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The Top 5 Form Types to Use in Your Web Design 

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There are a lot of factors that contribute to a better user experience on a website. Pages need to load quickly to give users peace of mind and efficiency. Navigation must be clear and straightforward, with direct pathways for visitors to follow when finding your contact pages, blog posts, and products. Your colors need to work seamlessly together while providing just enough contrast in the areas that need it most.

Excellent user experience needs to be considered for every part of your website that acts as a touchpoint with a potential customer or user.

One of the most significant touchpoints of all is your forms.

All websites need some form of interactive content to thrive. Users need to be able to do something with the site, whether it’s looking for information with a search bar, contacting a team for a quote, making a booking, or completing a purchase. Forms power the majority of the interactive activities available on websites.

If you know how to master great UX on a form, you can contribute to more meaningful interactions between your brands and their customers. But not all web forms are the same. Here are some of the top types of forms you need to master and how you can optimize them.

The “Opt-In” Form

The Opt-in Form is probably the best-known form in the digital landscape. It’s essentially a form that asks visitors to “opt-in” to a specific offer. Sometimes, this means signing up for a webinar; other times, it’ll be agreeing to an email newsletter or a regular series of blog updates.

Opt-in forms grab attention quickly and ask for something specific from the audience. For instance, this example from HuffPost encourages visitors to “Subscribe to the Morning Email.”

Opt-in forms are all about generating action.

Sometimes, they’re placed at the bottom of a landing page after a company has had a chance to explain precisely what they’re offering. Other times, you’ll find the opt-in form situated on a sidebar of a website, constantly enticing people to “sign up” if they like what they see on a blog post or article.

It’s also common for opt-in forms to appear as pop-ups and exit pop-ups on modern websites. For example, a brightly colored opt-in form that promises an immediate benefit to a customer could encourage them to hand over their details before they abandon your website.

How to Design a Great Opt-In Form

So what kind of best practices go into an excellent opt-in form?

  • Start with simplicity: If you’re asking your visitors to do something, don’t overwhelm them with too big of a request straight away. Keep the form short and simple, so it doesn’t seem like too much extra work for the visitor. Something like “Subscribe to our newsletter” should ask for nothing more than an email. 
  • Highlight the benefits: Most customers won’t want to give you a place in their inbox or the opportunity to interact with them further unless you can offer something in return. Even if you’re asking for something small, like an email address, let the customer know what’s in it for them. In the HuffPost example above, the company highlights that you can wake up to the day’s “most important news.” 
  • Give the visitor the power: Let your visitor know they’re in control here. They want to see that they’re getting exactly what they need from you in exchange for their contact details. This means reassuring them that their email address won’t be used for spam, like H&B Sensors does here: 

The Contact Form 

The Contact Form is another crucial part of building an effective UX for your website – but it’s also an element that web designers and business owners often overlook. When customers decide they want to learn more about a business, they need a quick and easy way to get in touch.

Contact forms need to be easy to find and use on any website. Usually, your user will expect to see a link to the contact form situated somewhere at the bottom of your webpage. It might be called “Contact Us” or “Customer Support.” Avoid anything that would go over the user’s head.

Aside from being easy to track down, your contact form also needs to reassure an audience that they’re making the right decision by getting in touch. Therefore, the content needs to be short, sweet, and authoritative—highlight why the user might contact your company and how they can do so.

Avoid any unnecessary information in the contact form. For example, you don’t need to know your client’s age and their job to answer a question about where their nearest physical branch is. Keep form fields to the point, or you’ll chase customers away.

How to Design a Great Contact Form

Design something personalized but straightforward to make the most of your contact form. Use features like smart content and conditional logic, if possible, to adapt the page to the user’s needs. Dynamic content is becoming increasingly valuable these days. Other best practices include:

  • Set the right expectations: Let your customers know how active you are and how quickly they can expect to hear back from you. Imagery and the right fonts can also set expectations about the kind of communication your audience can expect. For example, this contact page from the Marvel app is fun and playful, like the company itself:

  • Provide multiple options: If your customer doesn’t want to use your contact form, give them another way to get in touch. Ensure the contact page includes information like where to find you on social media and your professional phone number. 
  • Simplify things on your end: To ensure that you can contact your audience as quickly as possible, allow your customers to choose a specific subject that their query is connected to. Allowing them to choose “Sales” or “Order issues” means you can automatically direct the message to the right team member on the back-end. 

