It’s that time of year again when we get the Red Hat Summit 2022 call for papers!
This year seemed to be a perfect time to go all in with sessions around our architectures based on a series of talks we’ve designed to showcase the various aspects we cover. Some are vertical aligned and others are just customer domains, but all of them include extensive research into how to implement successful architectures at scale.
Picture a dark office, blinds drawn. Picture a UX designer smoking a cigar. See the light filtered through the smoke whipped to fog by a spinning ceiling fan. Watch as the UX designer sits at a desk and considers the website.
The UX designer has devised a series of tests to determine if a green button is better than a red button. One of them involves tipping a tortoise onto its back. He looks the website over carefully and says, “Describe in single words, only the good things that come to mind about your mother.”
The website pauses, sweating under pressure, then replies, “Let me tell you about my mother…”
BLAM! The website pulls the trigger of an unseen gun, and the UX designer collapses, leaving the project to be rebuilt from scratch in Material by Harrison Ford, with overuse of Post-its delegated to Edward James Olmos.
In the past’s bleak dystopian future (1982’s Blade Runner was set in 2019) no one benefitted from asking the wrong questions. And little has changed.
Designing any test to verify UX is fraught with as many complications as administering the test. Questions are skewed by bias, conscious or otherwise, and competing agendas. Even with something as apparently simple as a split test, the potential for distortion is immense.
When planned by a designer, a UX test offers little benefit to a client; the benefit is to the designer, who can then say their ideas are validated (or not).
Imagine hiring a developer to code a website, only to discover that the developer didn’t know CSS and expected to be paid to learn it before completing the work. You would hire someone else because that developer isn’t qualified.
From a client’s perspective, a UX designer should know, through experience, whether a green button is better than a red button. Designing an elaborate test to split-test the button color serves little purpose other than indemnifying the designer against mistakes.
It’s widely accepted that there is substantial ROI (Return On Investment) from UX testing. We’ve all heard apocryphal stories about sites that split-tested their checkout and improved retention by 5%.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that without user testing, that site could have improved its checkout retention by 4.9% simply by hiring a competent, experienced designer. But what about the remaining 0.1%? Well, for most sites, 0.1% represents very little profit. And the cost of recovering it via testing far exceeds the benefits.
When a company the size of Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, or Google split tests a website, it can afford to allocate $25k for user testing because it stands to gain 0.1%, and that represents far more than $25k. To meet the same 0.1% improvement, a small business has to design and run the same tests, incurring the same costs. But in the case of a small business, $25k could eat up all of its profits.
UX testing almost always works. But it is only profitable at scale.
If a good UI designer with a grounding in UX can improve checkout retention by 4.9%, tripling the project budget for just 0.1% more is a tough sell. Bluntly, that $25k is better spent on advertising.
We all have the tendency to think we’re unique. It’s a survival trait attributed to our prehistoric brain. That belief in uniqueness is particularly strong in highly competitive people. We all think our site, our side-project, our approach are original. And we’re all wrong.
When a psychiatrist sits down with a patient, they have two immediate goals: categorize that patient into an established diagnosis, and assess the severity of the condition. It may be that the patient is depressed or anxious or even suffering from a potentially more debilitating condition like schizophrenia. What the psychiatrist is not trying to do, is define a new illness.
Occasionally — perhaps once per decade — a genuinely unusual patient will present themselves, and a new form of illness is considered. New treatments are found and tested. These treatments are rarely developed on behalf of individual patients; doctors work with grants from governments, medical schools, or the pharmaceutical industry and publish their results.
The vast majority of websites face similar problems. They deal with similar demographics, work within a similar culture, and deal with similar technology. As such, they can be categorized in the same manner a psychiatrist categorizes patients.
The key to delivering successful UX solutions is not UX testing in individual cases, but rather UX research, examining similar projects, and cribbing their solutions. If you categorize a project accurately, you’ll find a solution readily available.
Your client doesn’t need to pay for UX testing to benefit from it. Enterprise sites, government sites, and even personal projects will test UX patterns. Sites like Shopify or Stripe will user-test their checkout processes at scale and enable companies to benefit from the results by adopting their platforms.
If you’re currently testing designs for small business, one of two things is true: either you’re wasting your client’s money investigating a problem someone else has already solved, or you’re designing something so original that it has no precedent (and you probably shouldn’t be).
Designers should be opinionated. Designers should know UX best practices and how they apply to a range of scenarios. Designers should be capable of making an educated guess. Designers should be self-validating.
Once or twice in your career, you may find a legitimate need to test something. However, the vast majority of the time, the correct answer is to tip the tortoise back onto its feet and choose whichever color button has the higher contrast.
Featured image: Still of Brion James in Blade Runner. Copyright Warner Bros. Entertainment
The post The Case Against UX Testing first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
There was a point at which I was very close to losing my business, and I didn’t realize how close.
I wasn’t always a good planner, and I didn’t plan to start an agency. One day I was a freelance graphic designer, my job list grew, I hired some help, and suddenly I was managing a team.
