No Single Point of View
This blog post aims to introduce to you how our digital agency fundamentally changed the way in which we approach digital projects, ensuring we avoid fatal design decisions. Here we give you just some examples of how we’ve implemented our research-led approach to evade major design disasters.
At Univers Labs, we have worked on over 300 digital projects since 2012. We initially started out by building designs given to us from branding agencies. However, we didn’t want to just be sent designs by agencies and told to build them like coding monkeys. We knew we could offer more to our clients and we were often brought in to help guide the project designs based on our expertise.
We initially built designs based on what the client thought their customers’ would want
However, we lacked the insight to make key decisions beyond technical, compatibility and possibilities of digital design. We were often told to build a new website because that’s what the client thought the user would want. But, these were only assumptions, in which the client had little or no real evidence to support them.
Our clients often wanted a new blog or detailed pages on products and services or new search functionality. We found that tens of thousands of pounds would be spent on a single feature and we were left wondering — is this a good idea?
We quickly learnt that understanding what the customer wanted became crucial to developing a successful project for our clients’
As Univers Labs grew as a company and began to establish its own direct clients, the more times we were asked to spend a large amount of the budget on a particular feature or page. The more we realised the importance of looking in depth at the client’s website with the use of UX analytics.
More often than not, we found that the real issue was getting users to the client’s web page before we even began looking at a design fault. So to put this into perspective, imagine 80% of the budgeted time for a project is being spent on a page design that receives less than 1% of the website’s page views.
Therefore, we believed that the right thing to do was to invest more time in ensuring the user reached the client’s web page first and foremost.
Roll on 4–5 years and we have developed a framework of research led design methodology that ensures that digital projects are much more focussed, personalised and successful.
The golden rule
Is to not design from one point of view. The fundamentals of our research led design method is to look at a project from four key perspectives:
- Business
- Users
- UX data
- Competitors
By researching into these four key areas, testing hypotheses, imagining design solutions and finding evidence to support them, we have ensured that every project we do is a success.
We avoid single point of view designs
It means that the focus of the design is not just based on just the aesthetics of the page and doesn’t just focus on one single page or a gnarly interactive feature. It means every bit of time we spend on a project in design, creative and development are focussed and well spent on improving the metrics and pushing the needle on the things that matter.
The benefit?
By doing research into these areas we can:
- Uncover hidden opportunities to improve designs.
- Give people the evidence to back up design ideas or to avoid mistakes.
- Gives the team a wider view of potential issues — more often than not the lowest hanging fruit is hidden.
- Begin to estimate the return on investment for changes to the design.
- Accurately place yourself amongst your competitors.
- The research in itself is useful to the whole business as it focuses on your users, your goals and competitors.
- The research becomes an endless source of inspiration for game-changing ideas.
Some examples
The rebuild
Earlier this year a client came to us and explained that they wanted a whole new website in just 4 weeks, as they were attending a big conference, where they would be receiving a lot of qualified website visits and they wanted to better explain themselves.
We did a quick investigation into their website and here are some of our findings:
Firstly, we looked into their google analytics data, user recordings and so on and found that the majority of the web pages they proposed for redesigning were barely ever visited.
This particular client wanted to obtain more leads through their website, but the only way to do this was to book a software demo online. We also noticed that the landing page had the calendar off screen, meaning most people bounced and didn’t see it.
The product which the client had was some great software but it was nowhere to be seen! In fact, the only place that a user could see an example of the product was hidden 3 minutes into a youtube video.
Fix#1 logical navigation — we determined simpler wording of navigation that increased page visits dramatically.
Issue #2 easy to chat — we postulated that most people may just want a chat or simple enquiry rather than book a demo — it’s a big ask — so we added a simple contact form and CTA to the homepage — this increased inbound leads massively!
Fix #3 show the product — We created a simple looping video of the product on the homepage with simple USP messaging. Hard to measure the success but it just makes sense that the first thing the user should see is the product — subsequently the home page bounce rate went from 80% to 20%.
These are just some of the problems we identified and fixed with smaller tweaks in the right areas which helped avoid a costly and risky full rebuild.
The Search
Later on in the year, a company from Germany reached out to Univers Labs to take over their website and improve online sales. The emphasis of their brief was to improve the search bar.
The brief, however, went into great detail on what they wanted the search bar to do — but we noticed it was mostly from how top search works such as Facebook or Google.
After an investigation, we found that most users wanted to search via product codes, this was supported by a further investigation which was backed up by interviews. From this, we determined that the search should make the experience of searching for codes much easier by enabling the user to start typing a code into the search bar and it comes up with suggestions, autocomplete etc.
Without this in-depth research, Univers Labs would have made a way of searching that only had one point of view and the way in which this would have been done, would not align with the user’s needs.
Conclusion
We have found that since employing these various elements into our research strategy, we have ensured each project we approach is far more personalised and much more successful in achieving the clients end goal, ensuring we avoid waste and keeping our clients and their users much happier. We also believe that this in-depth research gives our clients far more advanced insights into their users in general whilst giving stakeholders the confidence to explore previously shelved ideas in light of new evidence.
Over the next 12 months, we will be formalising our research led design method and sharing it with the world in the hope that it can make everyone’s project more successful!
