Design has a tremendous impact on marketing results, it can make the difference between achieving your business goals and often surpassing them or driving your customers as far away from your objective as possible. Design is far more than simply look and feel and certainly more than an add-on service at the midpoint or end of the development phase. Design is as much scientific as it is instinctual and should never be done without a specific reason. Fundamentally design communicates in a visual way and taps into a subconscious decision making process which words alone cannot achieve.
A simple design element like the position and color of a call to action button or the amount of white space on a web page, if used as part of the design strategy, can enhance or reduce the power of your marketing.
It is no secret that perception is dependent on presentation, which contributes to the response to your marketing message or lack there of. On the web the effect of design is amplified because all any prospective consumer has to go on, is your web presence. The visual look, usability and design of your site is your company or product. Your web site is the interface with your potential customer at the time of purchase, when they are considering starting or continuing a relationship with you.
Design has too much of an impact on performance to be reduced to a subjective opinion of whether someone or some committee likes it or dislikes it. Because of this impact on communication it is important to measure and test design just like any other part of your marketing mix. It is also important to note that design testing is not the same as usability testing, which is also vitally important and should not be ignored.
Design testing measures your customers’ behavior in relationship to your brand and can combined with good design can improve your site’s conversion rates. Under the lens of a properly conducted design test there will be no question that design B increases some business metric by x% vs. design C which decreases the same metric.
Measuring design and other web analytics are ultimately good for the business intention. However, there is some backlash within the industry that believes it creates too much of a focus on the short-term. The Creative Thirst solution is to combine design testing with usability testing, along with qualitative data and observation of visitor behavior over time. This combination is the key to developing deeper insights into your customers and is the basis of the continual improvement process that will ensure greater gains to your bottom line through the design in situations where you cannot afford to guess.
The Internet more than any other medium lends itself to measure ability, perhaps because of the availability of immediate information one can get on web site visitors with products like click tracks, google analytics and webtrends in the form of analytics. In this fast paced world it is increasingly important to generate results in less time, and there is no better method for doing that that to leverage design and analytics.
Web analytics is the analysis of how visitors use a web site. Once visitor data has been collected, analyzed and measured over time against clearly defined goals for your specific web site, design can be used to convert analytics into actionable results through a continual improvement process. Design can then become empowered through analysis and user testing; metrics can provide insight on the success of an online strategy.
Several factors including design and usability to name a few impact a users experience with your site, product, message and brand. By minimizing the guess work and combining analysis of visitor behavior over time design improvements can continually advance specific key metrics that are important to your business model and your success.
The true value of design is in it’s effectiveness in meeting the desired business goals. Improving communication as a result of better design means a web user can be impelled to act more often ensuing higher returns to your bottom line.