There isn’t a guidebook for new business owners, you have to learn on the job, and there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. We expanded rapidly from two to four people, then seven, and suddenly we hit 16 employees in just 18 months. It was pretty scary and felt like driving on the freeway without brakes. A client shared a story that they were turning over $20m, and the owner was only taking home $30k. It felt like where I was headed. At that point, I could easily have lost it all.
I took a hard look at the numbers and realized that we were barely breaking even, let alone profitable. That needed to change to stabilize the business and regain control of my operations. The change wasn’t easy, and there were some hard lessons, but 11 years later, with a strong local team and 40+ awards for our work, I’m thankful for that wake-up call.
There are other people in my position struggling with the same issues I faced, so I’d like to share the four key things I did that helped turn things around and move us from surviving to thriving.
I wanted to do it all, and as the business owner, it was hard to turn down a new client. Our instincts are to help, and declining opportunities feels wrong. In our industry, digital agencies, especially web design agencies, try to cover all bases from marketing, SEO, adwords, design, photography, and coding. Everyone wants to be a one-stop shop for clients. I used to be that person: I would wash your car and shine your shoes if I could.
Do not give in to that fear.
When you’re a generalist, you spread yourself too thin. I know: a decade ago, we were offering dozens of services outside of the web design realm: packaging, branding, copywriting, sticker design, SEO, hosting, analytics, you name it, we provided it. We used over seven different CMS for our projects. If a client wanted it, we tried to offer it, no matter how unsuitable it was for us.
On the surface, we fulfilled our projects, and our clients were always thrilled with the results. But below the surface, our operations were dissolving into a mess. Our eyes weren’t on the prize; we were always chasing after each little job for cash. It took too much time to learn new skills. When I looked at our timesheets and deducted the unbillable hours, our projects would hardly break even.
What hurt us even further is that with diversifying, we had to manage multiple workflows, software, and systems: Sketch, Illustrator, Photoshop, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Google Analytics, Final Cut Pro, etc. It was expensive with minimal return. It was like an Olympic swimmer signing up for a swimming-diving-ice-skating club when their passion is swimming.
So I took a step back. I boiled it down to what we enjoyed and excelled at. Ask yourself: for what do you want to be known? For us, it was psychology-driven, conversion-focused web design. This was the service our team had the most skills in and collectively could give the best value to our clients. Once I’d figured that out, it was easy to eliminate those other services and specialize.
You can niche down by service or industry and be the specialist in what you offer.
The first red flag that my business was in trouble was when I said to my accountant, “I feel like my business is doing great.” He replied, “I don’t care how you feel. The facts are in the numbers. Show me your accounts, and I’ll tell you if you’re actually doing well.” As an intuition-driven guy, it was a real eye-opener; I’d only ever relied on gut instinct.
At one point, we had a ton of work coming in, so I hired a few juniors to help the rest of the team. The team grew to 16, and the vibes in the studio were great, but the numbers weren’t. Instead of increasing efficiency, projects took 40 hours longer than they should have done. Why? The seniors and mid-level designers were taking time out to train the juniors! Reassessing the team showed me I needed to hire experienced staff, so projects ran on time and budget. It was a hard decision but a necessary one to keep us afloat.
The crucial numbers for any design agency are your timesheets, where bottlenecks lie, how much you’re spending, how long a project takes; these determine your actual margins. Setting up quantitative software like Toggl, Gantt, and Asana were a game-changer for us. They gave our project management real purpose and potential. Knowing the average hours our primary type of project took made it easy to give clients realistic deadlines, anticipate the need for fresh hiring, and know when our plates were full. You do not want to bite off more than you can chew.
You can’t please everyone, and frankly, you shouldn’t be trying to. One type of bait won’t attract every kind of fish. First, identify the type of fish you want to catch, the pond where this type of fish lives, and finally, bait your hook with something that type of fish can’t resist.
Your sales team should be able to identify them instantly, and all you then need to do is streamline your team, process, and systems towards being the best fit for them.
There are many different marketing avenues you can go down, but go down too many, and it becomes a tangled web of confused messaging.
Remember, just because your competitors are doing it does not mean it’s the most effective approach for your target market.
There are really only inbound and outbound types of strategies, and it’s a great idea to list out the pros and cons (and the ROI of each) concerning your target market. Or, you can approach marketing based on your existing skillset — for example, if you detest being in front of a camera and don’t want to do video marketing, then just don’t do it.
Identify what works for you, and then be consistent. Consistency is the secret to a successful marketing strategy.
The post How I Saved My Design Agency & Tripled My Profits first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
2021 has been both memorable and instantly forgettable. Pop stars were freed from modern-day servitude, some people tried to overthrow democracy, and we all vacationed at home.
Despite the weirdness of the times, the web kept growing, kept changing, and kept on pushing boundaries. We saw a wealth of new sites launch or relaunch with significant updates.
Here are the 50 best sites launched on the web this year. Enjoy!
In April, seafood company Crusta C cleverly used the simple logomark ‘C’ to apply a cutout video effect.
Slow is a collective of creatives aiming to implement slow movement principles. Its site reflects those aims, creating a sense of calm and deliberation.
2021 saw tons of brutalist-inspired design. hnst’s take on the style works thanks to the bright red in place of the standard black.