The Online Payment Form 

Sometimes, when your customers have seen what you have to offer and they’ve checked out the competition, they decide to go ahead with their purchase. To facilitate this, you’re going to need an online payment form. Online forms ensure that your customers can safely enter their credit or debit card details to purchase whatever you have to offer.

Most payment processing companies like PayPal, Square, and Stripe come with payment forms included, so you can easily embed them into a website in minutes. However, there’s always the option to customize those payment forms.

For instance, ideally, you’ll need a payment form that keeps your customer on the same page, so they don’t have to log into another browser to make their purchase. The fewer transitions your client has to make, the safer they’ll feel.

How to Design a Great Payment Form

When designing any payment form, simplicity and security are the two most important factors. Your customer should be able to enter their information quickly and easily and get through the transaction process without worrying about their details.

Remember to:

  • Keep it simple: The fewer fields the visitor has to fill out, the better. Customers still feel uncomfortable sharing personal information and payment details online. Make the experience as painless as possible. If your client already has an account with your business, you might create a system that automatically fills some of the fields, such as their email address, name, and billing address. 
  • Offer the right integrations: The proper payment forms will integrate with the payment services your customers prefer to use. Options include PayPal, Stripe, Square, Verified by Visa, and Mastercard. Get a developer to integrate the right APIs with your form to give your customers the broadest range of options. 
  • Ensure security: Give customers peace of mind by providing as much security evidence as possible. An SSL certificate that places the padlock on the top of the browser next to the URL is a great way to make customers feel more secure. Integrating verification options so your customers can avoid fraud issues is another significant step. Sometimes just putting logos from the card types you accept on the page will make a customer feel more secure. 

Support Forms

Some companies bundle the contact form and the support form together. Others have a separate support form to get their queries routed directly to the people most capable of helping them. If you want to take the second route, it might be a good idea to design a “help” section on your website where you can locate the support form.

The “Help” section on a site often appears alongside other links on the footer. For instance, it could appear alongside “About” links and “Contact” options. Here’s an example of Hubspot’s Customer Support options:

The best customer support pages come with various ways for clients to help themselves and find answers to their most pressing questions. For example, you might have a search bar where your audience can search for the answers to their queries or a knowledge base full of helpful blogs.

Hubspot allows users to choose between a blog, knowledge base, academy training center, community forum, developer discussion board, and assistance from a certified partner.

How to Design a Great Customer Support Form

Designing a good customer support form is about getting your audience the information they need as quickly as possible. Once again, you’ll need to stick to as few form fields as possible here to avoid angering an already frustrated customer. Also, remember to:

  • Ask for the right information: Find out what the query is about by giving the customer a drop-box menu full of possible topics to choose from. If you need a product reference number or something similar, ask for that at the top of the form, then allow the customer to provide extra information about their query underneath. 
  • Set expectations: Let your customers know when they can expect to get a response to their concerns and provide them with advice on what to do next. For instance, you could invite them to check out your knowledge base while they wait for a response. 
  • Keep it simple: Avoid using technical jargon on your support request forms. Be direct in your requests for summaries of the issue at hand, contact information, and other supplemental data. 

Customer Feedback Forms

According to Microsoft, around 96% of customers say that customer service is crucial in determining their loyalty to a specific brand. Another 52% of global customers believe that companies need to respond to the feedback provided by customers.

To ensure your customer service strategies are on-par with what your customers expect, you need to get feedback from your audience. That’s where a feedback form comes in. Customer feedback forms often appear after a client has finished purchasing on the “thank you” screen. They may also occur after a customer has completed a service interaction online.

Here’s an example of an Apple feedback form:

How to Design a Great Customer Feedback Form

By leaving you feedback, your customer is doing you a massive favor. They’re giving you a chance to learn from your mistakes and improve the service you can give next time around. Feedback is one of the best tools for any business that wants to grow and thrive.

If you want your customers to use your feedback forms, you’ll need to make them as simple as possible. Your customers don’t have time to waste on a complex form.

