Running a small business is a lot of work, often lonely or stressful work. When we are working on our marketing materials, it can be difficult to take the time and energy to do proper UX (user experience) in our designs.
The symptoms of poor UX include websites that don’t make sense to your customers, marketing materials that convince people to do one thing when you wanted them to do another, and so on.
Proper UX in Design
To really do UX, you have to take the time to see your materials as your potential customers would see them. While it seems simple, just ask a friend to look it over, it can be incredibly difficult to really listen to honest criticisms of how our designs just don’t work.
Good UX is minimalist in that you don’t want to add so much to your marketing materials that people get distracted. Good UX is functional in that you have to ensure every thing you ask someone to do can actually be done: do the phone numbers get answered? Do the links go to the right page? And so on.
Why Business Owners Fall Short
When I fall short on user experience, it is primarily because I don’t want to hear the incredulity that comes from marketing materials that don’t work. I spend hours working on a single page and then someone looks at me and says: Why did you do that? It’s discouraging to say the least.
Another reason I have fallen short in the past is the fact that I don’t know what I don’t know. If you are trying to design a website that integrates video, text and images, and interactive elements, you better have more than a basic understanding of the CMS you are working in, database management, and even the HTML and browser programming language that will be running your interactive elements. When we overstep our abilities and refuse to ask for help we end up with something that works, mostly. Kind of. Not really.
As business owners, our job is not to be the one who does it all: in marketing, it is impossible to be the one who does it all. Our job is to make sure that we are able to serve our customers and bring in the team members who can make sure that the job gets done.
A Call to Better User Experience
The start for better user experience is to have someone look over your marketing materials with a critical eye to find the points where customers will get lost, where your reader won’t know what to do next.
When small businesses take the time and capital to create great user experiences, we will be able to compete for our audiences attention and actions. What’s stopping you from doing better User Experience?
Leave me a comment below of one area you want to improve for your users and we’ll see if we can help each other learn how to improve, together.