B2B website design that focuses on the user experience will continue to be a top priority for brands who thought UX was only for consumer and e-commerce sites. In a recent blog post, we offered some of the best practices for developing an effective user experience on a business-oriented website. In this post, we will explore some additional best practices for the B2B website design that puts the user first in its architecture.

Write the way your targets think.  When potential buyers visit your website, they will have a level of knowledge that most often is not as deep as you. Write content for who they think and eliminate jargon or text that won’t keep their attention. Use language, phrases, and concepts that are more likely to be familiar to them.

Make sure the text you include on your site appears in a logical order, but it should be natural as well. Confer with key customers and ask them to describe what your solution, services or products mean to them. What problems do they solve, and what were their pain points before working with you?

Let the buyer maintain control. Eliminate designs that override how a prospect might want to interact with the website. Autoplay videos, which have become ubiquitous across social media platforms and many news websites, can frustrate visitors who view these are a nuisance.

Don’t assume what the visitors want to do; let them play the video only if they want to. It should supplement, not be a substitution for, good content that is in text on the page.

Automatic carousels, once a common feature on many high-end websites, have also lost their allure, for the simple reason that they don’t work. Besides the fact that motion in carousels is distracting and rarely timed at the right intervals, it doesn’t present key messages to the visitor where they will be certain to see all of them. Layer information for your website in a way that makes it easy for your buyers to discover and explore instead of using an element that is less effective.

See how Bluetext can help your brand deliver an effective user experience.

User experience and personalization was the top trend for website development, and it will continue to be for 2018. Designing and executing the best architecture for a website engagement and conversion, while offering the right content at the right time to improve SEO and move prospects through the sales funnel, needs to be every marketing executive’s top priority. It remains a process of emotional transformation for many organizations, as top executives push still need to be convinced that creative design alone isn’t going to make their website the business tool that it needs to be.

With that in mind, here are our top tips for creating websites with user design as the first and foremost priority:

1. Personas are evolving. It’s easy to look at personas as a type of user who fits into certain common demographic categories. In the political arena, for example, a typical persona might be the “soccer mom,” shorthand for suburban mothers in the 30-45 age range whose main concerns are focused on their children. That makes sense for political purposes, but it gives little insight into how people actually engage with a website. We are recommending grouping personas into categories according to what they want to do on the site. Is it browsing, comparison shopping, or looking for specific content in order to make a decision. Recognizing these groupings offers more useful insights about what they want from their experience, and how best to deliver that content when they want it.
2. Less is more. It’s easy to clutter up a website with tons of promo boxes and fly-out menus. But the goal is to make it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for and take the actions that we want them to take. Instead, design the home and landing pages to reduce the tasks required of users to the bare minimum. Make it simple, and get rid of all the clutter that doesn’t add value or that serves as a distraction.
3. Design the user experience. Remember that designers are always working on large monitors with the best resolution. Unfortunately, most users are on laptops, tablets or mobile devices. User design for that reality shouldn’t be an afterthought. Visual hierarchy, spacing, content grouping, positioning, and size should be solved in the wireframe process before a visual designer is passed the assignment.
4. Take a field trip. There’s an old adage in real estate that says the more houses a homebuyer visits, the more likely they are to know the one they want when they see it. That’s why one of the early steps in our design process is an extensive virtual field trip to explore design elements in scores of websites across multiple industries. The idea is to show the client team the wide range of user designs that are out there on the web and to react to the design elements and functionality in multiple settings. We watch their faces closely during this exercise to see what they respond to, and to give them the confidence of knowing it when they see it.
5. It’s all about the user. It’s easy to gravitate to what you like for the website based on your own preferences. But it’s not about you, it’s about your customer and the user experience. While tempting to select design elements with your own preferences and tastes in mind, that won’t help engage your target audiences if they have a whole different set of preferences and needs. Always remember that it’s about what users want to do. Our job is to help them to get the content and take the actions they want in the easiest and most intuitive way possible.

See how Bluetext can help design a website with a great user experience. 

Smart digital media strategies depend on deep, accurate and relevant personas. Getting personas accurate and relevant in terms of website user experience, search media, and social media are critical. Mistakes in this persona development process lead to flawed content strategies, search in bound link targeting, and unusable web experiences. Correcting these personas after strategy deployment leads to budget over runs and dissatisfied brand embracers. Smart digital consultants use processes to reduce the risks inherent in persona development and the deliverables that are driven out from these personas.

Typical persona deliverables should include:

• Portraits of each persona delivered as compelling summary graphics and slides.
• A behavioral model of each persona, comprised of how the persona thinks and reacts to site concepts.