This site for boutique hotel Marram uses a soft color palette to create an impression of soft golden light and calm.
In July, we loved this site for running-blade brand Levitate. The site is clean and light, with a sense of inherent motion in the photography.
There’s some beautiful photography on this site for eco-conscious, bespoke travel agency Niarra Travel.
The core of this site for Plúnt is a combination chooser which feels pleasingly reminiscent of an animal flipbook.
Moth makes classic cocktails in a can. The striking black and white graphics and masking effects for its holding page stunned us back in March.
Selling supplements is hard; people are understandably skeptical. So this site for Seed packs in research and scientific information and avoids the hard-sell.
Another excellent portfolio site in 2021, this time for creative media agency Wavemaker. The site is uber-confident while still being playful.
Wild Souls makes nut butters, tahini, and other Greek delicacies. Its site is colorful and warm, and the site typography is soft and appealing.
JUST Egg produces egg-like food from plant material. The huge photography and bold typography do a great job of making a new concept appealing.
One of the most popular designs of 2021 was Aalto University’s site with its in-depth campus tour. The simple navigation inspired several imitators.
Scroll interactions were big in 2021, and Wisr features a Heath Robinson-style machine that ‘runs’ as the user scrolls down the page.
This site for Cevitxef ceviche restaurant in Bilbao does a great job of making us hungry. Drama is created by oversized text, heavily-styled photography, and lots of movement.
The best digital agencies keep their own sites simple, like this site for On digital technology studio that uses black on light blue and adds infinite scrolling.
We found Acayaba + Rosenberg’s use of architectural photography and subtle scrolling a pleasing browsing experience.
This site for home linen company Madre uses extraordinary fine-art style still-life photography to enrich a very simple site.
“Show, don’t tell” is a well-worn mantra. Hyperframe’s site implements it by demonstrating the product’s major selling point on scroll.
This exceptional WebGL experiment was built to show what’s possible in the technology. Have a play with the car; it’s a ground-breaking demo.
In 2021, collaborative mapping tool Felt launched in private beta. Its excellent site does a great job of creating interest while doubling as a recruitment notice.
Not every project is exciting, but this excellent site for imNativ uses macro photography to great effect to promote upholstery fabric.
Excellently named Websmith Studio uses color to highlight, and the noise effect applied to the background adds subtle interest.
High-quality photography and a terracotta-based color scheme create an inviting ambiance for Singita, an African eco-tourism and conservation brand.
A fullscreen background behind a mobile view for desktop? It sounds like a horrible idea, but this site for cosmetics brand Fluff pulls it off.
This great site for Chiwawa cantina features wrestling masks, skeletons, and tone-on-tone color to create a lively and distinctly Mexican site.
This site for Nothing’s ear(1) earbuds is packed with confidence. Appropriately, it looks even better on mobile.
Lots of experts have tried to tell us how to live our lives in the last couple of years, but Chérie Healey’s site manages to stay on the right side of positive without slipping into clichés.
Wayfinder, a game about our connection to nature using generative code, AI, machine learning, and data mining, could not have been more 2021 if it tried.
Not too many investment groups are thought of as ethical, but Green Angel Syndicate specializes in funding companies fighting climate change.
As the days got darker in the Northern hemisphere, we were wowed by this site for Tether, a cycle safety system using video and illustration to explain its clever approach to bike safety.
Back in January, we loved the new site for Patricia Urquiola design studio, thanks to its bright, bold colors that we thought inspired confidence.
Headup’s businesslike approach is created thanks to a pleasing color palette and geometric graphics.
For Earth Day on April 22nd, Redwood Empire Whiskey created a microsite promoting a competition styled to match their bottle labels.
The one-pager for GT Super has a certain drama in keeping with the font itself and allows you to play around with the size, weight, and style.
Due for release in 2022, Planet of Lana is a game from Wishfully Studios, and its teaser page launched back in June has kept us intrigued ever since.
This charming site for The Longest Road Out is a travel map and journal based on the creators’ road trip around Britain, Ireland, and the outlying islands.
Made Thought has a bold aesthetic and approach that explains its outstanding client list.
Miti Navi makes extraordinary sailing boats. We were attracted to how its site presented a luxury product in an original way.
Another powerful digital design agency site was La Nouvelle’s, which used a combination of contrasting and complementary color combinations to catch the eye.
Caleño makes non-alcoholic distilled spirits. They relaunched their website in March with bright, joyful colors that reflect the character of the brand.
This demo site for a coffee pod manufacturer isn’t a site as such, but it demonstrates that even in 2022, there’s room for parallax scrolling.
Everyone needs a few more houseplants, and How Many Plants is a great guide to how to own and look after them. The illustration style is friendly but efficient.
One of the most approachable design agency sites of 2021 was How & How’s. It keeps things light and clean, and effective.
Part of a campaign encouraging businesses to employ talented people with Down Syndrome, The Hiring Chain website dispels myths with clearly presented facts.
Back in February, we couldn’t get enough of photographer Virgile Guinard’s portfolio site. Blocks of color pulled from each image hide the image allowing you to focus on one image at a time.
Studio Nanna Lagermann’s site excels at creating a sense of space and calm. The color palette is soft and neutral. The type is large but clean and sophisticated.