  • Don’t make any fields mandatory: Don’t stop your customers from submitting a form unless they’ve completed every field. Allow them to enter the information they consider to be the most important, and that’s it. You can even fill some of the form out for your customer, if possible, by entering their name and email address if they’re already a member of your site.
  • Make it mobile responsive: Remember there are around 3.5 billion smartphone users worldwide. You can’t afford to lose feedback because your form isn’t responsive. Every form should look and feel incredible on any device. 
  • Include a rating option: If your customers don’t have much to say about your service, or they’re not wordsmiths, they might prefer a rating option instead. A one-to-five rating system that allows your customer to judge your product or service on a scale of poor to wonderful is a great way to gain quick information. Check out the Uber Engineering example here:

Though you can pre-enter some information on a feedback form to make your customer’s life easier, don’t overstep your bounds. Adding your customer’s email address to the form is fine if they’re already a customer with you. Pre-selecting the “very satisfied” rating above would look presumptuous.

Top Tips to Improve Every Form Design

The online form is an essential part of any web design project, but it’s also frequently overlooked. Unfortunately, without a good set of forms, your customers will struggle to interact with your company in a meaningful way.

When creating any form, remember:

  • Reduce friction: Reduce the friction for your customers by asking as few questions as possible. The less your customer has to answer, the better. If you can pre-populate forms with information like your customer’s name and email address, this could help. 
  • Keep it simple: Make sure that the form is clean and easy to use. Your customers shouldn’t be confused about where to click or how to submit their information. A single-column design is often better than a multi-column option.
  • Be clear in error messages: Don’t just tell your visitors that something has gone wrong. Let them know what they need to do to submit the form successfully. If possible, use inline validation with real-time feedback to let your audience know that you recognize the information they’ve submitted.
  • Keep data secure: Make sure your audience feels safe by letting them know how you will use this information and why you’re asking for it. If you’re asking for an email address, make the benefits of entering that information clear. 
  • Make fields optional: Allow your audience to add more information to a form if they want to – but don’t demand it. Give some freedom to the visitor. 

The better your forms are, the more effective your interactions with customers will be. Remember, it’s not just the face-to-face interactions that your customers judge when making decisions about your business and whether to trust you. Today’s digital world has prompted a new demand for more meaningful virtual experiences.

Your form could be the first interaction you have with a client, whether it’s a contact form, a booking form, or something else entirely. Get that right, and you can improve your chances of your customers coming back to interact with you again later.

 

Featured image via Pexels.

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15 Best New Fonts, January 2022

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With a new year here, it’s time to try out some new fonts.

Whether you’re designing a brand new website or redesigning an existing one, the following list of fonts has you covered. In addition to the dependable serifs and sans serifs we use to create attractive and readable content, this roundup also has some fun additions, including one you can use for websites advertising Valentine’s Day deals next month.

Antona

Antona is a geometric sans serif font family with 16 different styles. The solid structures and ample white space within the characters give off a safe and friendly vibe.

Aromanis

Aromanis is a small font family with just two variations: Regular and Shadow. This new font supports nearly 70 languages and has an extensive Latin character set with localized forms. This font works best in branding for youthful companies with a playful vibe — from logos to posters and everything in between.

Black Coopy

Black Coopy is an edgy display typeface that would work well for sporty brands. In addition to the standard alpha, numeric, and punctuation sets, the font also comes with a variety of “swash” characters that can be used to frame your bold headlines.

Cimory Love

Don’t wait until February to start thinking about how to infuse a little romance into your designs. Cimory Love is a script font that comes in two styles: Regular and Italic. In addition to using it to promote Valentine’s Day sales, this could also be a cute font to use on websites for small gift shops, bakeries, and so on.

Cotford

Cotford is a contemporary serif font with a ton of flexibility built into it. It comes with eight variations — three text and five display weights. Designers can use one of the many pre-designed styles or they can modify this dynamic font set to make it suit their specific needs.

Digno

Digno is a beautiful, informal serif font that’s easy on the eyes. The font family comes with 14 weights covering a wide spectrum — lights, mediums, heavies, and even a couple of “Book” weights are thrown in if you want to add some personality to those text-dense pages of yours.

Dogly Comika

Dogly Comika is a rounded display font with two styles: Regular and outline. While it’s promoted as a font for animals and pets, you could use it for any type of website hero image, mobile app splash screen, video game, or social media graphic for brands with a fun vibe.

