Have you ever gone onto a website and bounced right back out because it looked chaotic? How about visiting a website with broken links or videos that take forever to load? If the answer is yes to these and other frustrating onsite elements, you’ve had a bad user experience.
One bad user experience (UX) is enough to put you off for life. Your dismal experience might be sufficient motivation to warn your friends or online community not to bother with the business at all.
Now imagine that the website belongs to your company.
You need to find a reputable UX designer ASAP to turn your website around and drastically improve your user interface to guide visitors through the entire user journey.
This article is going to look at the role user experience plays in your website’s success in the public sector and how UX design affects your user’s experience.
What is User Experience (UX)?
To wrap it up in a little nutshell, UX is how users feel when they visit your website. Or, how your website makes them feel.
Your site should be intuitive and easy to navigate, information should never be more than a couple of clicks away from the home page, and it should help users meet their needs to give them a competitive advantage in public procurement.
However, this is easier said than done. Fortunately, we’ve got some info that can help you make your site’s UX design a joy for contracting authorities and public sector buyers.
Not Sure? Ask a friend
If you’re not entirely sure how to determine which aspects of your site need a UX and user interface overhaul, consider asking a neutral friend to navigate your site. They can provide valuable user feedback on the positive and negative aspects of your user interface design.
You have two options when it comes to setting up the usability tests.
1) You can give your friend a set of questions about their experience of the human-computer interaction to answer as they go through your site. The downside is that focus attention on certain features, which they’ll look at differently from someone going into user testing blind.
2) You can keep your questions to yourself and give your friend the freedom to continue with their usability testing as they see fit.
If you want a genuinely objective test of interface design, option two is the better bet.
Key questions about your site’s interaction design.
1) Is the menu easy to use?
2) Does the menu immediately link to pages of interest?
3) Do pages load quickly?
4) Is the content easy to read and understand?
5) Is the call-to-action clear and consistent across the site?
6) Does the topmost content on each page tell users exactly what to expect?
- Does the page deliver?
7) Based on UX design usability alone, would they come back to the site or recommend the site to their friends?
8) What is their overall impression of the site’s user interface?
What User Experience Encompasses?
While each website has unique interactive systems to suit its niche, some user interface features are common to all UX designs. Let’s look.
UX designs must be:
Easy to use. You’re looking for text that is easy to read – the content flows, but the size and type of visual elements, like the font, are also important.
UX design must be intuitive; the user flows naturally down a path to their (and your) end goal. You don’t want to hide essential content several clicks away from the home page or send your end user down a maze before they find what they’re looking for.
Succinct. It doesn’t matter how well you know your subject. It doesn’t matter how much you want to educate people about your subject. Keep it short. Keep it sweet. Keep it largely jargon-free.
Users are wary of great big blocks of text, so if you do have a lot to say, maintain a good user experience by breaking it up with images, photos, simple graphs, and mini-infographics.
Stay on topic and avoid meandering like a lazy Sunday river.
Helpful. Public sector users don’t have time to waste on fluff. Good UX designers deliver the information exactly where users expect to see it. Remember UX designers can only do so much, it’s up to you to ensure the information is accurate, relevant, and reliable.
Helpful features to facilitate the user experience include:
- Interactive elements like search tools that enable the end user to find specific data.
- Contact details, including an onsite contact form for users to get in touch there and then.
- Downloadable (gated) documents, files, presentations, and videos.
- User accounts to access more detailed information, like case studies and whitepapers.
- Access to company-related information, including staff details (their qualifications and areas of specialisation) and experience.
Consistent. Consistency in the design process is important for brand recognition. The user interface must be neat and ordered.
Essentially, user interface designers must use the same colours, patterns, buttons, and tabs across your website and mobile apps (if you have any). Keep the format going on social media platforms, like LinkedIn, and on “extra” content, like webinars, presentations, print media, and banners for expos and conferences.
Consistency also applies to universal user experience design rules, for example, refresh, menu, download, search, and home buttons all have the same symbols.
Appealing. You can nail every feature that makes your website a joy for users to visit, but if it doesn’t appeal aesthetically, you’re going to have a high bounce rate and your user engagement and design ideas will go to waste.
All sorts of psychology go into developing a smashing user experience. For example, where your UX designer puts the menu (usually on the top right), visual hierarchy (what users see/read/absorb first), spacing, and colour choice (blue for trust, stability, confidence, and calm) all impact the user experience.
Make the UX design process work for you.
How UX Design Skills Can Drive Your Public Sector Marketing Strategy
Content marketing is an essential component of your procurement strategy. Content is used across several media channels, including digital media, so you must ensure that the UX design encompasses the features above.