Veganism is a growing trend, and one of the sites promoting it with gorgeous colors is this site for lab ‘grown’ meat.
This one-page site for Mama Joyce Peppa Sauce is big and bold. Click almost anywhere, and two bottles of sauce go into your cart.
The site bucks the trend for luxury hotel design and instead is styled to complement its interiors. We could have done with time at this boutique hotel in 2021, maybe next year…
The post 50 Best Websites of 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
As the year begins to wind down, there are still plenty of new and evolving website design trends going strong. Much of what you’ll see this month carries over from things we’ve been seeing all year but with fresh touches.
From peek-a-boo designs with neat animated elements to vertical bars to brutalist blocks, there are a lot of highly usable trends to work with.
Here’s what’s trending in design this month.
Designers have been experimenting with cut-out and layering elements with animation for some time, which has evolved into full peek-a-boo styles with a lot of visual interest.
How each design comes together is a little different. Some have the animation in the back, others in the front, and some include text as part of the style. There’s almost no set of actual rules to how to make this design trend work.
Each of the examples below does it somewhat differently with varying degrees of success. The commonality here is that it is almost one of those visuals that you either see and love or hate.
Jatco Insurance is the most stunning example here, with a bold color choice and a peek-a-book element inside the oversized “J.” The overall effect is soothing and interesting and naturally draws the user across the screen from the top left to the background video layer. The small tagline, “Individual attention you deserve,” is perfectly placed.
Liron Moran Interiors takes a different approach with the peek-a-boo concept with the letters peeking out from behind an image. The animation is restricted to a hover and scroll effect that adds a liquid element to the image as well as changes to the image and color background. The challenge here is in readability. More of the words show on wider screens, but is it enough?
Melon Fashion also layers text and animated effects for a neat peek-a-book style that almost seems cut out from the background. The overall look appears to have three layers: background video, middle layer for the yellow color block, and text on top. The opacity of text elements with the peeking video is interesting and well pulled together without sacrificing too much readability.
Vertical color bars are a design element that keeps popping up in different ways. Designers can use it as a standalone element or container for content, such as navigation or other click actions.
Vertical elements are helpful because they can help create a more consistent and unified user experience from desktop to mobile screens. This shape can also be somewhat disruptive because you don’t see it featured that often. (Although with this style trending that might become less true over time.)
New Classrooms uses a vertical color bar on the left to help you move through the design. The color actually changes as each slide progresses on the homepage.
Serving uses multiple vertical bars as links to different content entry points. Clickability is emphasized with a change from a red overlay to a full-color image. The navigation is also tucked inside a white bar on the left side of the screen with a hamburger menu therein.
TechnoAlpin goes with a skinny vertical navigation menu on the right side of the screen. The icons with menu elements make navigation highly visual and intuitive. The color, which significantly contrasts with the rest of the design, also helps.
Not many people thought brutalism would stick around when it started trending. Elements of brutalism keep sneaking in, though, although they are much less stark and harsh than some of those original trending website designs.
This version of brutalism focuses on block elements that contain images or text and often click to other pages in the design. The blocks themselves are essentially the buttons that help you navigate to additional content.
The critical question about this design technique is whether this click action is intuitive enough. Will users interact without buttons?
The answer likely depends on your audience base, but if you opt for a style like this, it is essential to keep a close eye on analytics to ensure that users know and understand how to engage.
Milli Agency might be the most intuitive example of the brutalist blocks trend. The homepage is essentially a giant navigation menu. Each block changes from white to yellow on hover and expands, further encouraging clicks.
Sick Agency uses brutalist blocks with experimental typefaces and bold color for an in-your-face design. You can’t help but look at all the different things happening here. The biggest question might be, where should you focus and click next? The cursor provides some visual cues, but it’s not quite as intuitive as you might want it to be.
Mawo mixes brutalist blocks with a big blue cursor to help users click through the design to see more clothing options. Even the images here have a rather stark feel, which isn’t typical for e-commerce. Every block element above the scroll on the homepage includes a click action from the navigation blocks across the top to the “Shop Women” and “Shop Men” images. Further, the blue cursor dot helps show where users can click, and text buttons change to blue on hover as well.
Most of the examples here show trends as homepage elements, but you aren’t limited to that application. Try some of these techniques on landing pages or interior pages that you want to add a little something special to.
This can be an excellent way to test the design and see if your users like the style and know-how to interact with it. If it works, then you can extend the aesthetic to more of the design.
The post 3 Essential Design Trends, November 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
What makes a company special? There are hundreds of organizations out there selling fast food, but only one McDonalds. You’ve probably stumbled across dozens of technology companies too, but none of them inspire the same kind of loyalty and commitment as Apple. So why do people fall in love with some companies more than others?
Most of the time, it comes down to one thing: brand essence. Your brand essence, or brand identity, represents all of the unique components of your business that separate it from the competition. It’s not just about your logo or the brand colors you choose for your website. Your brand essence entails all of the visual assets you use and those less tangible concepts like brand values and personality.
When your customers decide which companies to buy from, they’re not just looking for another dime-a-dozen venture with the cheapest products. Instead, your audience wants to buy from a business that they feel connected with. That’s where your brand comes in.