Guzzo

Guzzo is a nostalgic typeface inspired by mid-century grotesques. With 24 styles ranging from Condensed Thin to Extended Black and unexpected character variations (like the random cursives in the italics), you could realistically create interesting font pairings right from within this family.

Idem

Idem is a contemporary serif with nine wide-ranging styles that would work well for headers and text alike. Inspired by literary publications and commercial artists from the earlier part of the 20th century, this font family has a highly legible structure with a bold flare.

Jantur Type

Jantur Type is a geometric sans font that supports over 200 Latin-based languages. While you could use one of the Thin or Regular weights for editorial content, this font will be most effective in shorter headers and paragraphs where it can make a greater impact on messaging.

Loretta

Loretta is an elegant serif designed specifically for the body of your web pages. Because of its calligraphic roots, this particular font would work great for high-end digital publications or blogs that promote luxury lifestyles and goods.

Rebrand

Rebrand is an exciting take on geometric sans. There are two sub-families in Rebrand: Display comes with nine weights as well as alternative characters and dingbats; Text comes with seven weights that cover a broad spectrum of styles. Because of the size and variety of this font family, you could easily make this the go-to font for a company’s branding, headers, and body type.

Royal Grotesque

Royal Grotesque is a resurrection of a 1914 sans serif font called Wotan. Only one version of this font is available (Regular) and it would work great pretty much anywhere on the web with its clean and neutral design.

Selva

Selva is an attractive Scotch typeface that has a traditional Roman serif family, an italicized version of each Roman, as well as a script family. If you’re considering using a script font for branding or headlines, the classic and delicate details of this particular font would make for an interesting choice.

Sunset Gothic

Sunset Gothic is a sans serif inspired by signage found near and around Los Angeles. Because this signage was often painted directly onto shop windows and building facades, the letterforms had to be extremely legible for passersby and drivers alike. This font draws upon the hand-painted, vector-based styling of those painted promotions.

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Pantone Color of the Year 2022

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At this time every year, Pantone announces its choice for Color of the Year for the coming 12 months. The last year has been uncertain, to say the least, and although a tentative optimism seems to be piercing the general gloom, it’s difficult to see how that can be expressed in color.

On this occasion, for the first time, Pantone has elected to create a brand new color for its Color of the Year. Normally colors are chosen from Pantone’s extensive swatch books, so this new shade either reflects new beginnings or Pantone’s design team has been underemployed in the last year.

In either case, the shade created for 2022 is Very Peri. It’s a lilac — a bit more blue than violet, but still on the warm end of the spectrum.

The color feels a little retro — like the color of one of Jerry’s shirts in Seinfeld — and also spring-like — fields of bluebells leap to mind.

Pantone describes the color as having a “courageous presence,” but for that, I tend to think of neons; something with a little more saturation.

In fact, looking back over the past few years of Pantone colors, a soft purple (or adjoining shades) has traditionally been a safe choice for Pantone. 2014 was Radiant Orchid (lilac), 2016 was Rose Quartz and Serenity (pastel pink and blue respectively), 2018 was Ultra Violet (purple).

If Pantone was looking for a genuinely “courageous” choice, it should perhaps have reissued 2020’s Classic Blue, and called a do-over on the last couple of years.

Occasionally the Pantone Color of the Year has hinted at something more than a single shade. 2019’s Living Coral felt like attention was being drawn to the horrifying state of our ocean. Designers didn’t adopt the shade en masse, but environmentally conscious design has certainly become more prominent.

As we complain about homogenous design, is it right to even nominate a single color of the year? If what we’re lacking in the design industry is diversity, shouldn’t we ignore a color trend? (The irony of that question is not lost on me.)

In that spirit, rather than dishing out another bland lilac for 2022, Pantone should have presented us with Pure White #FFFFFF. A blank page to do with what we will. That would have been courageous.

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The State of Remote Working and Productivity During the Pandemic

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As we cross 2020, most of us are still functioning remotely and preparing for a hybrid work environment where we will be expected to work from home. How can an organization determine productivity? What can we expect from remote working in 2021? How can leaders motivate their employees who are low on motivation? Read this article as I dissect the remote working environment of 2021.

