cart before the horse. When you build a website, before rushing to fill it with flashy graphics or AI chatbots, first consider a UX design agency that pays close attention to a website’s external and internal structure. If you want your website to last beyond a trend, though the graphic design seems the most prominent, user experience starts with creating strong internal bones.
Information architecture, for example, plays a valuable role in organizing websites according to the relevance of your desired visitors. In this lens, a UX design agency may determine things like experimental navigation, a suitable feature only for younger demographics who are more at ease online. Information architecture determines your site’s infrastructure by the priorities of your prospective clients.
Similarly, responsive design is another integral aspect to crafting the perfect website. A UX design agency with an awareness for the internal, as much as the external, workings of your site will make sure its responsive to other mediums like tablets and mobile devices. Attention to a responsive website means you broadened the convenience of your site. However, it can’t just operate on these mediums, but perform just as well on a phone as it does on a computer, creating a continuous experience for every user through every device.
Finally, any modern UX design agency worth its salt should also make sure your site meets, or exceeds, website accessibility standards. Since your website is your most important tool, it is equally important to guarantee it can reach the full scope of your prospective audience, including those with impairments. There’s been growing awareness over the past few years to the need for website standards so all people can experience our growing digital world. If your UX design agency isn’t careful, individuals with visual impairments may have difficulty reading pages with low contrast, or the back end of a site may fail to adhere properly to someone’s screen reader.
Beyond these, there are so many other components, both internal and external, when it comes to building websites. However, the demands of the current age require any business that wants growth and exposure to maintain a user-friendly website. These results don’t come from a UX design agency overemphasizing crazy designs or even just the functionality of the back-end structure, but one that coordinates the simultaneous inner workings of the internal and external to create a website that communicates that perfect first millisecond impression.
But how do you strike the balance between these two sides to web design?
As a UX design agency, Innis Maggiore finds that perfect flow between beauty and operation using the power of positioning. Before we even consider the design of a page, its organization, or even its operation, we start by uncovering your brand position, that one thing that differentiates you from the competition. Once we’ve nailed it down, we use your position as a guide during the website building process. We escape the fading trends and create a website that doesn’t just leave that initial impression but communicates the heart of your business — your brand differentiation.
So, when you’re looking for a UX design agency to build your most important tool, don’t just ask if the agency understands websites — ask if its team understands you.
At Innis Maggiore, our work always begins with getting to know our clients. Contact us today to start the conversation toward a better UX design experience.