Infusing brand essence into your website helps give your digital presence that extra touch that differentiates you from other similar companies.
So, how do you get started?
Your brand essence is a collection of core characteristics responsible for defining your brand. More than just a single asset, your essence encompasses everything from your unique tone of voice, from your brand image, your message, and even what you stand for.
More than just a single asset, your essence encompasses everything
When you’re trying to boost your chances of sales, a brand essence helps build a kind of affinity with your customers. Your clients see aspects of your character that they can relate to, such as a modern and playful image or a commitment to sustainable practices. It’s that affinity that convinces your customer to choose your company instead of your competition time after time.
Your website is one of the first places that your customer will visit when looking for answers. They might happen across your site when searching for a key phrase on Google or stumble onto it from social media. When they arrive on your product or home page, everything there should help them make an immediate emotional connection.
The only problem?
It’s challenging to portray a unique brand identity through a standard website template. If your site looks the same as a dozen other online stores, how can you convince your customers that you’re better?
First impressions are a big deal.
In a perfect world, your visitors would land on your website and instantly fall in love with what they find there. So everything from the unique design of your homepage to the pictures on your product pages should delight and impress your audience.
Unfortunately, if just one element is wrong, then you could also make the wrong impression entirely on your customers too. Adding elements of brand essence to your site will:
Since there are so many elements that add up to a strong brand essence, there are also a variety of ways you can add your brand to your website. Whether it’s using specific colors to elicit an emotional response from your fans or adding your unique tone of voice into content, there’s no shortage of ways to show off what makes you special.
Brand colors are an important part of your brand essence. Walk into Target, and the bright shades of red will instantly energize you. Likewise, when you see a McDonalds, that golden arch logo might instantly remind you of joy and nourishment.
Color psychology plays a significant role in every brand asset you create, from the packaging you choose for your products to the shades in your logo. With that in mind, you should be using your colors effectively on your website too. Stick with the same selection of shades in every digital environment online.
For instance, the Knotty Knickers company uses different shades of pink and white to convey feelings of femininity and comfort. Not only is the website packed with this color, but the company also follows through with similar shades on its social media pages too.
Everything from the highlights on the Knotty Kickers Insta to the decorations in their images feature the soft tones of pink that make the company recognizable.
Remember, consistent use of color is psychologically proven to help improve recognition by up to 80%. So let your colors shine through.
Your colors are just one component of your brand essence.
Fonts and typography are other components that your customers use to recognize and understand your business. There are many different styles of font, and new ones appear all the time. However, your company should have a specific selection of fonts that it uses everywhere.
If you have a typeface logo, then you might have one specific kind of font for this, like Original Stitch’s logo here:
On top of that, you may also use one font for the “heading” text on your website and something slightly different for the body text. Your heading and body text need to be extremely clear and easy to read on any device if you want to appeal to your target audience.
However, there’s more to getting your fonts right than choosing something legible. The fonts you pick need to say something about your company and what it stands for. For example, the modern sans-serif font of Original Stitch’s website conveys a sense of forward-thinking cleanliness and style.
The fonts feel trendy and informal, perfect for a luxury fashion company. Alternatively, a serif font like Garamond might look more formal and professional. So what do you want your customers to think and feel when they see your typography?
Stock images look out-of-touch, cliché, and fake. If you cover your website in images like that, then you’re not going to earn the respect of your customers. Instead, it’s up to you to ensure that every graphic on your website conveys the sentiment and personality of your brand.
Bringing your brand essence into your website design means thinking about how you can convey your values in every element of that site. From the photos of your team that show the real humans behind your products and services to the pictures that you use on your product pages, choose your graphics wisely. If you have dedicated brand colors, you can even include these in your photos.
Of course, the most valuable graphic on your website should always be your logo. This is the thing that you need to include on all of your website pages to ensure that your audience knows who they’re shopping with. So ensure that no matter how much visual content you have on your page, your logo still stands out.
Firebox places its logo at the top of the page in the middle of your line of sight, no matter where you go on the website. This ensures that the logo is the thing that instantly grabs attention and reminds consumers of where they are.
Remember to ensure that each of the images you do include in your website is surrounded by plenty of white space so that your customers can see them properly too.
It’s easy to get stuck focusing on things like logos and colors when you’re trying to make your brand essence shine through in your website. However, one of the most common things that your customer will recognize you by is your tone of voice.
Your brand tone of voice is what gives the content you share online personality and depth. It can come through in the kind of words you use, including slang and colloquialisms. In addition, you can add humor to your voice (if it’s appropriate) and even include emojis if that makes sense for your brand.
With formal words, you can make sure that you come across as reliable, dependable, and sophisticated. With informal words, you’re more likely to convince your audience that you’re friendly and relatable. Sticking with the Firebox example, look at how the company writes its product descriptions.
Everything from the length of the sentences to the humor in the tone of voice helps to convey something unique about the brand.
Like all of the elements that bring your brand essence into your website, your tone of voice must remain consistent wherever your customers see it. Make sure that your customer service agents know how to use your voice in chat with customers and that you include that personality on social media too.