In 2020, this digital revolution was accelerated due to the pandemic outbreak, when most of the global workforce was forced to work remotely from the safe boundaries of their homes. We can witness the change in the work environment when we look at the introduction of various collaboration software, which helps employees connect virtually over a meeting and streamline their processes, to cloud-based connectivity, and a data-centric approach to strategic decision-making powered by the synergy between artificial and human intelligence. These have helped organizations reimagine the way to work.

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Cybersecurity for Cloud Applications in 2021

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Every digital aspect comes with a security risk if not handled properly. With billions of people using online and digital technologies worldwide, there are ample opportunities for hackers to break the security wall and create unrest all around. Cybersecurity news has become too frequent these days. We see bitcoin mining, credit card credential stealing, injecting malicious code into the systems, stealing confidential data, etc. In today’s digital world, it is not just about having speed, reaching your customers quickly, easy setup, mind-blowing features, etc., but rather, it is about how safe or secure your systems, data, or features are.

What is Cybersecurity?

The approach and practice of securing electronic data, networks, computer systems, and any form of digital infrastructure from malicious attacks is known as Cybersecurity. Banks, educational institutions, tech companies, government agencies, publishing media houses, hospitals, and every sector invest in cybersecurity infrastructure to protect their customer data, secrets, and business intelligence from attackers.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

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15 Ways To Secure Your Business WiFi Network

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Configuring your wireless network is one of the essential tasks to upkeep the security of your corporate wireless network.

At least among IT professionals, it is not a big secret how important it is for the Wi-Fi networks to be safe for any business. You can do a quick search on Google or skim through the social media or news feed to read about it. You will indeed read some interesting content about how vulnerable wireless networks are to attacks and data stealing.

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Leadership Is About Growth, Not Brilliance

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Does it ever cross your mind that praise can be negative? I guess not. After all, it looks harmless and seems to be quite effective. Conventional wisdom says that if you praise people, they are motivated to do better.
People who have been praised throughout their life by their well-meaning parents, friends, and teachers for their talent and smartness or those who have experienced extreme focus on talent and smartness throughout their childhood learn to value only intelligence. No wonder when these people enter the workforce, they continue to seek approval and demand praise every step of the way.
Every opportunity is a measure of their intelligence — do I look smart, how will I be judged, what if others find my ideas dumb. With a single-minded focus on validating themselves, all their actions are rooted in establishing their worth. Every mistake hurts their reputation and every failure is a reflection of their competence. They care less about learning and more about proving themselves. Their sense of morality sometimes takes a hit as they resort to brutal behaviors — demeaning others by yelling, insulting, controlling, or taking undue credit — all in an attempt to boost their self-esteem.
Carol Dweck, professor of Psychology at Stanford University summarised this unfortunate reality from Morgan McCall’s book High Flyers:

People often like the things that work against their growth. . . . People like to use their strengths . . . to achieve quick, dramatic results, even if . . . they aren’t developing the new skills they will need later on. People like to believe they are as good as everyone says . . . and not take their weaknesses as seriously as they might. People don’t like to hear bad news or get criticism. . . . There is tremendous risk . . . in leaving what one does well to attempt to master something new.

What Do Organizations Do with Such People?

They feed and promote this mindset. They praise people for their brilliant ideas conveying the message “we value talent and smartness.” They shower people with rewards and bonuses for their achievements communicating to everyone else around “all we care about is success.”
What happens when these people take on a leadership role? Their mindset of valuing brilliance above everything else amplifies leading to disastrous results. History is full of leadership fiascos with great promises that turned out to be the biggest disasters. This article from Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker is as valid now as it was 18 years ago. Describing the talent mindset at Enron and the consultants at McKinsey who wandered the hallways at the company’s headquarters, he points out “They were there looking for people who had the talent to think outside the box. It never occurred to them that, if everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box that needed fixing.”
He also talks about the impact of an environment that values innate talent and what happens when times get tough and that self-image is threatened “They have difficulty with the consequences. They will not take the remedial course. They will not stand up to investors and the public and admit that they were wrong. They’d sooner lie.”
Really, is praising people for their intelligence and achievements the only way to develop people who will be the leaders of tomorrow? Is there a better way out?
What if we praised people for their hard work, for their ability to persist despite failures and setbacks, for taking initiatives to build new skills, for standing up to their mistakes, for believing in their growth, and implementing the right strategies to overcome their shortcomings. What does this kind of praise tell them?
It tells them the value of effort in building abilities. It teaches them the importance of implementing the right strategies to solve problems. It encourages them to seek help to make progress on their task. It creates a passion for learning that’s not driven by the need to look smart, but with a desire to cultivate skills, to stretch themselves to grow.
When these people take on leadership positions, this mindset guides them to put the well-being of the company and its people before their own needs, to place value on teamwork over individual accomplishment, and to foster growth and development of their people.

