Beautiful Website Designs Built to Convert: From IA to UXI
June 16, 2017
When you’re designing a business website, it’s vitally important to understand what the purpose of your website is.
Ask:
- Do we want our website to tell our story, establish our good taste, and make clear what type of organization we are? Are we mainly focused on making a long-term impression?
- Or, do we want our website to direct visitors towards a specific action so we can get more sales, clicks, and leads?
In marketing, there has always been a conflict between the long-term benefits of beauty and the short-term requirements of direct-response and measurement.
The distinction is consistent: Content designed to be pretty doesn’t convert as well as what’s designed to funnel action or attention.
In other words, it’s been hard to do both #1 and #2.
We Want Both
A thought probably crossed your mind. You want your website to establish your good taste and tell your story. You want it to make a memorable brand impression.
And you want it to funnel visitors toward converting.
You want what in marketing has been kind of an oxymoron: beautiful direct-response content.
Web usability stalwarts from Seth Godin to Gerry McGovern comment on how making a web design “cool” is incompatible with having it be task or goal focused.
But mobile is changing the user experience as well as changing their expectations. They want both just as much as business owners.
The Core of the Problem: Design Before Content
So what is the issue here? Why the difficulty in having an attractive design with functional conversion focus?
The big problem is that when website “design” is the goal, it comes first. The website gets designed for aesthetic goals, then the content is fit in, often as an afterthought.
This is like putting together a recipe that looks good on the plate without considering whether or not the ingredients taste good together. You might make a very pretty side dish with strawberries and onions, but how will it taste?
If you want a website that drives clicks, sales, and leads, you have to start with an outline of that content.
You can have beautiful design. But if it doesn’t serve the content, that’s all it will be.
Information Architecture & User Experience
In the professional web design and marketing world, what we’re discussing involves two main disciplines: information architecture (IA) and user experience design (UX).
So what’s the difference between IA and UX?
Wikipedia says IA is “the art and science of organizing and labeling websites to support usability.”
And they say UX is “the way a person feels about using a product, system, or service…including a person’s perceptions of the practical aspects such as utility, ease of use and efficiency of the system.”
In terms of digital marketing and design, IA is a fairly old term. The most noted publication on IA (the IA Bible, really) is Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond, by Rosenfeld, Morville, and Arango.
Essentially, the Information Architect’s job is to make the complex clear. They focus on the structure of content, organizing it in a way that lets users navigate through it in the most direct, logical way. They are concerned with structure.
UX takes the site’s information a step further. It’s concerned not just with facilitating engagement, but also in the emotional response the content imbues. The User Experience Designer’s job is to produce a predictable, desirable effect on the audience.
A Blending of Disciplines
UX is a newer discipline that considers IA, but IA doesn’t necessarily consider the broader user experience.
IA makes an experience easy, simple, and clear. UX does all this but also focuses on creating a lasting impression on the user. As the guys at UX Booth say:
It’s the difference between coming away from a site and thinking “That was easy” and “Whoa. That was cool.”
Which brings us back to our starting point. The development of UX in website design means that you get essentials of IA, which make it easy for users to complete a task, with a design that’s memorable and cool.
You can – and should – have the best of both.
The biggest mistake most small businesses make with design is that they don’t employ the tactics of UX that carry the essential elements of IA. They make something cool that’s not easy or logical to use.
To compete today, you have to do #1 and #2.
Website Design Examples from UXI®
At Marketing 360®, our website design platform is called User Experience Intelligence UXI®. Hopefully, after reading this, you have an idea of what that name means.
We take the intelligence of Information Architecture and blend it with the “wow” factor of user experience.
The results speak for themselves. Here are some recent designs that combine beauty and functionality, showing you can have the best of both IA and UX.
Is your site a confusing blur of images that look more like something shown on a rock concert stage than a business website?
Or is your website as functional – and beautiful – as a cardboard box?
If you answer yes to either of these, then contact us to get a free UXI® mockup.
Expectations have changed. You need to guide and impress your website visitors at the same time.
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