Conventional persona development begins with qualitative research usually through focus groups and interviews, both virtually and in person. The process begins with analytical research, based on a large enough sample of your actual site visitors. Depending on the business and industry the word “large” obviously means different things. Leveraging clickstream data and the associated demographics, attitudes, and visit metrics, you can validate what your personas dictate. We therefore know definitively:

• Web property visitors
• Motivators for why they come
• The various persona attitudes they arrive
• The linear tasks they hope and seek to accomplish
• How successful these experiences are (review abandon pathways, shopping carts, applications, etc)
• How they feel about your digital presence and your brand
• How the site experience influences their likelihood of doing business with your brand in the future

Because we identify the primary personas from this statistically robust sample of thousands of actual visitors, the likelihood of our missing a key persona or even a key attribute is far lower than would be the case with exercises that start with focus groups.

Only when we have a clear picture of current visitors do we move to focus groups and one-on-one interviews, where we dig into the needs and experiences that formed your visitors’ attitudes towards your space, your brand, your products or services, and your competitors. We know, for each persona, the underlying motivators that influence the way they see your site and what they need from it, both now and in the future.

Get in touch if you would like help building out your personas to inform a sound digital media strategy.

Trend #2 – User Experience Design Becomes More Humanized

As marketers strive for the strongest brand recall in their competitive marketplaces, they must still focus on what our data continues to show – leveraging as many human sensors in a branded experience as possible drives results. The more human sensors involved in a customer experience the higher the brand recall, resulting in stronger campaign key performance indicators and the most positive word of mouth brand marketing you can get – viral.  The following trends in humanizing branded online user experiences will continue to emerge in 2011:

Touch – This year, brands will focus increasingly more on the touch experience. Touch allows the user to engage with another sense, thus offering higher brand recall. As tablets becomes ubiquitous, another experience will need to be considered in how we produce the interactive arts. Another dimension to the style sheet will emerge as standard in all projects to allow for presentations to be optimized if they have touch or a no-touch capability. Mice are much more precise than fingers, so interfaces will become dynamic to create optimized interfaces for the various devices. The human race is proving that there is a 4th screen needed in life. Wall mounted, the workbench, the casual experience and the mobile experience. I find myself equating my laptop to the modern day workbench, while the tablet is more like a casual device. iPhone and Android phones need to fit in the pocket. Until technology produces a mass market stretchable product, there will be two product categories. Printing and the disposable goods industry will shrink as people go all digital. The tablet is speeding that industry contraction. Printing in an analog way makes no sense with today’s technology. I am seeing consulting firms far and wide with high volumes of presentations switching to synchronized iPads in presentations versus printing. Clients prefer the progressive, cleaner, portable experience. Branding these experiences and producing applications for this customer behavior is a great opportunity to differentiate your brand.
CNBC iPad Application

Social Media Integration – Understanding how your social ecosystem is engaging with brands is critical in today’s socially connected world. A sound social strategy that creatively weaves into a brand experience is where you will see all brands, including public sector, business to consumer, and business to business audiences. These platforms are communities in themslves. Brands like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Vimeo will all be integrated into a user experience.
Live Customer Service – The time to react to your customer is shrinking. Customer service has become the new marketing. Look at how Rackspace and Zappos and other customer service centric brands are growing.  These are very different industries, both branding themselves with Ritz Carlton quality customer experiences. The “social support” experience grows. Brand get rated online through outlets like Yelp, Service Magic, etc. These ratings are search optimization pillars and facilitate many more word of mouth conversations between companies and their brand ambassadors.  Encouraging social support produces a strong knowledge base and a self service community that drives support costs down and brand engagement up.
HTML5 – The standard will continue to grow as browsers become modernized globally.  Brands and customers will demand HTML5 experiences for their richness, openness, and accessibility across all devices seamlessly. As differentiation between Flash, Silverlight, and HTML5 blur dramatically HTML5 will rule. What is Adobe’s next move? Open source Flash all the way?  I think this is the year.  Adobe’s sales will continue to grow as their tools continue to be best in class.
Mobile – Mobile and Facebook global growth continues to trend inline with one another. 2011 will bring 600 million global smart phones online. A more connected world is a more sophisticated world with greater demands and a changing dynamic. Mobile technology solutions like Square, PayPal, Identity X and other brands and their API developer strategies will enable brands to produce some amazing applications for their customers.

Design digitally becomes more humanized.  Years of two dimensional experiences with limited colors, limited fonts, and limited bandwidth and accessibility are now all things of the past. The amazing experiences agencies globally are producing for their clients are truly phenomenal.