As growth-minded leaders, they start with a belief in human potential and development — both their own and other people’s. Instead of using the company as a vehicle for their greatness, they use it as an engine of growth — for themselves, the employees, and the company as a whole.
– Carol Dweck

Unlike leaders who pull their companies down with their focus on brilliance, these leaders lead their companies into greatness and gratitude filled in their own hearts and those of the people around them.
Choose your praise carefully as you will see the tremendous benefits in praising for growth over brilliance.

When Leaders Focus on Brilliance

They live in a world of personal greatness and entitlement, vie for labels, and will do anything to boost their image. Instead of building a long-lasting company, they spend time and money on enhancing their image.
With the constant need for validation, they use people in the company to feed their egos and showcase their superiority. Everything is about pleasing the boss. They surround themselves with people who boost their self-esteem. Agreement earns them admiration and disagreement is an attack on their intelligence. Instead of hearing people out, they punish dissent and shut people down.
They pounce at the less talented for their lack of intelligence and find those who are more talented than they are as threatening. They mistreat employees, yell, insult, control and abuse them into their way of doing things. They feel better about themselves by making other people feel worse. Employees worry about being judged all the time. When people are ridiculed for mistakes, they soon learn to keep their heads down, stop putting their critical thinking skills to use, and give in to groupthink.
Their belief in their superiority blinds them to see reality. They turn a blind eye to complaints, ignore warning signs, and fire people who tell them what they don’t want to hear. Their decision-making criteria are based on what would make them look good as opposed to what’s good for the company long term.

What happens when a leader refuses to confront the brutal facts? “The minute a leader allows himself to become the primary reality people worry about, rather than reality being the primary reality, you have a recipe for mediocrity, or worse. This is one of the key reasons why less charismatic leaders often produce better long-term results than their more charismatic counterparts.
– Jim Collins

Since success and failure are a part of their identity — success means they are smart and failure means they are not — they find excuses and blame others for failures instead of taking personal responsibility. Instead of investing in the future growth of their company, they play safe with fear of failure, become less responsive to challenges from competition, go with what’s tried and tested, and refuse to take risks. Why take up the challenge that can hurt their reputation? On the other extreme, they may not shy away from crossing ethical boundaries to beat the competition at all costs. Success is what they are after and it doesn’t matter how they get it.
With more focus on talent and less on potential, they do not invest in mentoring and coaching employees. Instead of putting practices in place to develop employees and help them collaborate together, they make them compete against each other.
Carol Dweck sums up their brilliant mindset “My genius not only defines and validates me. It defines and validates the company. It is what creates value. My genius is profit. Wow!”