The tone of voice and personality that you showcase in your website and content is crucial to driving success for your business. However, under all of that, the most important thing to do is ensure you’re sending the right message. In other words, what do you want your customers to think and feel when they land on your website?
If your whole message is that you can make great skincare easy to obtain without asking people to compromise on animal safety, this should be the first thing that comes across when someone arrives on your homepage. That’s why Lush combines clean, simple web pages with credibility-boosting badges that tell customers everything they need to know instantly.
Ensuring that your message can come across correctly means learning how to use all the different brand assets you rely on consistently and effectively. Everything from the colors on your website to how you place trust badges along the bottom of every page makes a difference to how significant and believable your message is.
Notably, when you know what your core message is, it’s important to repeat it. That means that you don’t just talk about what your ideals and values are on your homepage. You also include references to your message on every product page and the “About” page too. Lush has an entire “ethical charter” on its website, where you can learn more about its activities.
Having a similar component included within your web design could be an excellent way to confirm what your most crucial considerations are for your customers.
Exploring other website designs and ideas created by your competitors is one of the easiest ways to get inspiration. Competitive analysis gives you an insight into the trends and design strategies that are more likely to work for your target audience. It’s also an opportunity for you to learn from your competitors’ wrongs and what they’re doing right.
However, it would be best if you never allowed your initial research and exploration to go too far. In other words, when you see something great that your competitor is doing, don’t just copy and paste it onto your own website. This is more likely to remind your customers of the other company and send them to that brand than it is to improve your reputation.
Instead, focus on making your website unique to you. If you’re having trouble with this, then start by looking at your About page. How would you describe your background and your mission as a business to someone who has never heard of you before? What makes your company different from all of the other organizations out there?
Take the unique features that you rave about on your About page and the personality you try to convey through your employees and bring it into the rest of your website design. The whole point of bringing brand essence into your web design strategy is that it helps to differentiate you from the other companies out there.
It’s a good idea to protect any assets that other people might try to steal from you too. Copyrighting your logo, your name, and other essential components of your brand will stop people in your industry from treading on your toes too much.
Your website is one of the most valuable tools that you’ll have as a brand. It’s an opportunity for you to share your products and services with the world, capture the attention of your target audience, and potentially make sales too. However, it’s important not to forget that your website is also a chance for you to demonstrate what your brand is truly all about.
Through your brand essence, you can share the unique values and messages that make your company special. But, more importantly, you can use those components to build a deeper relationship with your audience – the kind of connection that leads to dedicated repeat customers and brand loyalty. People connect with other people – after all, not just faceless corporations.
Once you’ve identified your brand essence, the next step is to make sure that you know how to connect with your customers consistently. Every aspect of your website, application, social media pages, and anything else you make for your business sends the same message.
The post Making Your Mark: 6 Tips for Infusing Brand Essence into Your Website first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Ever since online stores first emerged they’ve faced one big challenge compared to their real world rivals; yes, it’s convenient to shop wherever, whenever you want, and delivery options permitting, buy from anyone anywhere in the world. But it’s a minimal experience compared to the fuller sensory experience of shopping in the real world.
Online stores can only access our sight and hearing, whereas physical shops can engage all our senses. How can a website compete with the experience created by walking into a physical space where lighting, layout, decor, and background audio are all carefully designed to create an appropriate atmosphere; where you can touch fabrics to check how they feel, try clothes or shoes on without having to buy them first? How do you sell scented products without allowing them to be smelled?
In this month’s round-up, we see a few different approaches to solving this dilemma, sites that focus the copy, visual, and auditory, to work on the imagination.
This microsite to advertise The Body Shop body butters, uses sensuous imagery and video to create an atmosphere of indulgence while also offering comprehensive product information.
Sustainable, bespoke travel agency Niarra Travel makes good use of some beautiful photography. The background color scheme of earthy greens and neutrals fits both the luxury and eco-conscious aspects of the company.
by Humankind is a personal care brand making toiletries from natural ingredients. The focus of their pitch is reducing plastic waste. The site is appropriately sparse, with simple product shots and mostly warm neutral colors.
This one-page site for Mama Joyce Peppa Sauce is big and bold. Lots of scrolling type and vintage style illustration. You don’t need to look for a ‘buy now’ because the cursor itself is it. Click almost anywhere, and two bottles of sauce go into your cart.
Eadem is a beauty company for women of color — their flagship product is a serum that fades dark spots without bleaching. Pinks and dark golds contrasted with fresher oranges and pale greens create a color scheme that feels rich but not heavy.
Pact Media is a full-service digital design agency whose work mainly focuses on agencies, businesses, and organizations involved in conservation. Large type and greyscale with red accents create a strong feel, while color on image rollover adds extra impact.
hueLe Museum is a collection of clothing brands. The philosophy behind it equates choosing clothes to choosing flowers, and there are some beautiful flower images. There is a sense of tranquility to the site, and it is even better on mobile.
Photographer Marnie Hawson’s portfolio site is clean and simple, with a warm green (again) background and an engaging asymmetrical grid layout.
