How UX Changes my Perception of the Brand
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
--- Steve Jobs
With the development of the internet, web design and user interface transformed from initial code to a more responsive interaction between mouse and icon. 52% of online shoppers claim that quick page loading influences their loyalty to a site. Therefore, the user’s interface experience and the visual needs have changed revolutionarily. In addition, 74% of people are likely to return to a website if it is optimized for mobile. In today’s information age, UX has become an indispensable standard in evaluating effective marketing.
I will use Suja Juice’s website as an example to analyze its UX. Since it is a private business website, I am not able to get access to more data. I will focus on page analysis.
Overall
Suja Juice is a company which promotes healthy drink and a healthy lifestyle. It mainly sells cold-pressed juice, functional shot and kombucha. We can learn from the homepage that this website is mainly used for online sales of products, product introduction, company’s mission, important events and FAQs. The homepage can help consumers who are interested in this company to quickly understand the company’s purpose and, potentially, buy its products. It can also redirect consumers to the company’s different social media platforms. As a result, this homepage becomes the core interface of a company.
User Experience
Visibility is a significant component for users to understand what they can do. Hence, visibility can assist the user to predict their behaviors, in order to achieve simple interactive use. The location of the navigation bar can easily attract people’s attention. No matter which page the user is on, the navigation bar can help the users to jump to any page you want to visit. At the same time, its responsive button (when the mouse is over the button to create change) also helps people to quickly identify that this is a jump link rather than a text description. These functions have created a sense of order and direction for the website’s interface.
The second advantage of Suja Juice’s website is the memory load. Using a lot of text and long paragraphs will only make users give up on reading and close the webpage. Suja Juice uses few words to layout the webpage, which reduces the memory pressure of the viewers, and users can better remember the healthy concepts that the brand wants to convey. At the same time, it also helped visual design better convey the message, instead of using texts to cover pictures that could have caught users’ eye.
Although most of the page elements adapt well with the change to mobile devices, some pictures are too small or distorted. This made the users difficult to view and negatively affected the users’ experience.
The response speed of the webpage (on mobile devices) is not fast enough. Suja Juice only got a score of 65 on Google’s web page speed running test. I think it may be due to the increase of the web content, the storage is not large enough to run the contents smoothly. The company has not taken effective action to improve the response speed which is a crucial part to evaluate a website’s user experience.
Design
Even though the design of the website is relatively simple and has a lack of creativity by using WordPress, there are still many advantages. Warm colors are used as the main color themes, which represent the freshness of the fruits. The images of palm trees and people running on the beaches can also remind users of the sunny weather in the west, which increases people’s expectations for the products to be fresh and tasty. However, I found that there is a conflict between the text and the background color. For example, the font on the subpage is too thin, and the light grey text color in the nutritional content table (This Website offers you a solution). These make the users hard to read which creates barriers between the company and the consumers for sending the message.
Although the pictures reflect the vision of the company, there are also problems. Firstly, there is a lack of variety of pictures which made viewers, like me, feel bored while browsing. Secondly, the resolution of the pictures is not high enough. Low-resolution pictures remind me of scam websites, which will reduce the credibility of the brand. Lastly, the sizes of the pictures in the Blog category are not consistent, which makes the entire page look visually cluttered and viewers may be unwilling to read.
Content
There is a variety of content on the website, especially I found the different product information is very interesting and convincing, which made me feel that my body becomes refreshing after drinking Suja Juice. Moreover, there is a comment section below each product. This interactive design helps the product descriptions to be more convincing because these are subjective reviews from former customers. The Like function allows people to find more resonance.
Convert
The website introduces two ways to make purchases. The first is online purchases which ask the customers to click the “Add to Cart” icon or the links in the subpage so that the products are saved in the cart. They can easily go back to the cart to make purchases. The other option is the offline purchase. Customers can locate the nearest store by clicking Find store, a program that is built into the website so that the consumers can conveniently get the products from a physical store.