When Leaders Focus on Growth

They operate with a learning mode. They don’t claim to be genius but promise to invest in development, their own development, and the development of their people. The drive and enthusiasm to grow their companies make them adopt long-term strategies over short-term tactics. They aren’t in the game to boost their ego or establish their self-esteem. It’s the pure joy of shaping the future of their company that excites and motivates them. More than prestige, they are in it for the challenge.
They understand that the path to success goes through failure. Why lose the opportunity that can drive their future growth? So instead of hiding behind their failures, they face them head-on. Failures don’t define their competence, they are glaring moments of self-reflection. They are opportunities to build skills, explore possibilities, experiment, and invest in the promise of a better future.
They lead with vulnerability. They accept mistakes to shift the focus in the organization from hiding mistakes to finding solutions. When they don’t know something, instead of pretending to hide their ignorance, they say “I don’t know”. These three powerful words show humility and self-confidence. To make decisions, they invite others to share their opinion which promotes the culture of constructive criticism. Since they do not connect their identity to their opinion, more value is placed on seeking the right answers which require open disagreements and championing flexibility of opinion over their sense of righteousness.
Difficult situations make them uncomfortable, no doubt. Instead of letting their discomfort get in the way of meaningful conversations, they embrace it. They choose to look past their discomfort in the value that these discussions provide — saving a lot of time that can be wasted due to stress and anxiety that comes from misalignment of expectations and lack of clarity of purpose.
They are tough but compassionate. They do not shy away from giving critical feedback while also challenging the people in their organization to step outside their comfort zone. They empower people to make decisions with the right channels of feedback to assist in better decision-making in the organization.
Leaders with the growth mindset operate with what Lou Gerstner, who turned IBM’s fortunes around by saving it from near bankruptcy said “Hierarchy means very little to me. Let’s put together in meetings the people who can help solve a problem, regardless of position.” Not blinded by reality, they focus on finding solutions that will push their company forward. This requires keeping an open eye to change in market trends, identifying and investing in future growth areas, and taking calculated risks.
With a focus on potential and growth, they invest in identifying and building future skills of the organization — skills that will be useful during difficult circumstances giving them an advantage over the competition. They foster productivity through coaching and mentoring, place value on teamwork by encouraging collaboration and defining shared measures of success.
Warren Bennis, a scholar, author, and widely regarded as a pioneer of the contemporary field of Leadership studies, writes in Organizing Genius:

Leaders are people who believe so passionately that they can seduce other people into sharing their dream.

His most admirable view on leadership says:

Good leaders make people feel that they’re at the very heart of things, not at the periphery. Everyone feels that he or she makes a difference to the success of the organisation. When that happens people feel centred and that gives their work meaning.

What kind of leaders think like this — those focused on brilliance or the ones driven by growth?
Previously published here.

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UX Design Doesn’t End With Your Website

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User experience design is something that most of us associate with websites. But why isn’t it something we extend beyond the website?

Here’s why I ask this:

As a consumer, it’s so rare that your only interaction with a brand is through its website. Take an ecommerce site, for example. You buy a product from it, and then what happens?

  • You get a confirmation email;
  • You get another email when the package ships;
  • You might get another email or SMS notification when the package is delivered;
  • You retrieve the package and open it;
  • You open up your purchase and use it.

These are all an extension of that initial user experience on the site. If there’s just one hiccup along the way, it could easily erode the trust and happiness you felt after quickly finding and buying what you needed on the site.

So, what I’d like to do today is look at 10 areas where UX design should extend beyond the website to ensure that the frictionless experience started there remains untarnished.

Extending UX Design Beyond the Website

As a web designer, you might be thinking that this part of the user experience doesn’t fall under the umbrella of your responsibilities. And you may be right about that.

For brands to truly be successful and profitable, someone needs to carefully examine the bigger picture and ensure that the user experience is flawless no matter how far away from the site it is. At the very least, you should share the UX research and strategy you do for a client’s site so their team can ensure it carries over to other areas of the business.

Here are some things to think about:

1. Mobile App

It’s not uncommon for websites to have mobile app counterparts these days. The layout doesn’t need to be identical since mobile users tend to behave differently than those on desktop.

That said, an app shouldn’t force users accustomed to the desktop experience to re-learn how to navigate or engage with the brand. So, the branding, UI design, speed, security, and navigation all need to be on par with what’s already been established in terms of usability.

2. Email

Most websites have a direct connection to email. For example, blog newsletters, purchase confirmation emails, and lead generation follow-ups all start on the website.

Consumers are well aware that when they hand over their email address, they will receive an email in return. In many cases, those emails are welcomed when they’re done right. But if something feels off, that bridge could easily burn between brand and consumer.

To preserve the UX, emails should come with the following:

  • The same branding and visual style as the website;
  • A personalized subject line, greeting, or offer;
  • Consistent messaging as the site, especially when it comes to the CTA.

Another thing to remember is that email isn’t the time to inject dark patterns into the experience. So, the “Unsubscribe” option should be in an easy-to-spot area and a sharply contrasting font color.

3. Social Media

Social media is another channel that’s commonly connected to a website. While you can’t control the aesthetics of social media websites themselves, the visuals and messaging in posts need to be on-brand.

That means that things like memes and emojis — which are popular means of communication on social — should only be used if they’re normally part of the brand identity. If not, you’ll need to find other ways to communicate engagingly.