Kōpiko is a micro-bakery that offers a sourdough delivery subscription service to its local area. It makes and sells only two products, and the single-page site is suitably simple. Putting the subscription form above the product and company information gets to the point without seeming pushy.
Banila Studio is a branding and design studio in Basque Country. This is a nice example of sideways scrolling, and the alternate color scheme option is a fun touch.
Big Green Eggs are high-end barbecue/outdoor ovens. Lots of high-quality food photography is the key here, along with a clear build-your-own setup process.
Pawzzles is a puzzle feeder toy for cats, and yes, there is a cat video. This has a fun feel, with some rather sweet illustrations and lots of silly puns. By cat lovers, for cat lovers.
The choice of display type on this site — crucially one that works well for both the latin and greek alphabets — emphasizes the Cretan origin of Melopeion honey. The illustrations are appealing, and the shopping basket icon is an especially nice detail.
This site for Brendel Wines is all about photography, large background photographs, and video, as well as product shots. More specifically, the lighting in the images creates an atmosphere, a sense of warm summer evenings.
imNativ is an upholstery fabric: not the most exciting product to present enticingly. Some good, close-up photographs and well-styled images of the fabrics in use make them desirable.
Thursday design studio has produced a very pleasing, clean site for their own portfolio. The split-screen scrolling that changes to sideways scrolling on mobile is especially nice.
HALEYS Beauty uses a soft, powdery color palette and a clear, well-spaced grid, which gives it a modern, feminine feel.
The Wookmama app is a color visualizer which displays palettes and applies those palettes to real-world images. Colour is, as one would hope, used well here, along with plenty of screen mock-ups.
Planet of Lana is the first game from Wishfully Studios, due for release in 2022. This teaser web page really allows the game illustrations to do the talking.
The Future of Office is a sales site for office space to rent. It has a fresh, airy feel which reflects the open, minimal aesthetic of the spaces on offer.
The post 20 Best New Sites, June 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Inclusive design is often mistaken for accessibility, or even used as an interchangeable term, which is a good indication that most designers don’t know what it means.
Accessibility is a process that seeks to mitigate issues in a design that is not sufficiently universal; inclusive design increases the universality of the design. In real-world terms, an accessible building may replace its front steps with a ramp; an inclusive building is constructed at the same level as the sidewalk.
Accessibility is concerned with objective, measurable improvements. It’s a UI concern. Inclusive design is subjective, more difficult to measure, and is a UX concern. By designing inclusively, we extend our designs to the widest possible user group and contribute to a better society. Here are three ways to get started.
When designing, it’s normal to assume that we are normal. After all, we are the center of our experience of the world. Everything from our preferences to our empathy stems from our individual place in time and space.
When we use the term “edge case,” what we’re referring to is a minority experience, a way of using our design that is uncommon or distinct from our own expectations.
But what would happen if we treat ourselves as the edge case? What if all of the experiences that we deem to be minority experiences are actually the core, common user experience of our design?
If we start from the position that we are the one out-of-step with the design, that most people will not think or act as we do, then we’re eliminating thousands of biased decisions about how our design should be.
It has always surprised me that in Europe’s dark ages — ranging from the decline of the Roman empire to the Proto-Renaissance — it didn’t occur to anyone to draw from life. Artists drew things the way they thought they should look, which is why so many Byzantine icons of the infant Jesus look like a middle-aged blonde man that has been shrunk.
It’s important to draw from real life as much as possible. That means abandoning personas — which are by definition under-representative and frequently loaded with bias — and engaging with actual users. Most of all, it means taking a step back and opening your eyes.
Inclusive design cannot be a part of your practice; it’s an all-encompassing attitude. Your design practice must be inclusive. At least, it should aspire to be…
As human beings, we are biased—all of us. The reason for that is that bias — be it racism, misogyny, nationalism, homophobia, or anything else — is cultural. And we all exist within society. We’re all bombarded with information that reinforces those biases every day.
Accept that you have biases and that your biases will pull your design work away from the inclusive solution you aspire to. But equally, accept that by acknowledging your biases you’re limiting the influence they have over your decision-making.
It’s divisive and abusive to partition users into groups, especially when the act of doing so perpetuates bias.
One of the most encouraging developments of the last decade has been the introduction of the answer “prefer not to say” in response to personal questions about race, gender, status, and so forth. But if “prefer not to say” is a valid option, in other words if you don’t actually need to know, then why ask at all?
Occam’s Razor is an often misquoted idea that (to paraphrase) states that when making a decision, the one with the least assumptions is the correct choice.
The problem is that Occam’s Razor implies that there is a ‘correct’ decision. But in fact, inclusive design benefits most from a flexible UI and a high tolerance for deviation.
If you can identify the assumptions in a design decision sufficiently to count them, then you’re best served by testing, not comparing, those assumptions.
There is no such thing as a “natural normal,” but there is “perceived normal.” Much of our behavior is governed by the experiences we’ve had since we were very young. Despite existing somewhere on a scale of ability and preference, most of us have inched towards what we have been told is a “normal” range all our lives.
However, it is a physiological fact that every characteristic exists somewhere on a spectrum. There are no black and whites; it’s all grey.