The visual design must be appealing, it must be easy to read and easy to access, as well as clear and consistent. It takes skill to meet all the user interface requirements when designing websites. It takes more skill to incorporate SEO (search engine optimisation) elements that meet Google’s requirements, your requirements, and the requirements for a good user experience.
It’s a good idea to consult a marketing agency that understands the value of the UX design process and can develop tailored solutions to meet everyone’s requirements.
UX design benefits that drive online content marketing
User experience has several benefits for online public procurement marketing strategies. We’ll look at some below.
UX design supports SEO
SEO-optimised content, combined with good user experience does two things.
1) Ensures a pleasant user experience for visitors to your website. Contracting authorities find the information they want quickly and easily, and the high-quality content answers all their questions about your products, services, or works.
2) Ensures the site is visible to search engines. Of course, the aim is to be more than visible. The aim is to be as close to the top of search engine results as possible. The number of satisfied users who spend time navigating your site helps in this regard. (Google actually prioritises sites with good UX design elements.)
First impressions last
It takes seven seconds to form an impression. It’s essential to use every element of UX design to ensure your site’s visitors find more and more reasons to extend their stay. For example, intuitive UX design leads procurement authorities seamlessly to the information they want.
A good first impression does more than make users feel good about their visit. Procurement authorities who find your site helpful are likely to recommend your business to their network. In the public sector, this increases your exposure, brings your expertise to the attention of other buyers, and helps you stand out from other suppliers in the pool.
It underscores the importance of having a good user experience designer managing the design process.
The customer comes first
A prevailing trend in retail (of any kind) is focused attention on customers; it’s a user-centred design approach. UX design provides an opportunity to test the degree of customer-centeredness in your marketing strategy. For example, you can swap images on product pages to see if it improves customer retention. Or you could rephrase titles on product pages to see if that makes a difference to your target users.
Essentially, you’re personalising your site so it better meets your customers’ needs.
Know Your Audience
The most important element in user-centred design is your target audience. You can’t personalise your UX design unless you know who your target users are. After all, an audience in public procurement is very different from an audience that loves Anime.
The best way to come to grips with your audience is to create a persona. A persona is born from research, interaction with real users, and empathy as you learn about their emotions, behaviour, and motivation.
Information gleaned should include age, gender, education, income, job title (important when you’re targeting key decision-makers in government offices), hobbies, goals, challenges, and pain points (also important information in the public sector when it comes to crafting tender responses).
It’s all put together to create the ideal customer who can help you predict behaviour at certain touch points. In this way, you can anticipate actions and personalise your website according to the persona’s needs and preferences.
Your knowledge and experience count
However, you don’t need a fully formed persona to start developing your user experience design.
You’ve got the feedback from your neutral friend to work with and you’ve got your own knowledge to tap into. And, some things don’t need a genius to figure out.
For instance, you’re targeting the public sector, which isn’t known for its pzazz. So immediately you can cast bright colours, comic sans font, and slapstick humour out the window.
That’s not to say that the public sector is grey and dry and boring. Far from it.
Look into the central or local government departments in your industry. Study their websites (almost all councils have a website these days) so you learn how to speak their language (tone and voice) and understand their niche needs.
For example, you might target government projects that focus on renewable energy, more specifically, solar water heating. The tone and voice can be more relaxed and informal than, say, an NHS contract for diagnostic equipment for cancer, specifically mammography.
UX designers adapt their approach to visual design and other important elements, like the end user’s interaction with the interface, according to the nature of the contract.
User Experience Affects Site Performance; So Do B2G Marketing Agencies
Empathetic UX designers work hard to create happier users. They ensure the website is a pleasure to use, which motivates satisfied customers to spread the word. This is invaluable when you’re competing in public sector procurement. But you need bigger-picture thinking to really capitalise on good UX design skills.
Marketing creates a holistic (bigger) picture of your company or organisation and is exactly what you need to capture your share of the public sector. A digital marketing agency might be able to help you achieve some marketing goals, but if you want to make your mark in government procurement, you need a B2G marketing specialist who embraces UX principles, like visual style and usability.
The B2G market is different to the private sector. Marketers need unique insight into factors that don’t apply to private organisations, like compliance with strict regulations on a local, national, and global level. Cadence Marketing specialises in public sector marketing, boasting decades of experience that give suppliers a good hold on the government sector.
Contact Cadence Marketing to book a free consultation to find out how we can use our specialist services to carve out a niche for your business.