Another part of the user experience to think about is customer support. Social media is a lot like going into a store. If someone has an issue with what they bought or the service they received, there will be many people around to witness the complaint. Social media only amplifies that — so the quality of customer care needs to be consistent with how the brand handles it everywhere else.

4. SMS

Not every brand will need to be connected to customers via text messaging. eCommerce companies, news sites, and personal services providers likely will, though.

However a brand uses SMS, the same UX guidelines apply here as they do across all other channels:

  • Keep messages concise;
  • Make sure they’re relevant and valuable;
  • Use branded messaging and design;
  • Don’t abuse the privilege and send too many;
  • Make it easy to opt out.

Basically, if you can’t make it a valuable extension of the brand’s offering, don’t use it.

5. Phone

Any website that publishes its phone number should expect to receive calls from prospects and customers. While there’s nothing to design here visually, the experience of getting on the phone with a company should be consistent with what they experience elsewhere.

One way to do this is to design an easy-to-follow routing system. It should be simple for callers to figure out which number to choose. What’s more, there should be no endless loops. If a caller has exhausted the options, they should be immediately directed to a representative.

Another way to ensure consistency is to adhere to a script — that goes for call centers for enterprises as well as the local lawyer’s office. Every caller should be greeted with the same tone and handled in the same manner (depending on the situation, of course).

6. Ads

There are a lot of places where brands can advertise these days:

  • Google search;
  • Social media;
  • Ad networks;
  • TV;
  • Radio;
  • Podcasts;
  • Blogs;
  • Billboards;
  • Direct mail.

When designing an ad campaign, there should be consistent messaging, aesthetics (when relevant), and CTAs presented. If branding isn’t consistent from ad to ad, there may be a delay in consumers recognizing the brand or its offer. Or, worse, not recognizing it at all.

7. Packaging

For brands that sell products, you have to think about how the packaging will impact the user experience. There are two types of packages to consider, too.

The first is the product’s own packaging. Branding should be clear as day and consistent with the site they bought it from.

It should also be easy to open. There’s nothing more frustrating than finally getting your purchase, only to realize you need tools to get it out of the packaging.

You also have to think about packaging for products that get shipped.

The product should fit well within the packaging. A too-roomy package will feel downright wasteful. So will excessive bubble wrap and paper filler.

Having a shipping label present in the package is also important. If the website makes it easy to make a purchase, the package should offer a convenient way to return the product if they’re not happy.

8. Product

The product itself has to align with the expectations set by the website.

Take the example of a SaaS. You’ve built an awesome landing page and mobile app store page to promote it. It looks great, it loads fast, and it’s easy to get around. But if the SaaS itself is ugly, disorganized, slow, or otherwise just clunky, all of the work you did to market it will end up being just false advertising.

So, make sure the expectations set before and during purchase naturally carry over to the experience with the product.

9. Business Exterior

For brick-and-mortar companies, the business’s exterior matters just as much as what happens inside it.

The most obvious thing to focus on is the aesthetics of the building. Does it look attractive? Is it in a safe area? Is there clear signage around it? Is it easy to find?

But you also have to think about user experiences that take place outside of the building. For example, there’s now a rise in curbside pickup. There are tons of things that can affect how happy the customer is with the experience — like if the pickup area is hard to find, there are never enough spots or the associates who deliver the orders always seem to be in a foul mood.

The business’s exterior should always set a good impression for what takes place inside.

10. Business Interior

Here are some things to think about when it comes to “designing” business interiors for a good UX:

  • Decor;
  • Layout;
  • Signage;
  • Furnishings;
  • Product discoverability;
  • Availability (of products or people);
  • Quality of customer service;
  • Checkout process.

It doesn’t matter what the company does — whether it’s a large retailer like Walmart or your own freelance design business. If a business’s establishment doesn’t look good, operate flawlessly, or provide a good person-to-person experience, it’s going to be very hard to get people to return.

So, all those things you do to design a streamlined website journey should be applied to a bricks-and-mortar business’s interior.

Wrapping Up

Depending on the types of companies you build sites for, some of the channels and suggestions above might not be relevant. Hopefully, this has got you thinking about other ways you (and your clients) can extend the UX design and strategy from the website.

If you can maintain the high-quality user experience from channel to channel, your clients’ brands will get more business, grow their profitability, and see a rise in loyalty, too.

 

Featured image via Pexels.

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