When we design a site or app, we tend to silo certain characteristics into one. Someone who is visually impaired is treated to the same ‘solution’ as someone who is blind, even though visual impairment can range from screen reflections on a sunny day to someone who was born without optic nerves.
There are people who have lost their sight through degeneration or accident and will be able to make visual connections based on remembered visuals. Other people have never seen anything and their conscious mental process isn’t figurative at all.
To accommodate the full gamut of possible interactions with our design, we need to design to a scale, not with absolute values. This means thinking less about set colors and sizes and more in terms of contrast and scale.
Few areas are more indicative of a spectrum of experiences than color.
Color is instantly problematic for designers because quite apart from color blindness, color has deeply personal associations.
Over the last couple of decades, it’s been repeatedly proven that it is contrast, not hue, that increases engagement. Green does not always mean go; red does not always mean stop.
Color involves so many biases and assumptions that it’s simply better to work with contrast than select the ‘right’ hue.
In the first draft of this article, I wrote that increasing the scale of your typography was always good.
My rationale was that some users will benefit from larger type, and zero users will be hindered by it. But that’s not true. Larger type means fewer lines per viewport, which means more scrolling; not a problem for some users, but potentially an issue for those with motor control issues.
That was one of my biases right there.
Good design is self-aware in origin and unselfconscious in execution.
Inclusive design isn’t about enabling access for everyone; it’s about designing for a user experience that is welcoming and respectful. Every one of your users should feel not just enabled but validated.
Inclusive design isn’t a series of items on a checklist; it’s an ideal, like harmony or beauty, that we may struggle to achieve but that we should strive for nonetheless.
Image via Pexels.
The post 3 Ways to Design More Inclusively first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
DevConf.US 2021 has kicked off their call for papers this last month and of course it will be a virtual event (hopefully for this one last time) hosted on September 2-3. It’s the 4th annual, free, Red Hat sponsored technology conference for community project and professional contributors to Free and Open Source technologies coming to a web browser near you!
There is no admission or ticket charge for DevConf.US events. However, you are required to complete a free registration. Talks, presentations and workshops will all be in English.
This month we have several examples of brutalism used to good effect as a foil to showcase products and/or work. By contrast, at the other end of the scale, we have brands who have chosen to go more of an immersive experience route, using full-screen images, sound, animation, and even VR.
Both are valid approaches, depending on the content. The former tends to work better as a backdrop for artwork, photography, and artisanal craft goods — acting as a virtual gallery space — while the latter is better for consumer goods and experiences, particularly food, drink, and accommodation.
There is, of course, a whole range in between these extremes, and we’ve got that covered too. Enjoy!
A simple layout, soft pastel colors, and clear navigation provide an excellent backdrop for Grainne Morton’s handmade jewelry creations.
Good photography and a heritage-inspired color scheme give the Gage Hotel’s site a luxury feel.
Tejidos Roca is a fabric manufacturer, and the design of their site uses a circle motif to bring rolls of fabric to mind.
Synerghetic is part of the Junior Enterprises Europe scheme – a network of businesses run by students. This year they are not holding the usual handover ceremony, so Synerghetic created this rather fun little digital celebration instead.
For Earth Month, Redwood Empire Whiskey has created a microsite promoting a competition styled to match their bottle labels.
This site focusing on Spanish photographer Gabriel Cullado’s life and work features some great transitions and good use of horizontal scrolling.
In Ombia Studio’s site, atmospheric photographs stand out in a minimal layout. There is a sense of almost gallery curation here.
Headup uses a pleasing color scheme and geometric graphics to create a welcoming but businesslike approach.
Spherical curves and line animations create interest in this site for boutique hotel, the Figo.
Boon Market is about promoting a toxin-free and waste-free lifestyle, and their site reflects this with its use of simple type and soft colors.
Unspoken Agreement’s website has a quietly confident feel, with clean lines and some pleasing type.
Another brutalist-inspired design here, but the use of bright red makes it fresh in hnst’s take on the style.
Part minimalist, part glossy magazine, InteriorLAB have succeeded in making the simple feel luxurious.
Bowmore has opted for immersive video and visually beautiful images to present their limited-edition Timeless whisky range.
There is a slightly old-school start-up feel to Oly Sheet’s website, but it is still appealing with fresh, spring colors and well-organized content.
Aalto University has provided a pretty in-depth tour of its campus here. The navigation is clear, and the information is presented in ideal-sized chunks — enough detail, but not too much at once.
Wisr features a Heath Robinson style machine that ‘runs’ as the user scrolls down the page. It provides a bit of interest (no pun intended) to the not very exciting subject of personal loans.
Bright colors, cute, but not too cutesy, illustration, some nice scrolling, and transition effects are used really well on Rudl und Schwarm. And it’s got bees; bees are good.
This site for Dr. T. Maul manages to take orthodontistry past the usual image of uncomfortable wiring, elastic bands, and ‘train tracks and make it seem just a little more glamorous.
There is a slightly vintage feel to this site for My Drink with its cocktail illustration. The blue text on grey is soothing without being bland.
And finally not new, but a bonus in honor of May 4th, the Imperial style guide. Well, the Web would get boring if it was serious all the time.
The post 20 Best New Websites, May 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
