
UX, digital strategy and B2B marketing: Q&A with Jennifer Leigh Brown
User-centered design, UX research & user personas in Business-to-Business marketing with Godfrey’s Jennifer Leigh Brown
Identifying user needs should be the driving force behind business goals in digital marketing. As a UX digital marketing champion Jennifer Leigh Brown understands this:
“We have to be artists, researchers, data analysts, cognitive scientists, and strategists — but always advocates for the user.”
Jennifer is the Executive Planning Director of User Experience and Digital at Business-to-Business (B2B) marketing agency, Godfrey. As a UX marketing and digital strategist, she leads research-based strategies to deliver engaging digital customer experience and heads the team behind the B2B customer journey.
Her work revolves around user-centered principles, which ensure that her customers are at the heart of the marketing communications strategy at Godfrey.
In our Q&A, Justinmind talks to Jennifer about being a user advocate in the field of marketing, user research insights at Godfrey and crafting a valuable conversation with chatboxes.
Hi Jennifer! You’ve worked in UX testing, user experience, digital strategy and B2B and UX marketing — to name but a few of your areas of expertise. How would you describe the evolution of human factors research and digital design as it relates to marketing in the past 20 years?
Early in my marketing career, digital design meant designing websites, which were mostly static online brochures with laborious Flash intros. While Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think was already a classic, usability was second to aesthetics. Donald Norman was talking about user experience, but it wasn’t yet recognized by companies I worked with as a critical design element or differential that could influence brand perceptions and impact the bottom line.
In the past 20 years, what it means to be a designer in the field of marketing has evolved far beyond art, copy and code. With each advancement, there was a new design aspect to consider and expertise to master. Search engine optimization, social media integration, data aggregation, personalization, touch, voice and now AR, VR, and AI.
Every time technology evolves the rules change. Small screens? Design mobile first. Multi-screen, cross-channel, and responsive web design? Content first. No screen? Context first. My only rule that has never changed? Design for the user first.
What’s an average day like for you at Godfrey as UX & Digital Executive Planning Director?
Working at an agency means the work is very diverse. Our clients range from companies in the construction industry to manufacturing to chemicals; there is always something new to learn or explore even if it’s the same type of project. A “typical” day includes research, strategy, creativity and problem-solving. And lots of meetings. I could be executing a heuristic review, conducting an interview and observation session, or leading a requirements workshop. The outcome of the work might help build a stronger brand, inspire a stronger creative concept, or lead to a better user experience design. Basically, I take lots of complex information and synthesize it into a simple solution.
You’ve spoken about using personas to represent users across a number of processes, including marketing. With this in mind, how do you execute UX testing at Godfrey?
Godfrey is an insight-driven agency so whether a client needs help with a product launch or a mobile app, we begin with research to understand the target audiences, buying process, industry, and competitive marketplace. We adapt our methodology based on the objectives. For a company branding project, we might conduct surveys, personal interviews, and competitive messaging reviews.
The findings from this research guides the marketing communications strategy and creative concepts. But if the project is a website redesign project, I’m not going to learn how to improve usability through phone interviews! I’d use research methods to gain insight into users’ behaviors and mental models. For a website redesign for example, conducting interviews with on-screen observation, card sort studies, and prototype UX testing can help inform, validate, and improve new designs. Learn more about improving your user research with user personas here.
I am a huge proponent of data-driven design and include various research methods throughout the process whenever possible.
Read how data-driven prototyping can solve data visualization challenges in user research.
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Read the full interview on Justinmind’s blog
