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When building your website or app, UX design is now so important. A poor UX design will have a big impact on your business and can lose you customers, as well as fail to generate conversions. A report by Forrester found that websites with a ‘superior user experience’ have 400% higher lead-to-visit conversions than those without. However, having marketing know-how will help you in creating the best UX design for your customers.
UX stands for user experience. UX design is the process of understanding what your users want to do and designing with that in mind to deliver great user experiences. Google has described that the goal of UX is to ‘help users do what they want to do when interacting with your business’.
In order to understand what your users want, you need to ask them. Surveys and focus groups are a couple of ways of achieving this. Having some marketing experience, it’s likely that you would have undertaken these before. Once you understand what your users want, you are then able to design and create before testing, to see if the user behaviour is what you were expecting. You can then use the results from testing to improve the UX.
Research Driven
In order to fully understand what your users want, research should be undertaken. For marketing, research is fundamental to understand your customers including their behaviours and preferences. For UX design, research is needed to understand your customer including their needs and behaviours. Both disciplines require analysis before websites or campaigns can be created. Having marketing know-how will support you when creating surveys and buyer personas and carrying out your UX design research.
Desirability
The main aims of UX design and marketing is to make something as desirable as possible to customers or users. The aim of marketing is to make a product/service desirable so that people buy it or use it. The aim of UX design is to make it desirable to users so they have a great user experience.
As we have touched on, having marketing experience prior to starting UX design can be a big benefit.
Understanding business needs
Having experience in marketing will help you to strike the balance between the needs of your business and the experience for your users. Although a pop-up may not be the best for user experience, it can help if your business is looking to increase the number of sign-ups and subscriber conversions. It’s important to remember that you could have the best user experience for your users, however, they still need to be encouraged to spend money. Having prior experience in marketing will make it easier to design whilst still having the business’ objective in mind.
Analytical insights
Marketing involves a lot of research that is needed to be broken down and turned into actionable insights. As we have already mentioned, having experience of different research techniques will help when you start your UX design research. Once you have extracted all of the meaningful data, you will be able to transform these into actionable insights.
Good UX designers are required to fully understand the motivations behind the users’ behaviours. Having experience in marketing and finding meaningful data will help with getting into the mindset required for UX design.
You can still be a great UX designer without having any prior marketing experience. However, as you have seen in this blog, it will definitely help if you have some experience. Experience in marketing will give you skills that you can transfer over, as well as helping you have both the business and user in mind when you are designing.
