Lean UX approach to digital marketing

In this article we talk about how we use lean UX to ensure digital marketing works.

• Introduction
• What processes are involved in lean UX?
• Release, review, optimise, release, repeat
• Continuous optimisation
• Lean UX packs

Introduction

Successful businesses prioritise continuous improvement; from increasing sales and better serving customers; to rebranding as their business, competition and market evolves.

In a digital world, no business can stand still and survive. A website should always remain the central information hub and a highly effective means for you to promote your business or services. Today’s market leaders abandoned the ‘launch it and leave it’ approach to website design; having gained early and advanced understanding of the prime importance of continuous resource optimisation. 

Even with this knowledge, many companies still view optimisation as painful. Small businesses in particular may find ongoing financial investment off-putting. A common misconception is that UX is complex and that enhancing a website will be time-consuming. 

There are complexities to the process, but there are also simple ways to use User Experience (UX) to achieve better results from existing digital strategies.

What processes are involved in lean UX?

Knowing your customers

Do you understand the needs of your site’s visitors? Once you have knowledge and understanding of what customers want to do you will have insight into how to catch their attention. This is where research can really pay off.

Task analysis

- What do your customers want? 
- What’s important to them? 
- Do you have what they need? 
- How do you reach them? 

Making a list of the highest priorities of your customers is a great way to identify the main objectives of your company. Think lean. A short list of 5-10 items will help you to identify, analyse and prioritise your top tasks. Examples of top tasks could be:

- To persuade users to buy a product
- To create a clear market advantage 
- To convince of a cost saving benefit

User testing

Many companies assume that user testing has to take a lot of time, money and effort. 

It doesn’t. 

Arguing against large-scale user testing, Jakob Nielsen asserts that the best results come from testing with only 5 users. Take a look at his findings - a textbook example of diminishing returns. His formula does hold best with comparable users; but even when testing multiple, disparate and distinct users, Nielsen still recommends small test groups of 3, as they provide overlapping observations and better outcomes than larger groups.

Journey Mapping & Wire-framing

Use feature definition, rapid prototyping and wireframes to map the ideal journey for users and customers. 

Defining essential features of an improved website function before any code is written will save time by formalising planning considerations and acting as an initial test by posing 2 questions... what is the customer’s identified need and how will it be met?

Prototyping ideas onto wireframes help everyone to see direction without distraction; before the investment of significant resources into an idea that might not even be what the user actually wants or needs. First, check that you are on the right track. 

We find that Figma is great for collaborative wire-framing. If you’re a less experienced digital designer, Balsamiq or Moqup may be preferable.

Effective Communication

Whether you’re creating a blog post or a whole new website, one of the first things to consider should be the words you use.

Creating accessible and engaging content, based on your users’ needs and your brand guidelines, starts with a title that is intriguing. A good title compels the reader to read on.

Once intrigued, you then have the opportunity to guide users along a user-friendly way.  

Remember:

1     Be concise. If it's too long winded, it will not be read.

2     Include sharp images. Grab users attention. Mix it up.

Design & Creation

Time can be saved by using design templates from sites like InVision.Templates are useful for small business owners who have no knowledge of coding. It’s important to think carefully about what features and tools you will require from the product, before making a commitment. Will the template offer the ability to customise and personalise in line with your brand; will it support e-commerce and secure payments; blogs, marketing and have SEO capability?

Deployment & Testing

A crucial element of Lean UX:  When you release; test your product or service; analyse the data and incorporate improvements in the next release. Tests should cover all departments that have contributed, plus the actual journey experience for real user groups. Further to the usual proof-reading, the creative team should check content and context for relevance and flow, form accuracy, image definition; font clarity. The technical team should check speed; transferability across platforms; URLs, meta data, analytics, traffic load and security. 

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Release, review, optimise, release, repeat

Many people ask the same question. Can you fix my website quickly? The simple answer is usually no. Only through a learning process can we improve.

Working with Higher Ground will improve your digital offering, but won’t solve all your problems the first time we work with you. Total perfection is an unrealistic aim within a continuous improvement and optimisation cycle.

With any website or campaign, the first iteration primarily delivers a goldmine of information. It’s actionable data: the key to a more successful second iteration. 

Continuous optimisation is a fundamental element of strategy development. We’ll show you how it’s done - and the time you put into developing your own analytical skills will pay for itself many times over.

Lean UX is continuous optimisation

User Experience design doesn't have to be a lengthy exercise involving digital architects, customer behaviour experts and specialist research teams. Any business can improve its online strategy by using Lean UX intelligence which diagnoses and treats existing problems in bite-sized chunks; aligned with agile methodology allowing for organic growth.

How to remain competitive

You want your business to do better online and sell more of your products or services?

That takes:

- Targeted Search Engine Marketing to attract the right customers
- Lean UX to reduce bounce rates and keep users in the sales funnel.

Clear and concise information about your company’s products or services will be necessary. With regard to recruitment, your company’s ethos will also be of particular relevance: as generic job boards become less effective due to the growth of social media channels and organisations’ online career sections, companies have to work smarter to attract and secure suitable candidates.

Without a clear UX strategy an online business is at risk of remaining static; converting fewer users to customers as it falls behind its sharper, smarter and leaner competitors.

Introducing Lean UX PaX

As a Manchester-based CRO agency, we’ve made and marketed websites for businesses of all kinds, from small start-ups to huge players like JCB Worldwide.

We’ve condensed all that experience into PAX, our unique suite of organic SEO and UX packs. Work with us and PAX will provide a framework - a tried-and-tested collaborative approach to improving your digital strategy.

SEO Fundamentals PaX

This is all the SEO essentials and research we do as a first step for our enterprise clients, stripped down to the core as an affordable offering for your business.

Our SEO Fundamentals PaX assesses your:

• Current site’s SEO hygiene 
• Basic keywords 
• Competitors’ activities
• Marketing channel performance
• Opportunities to improve

Our SEO Fundamentals PaX provides:

• A development task list of immediate changes (a.k.a. quick wins)
• Recommendations for further development work
• A keyword analysis report
• An overview of your market and your competitors 
• Light-touch strategic guidelines for your company
• A guide to lowering your bounce rate

- Read more about our Organic SEO Services here.

SEO Optimisation PaX

Advanced SEO, building on the research outputs from the SEO fundamentals PAX.

Our SEO Optimisation PaX:

• Assesses your analytics configuration
• Employs heat-mapping and tracking software 
• Analyses your website usage
• Researches your market’s keywords
• Researches your competitors’ keywords

Our SEO Optimisation PaX provides:

• A list of your worst-performing pages
• Further insights into lowering your bounce rate
• A comprehensive guide to how people use your website
• Tips on improving your organic-search strategy
• New keyword opportunities 
• Refined SEO, aligned with your business direction

UX Research PaX

From research to customer insights: identifying your customers and understanding  their challenges, perspectives and interests.

Our UX Research PaX:

• Reviews your current products and services
• Identifies your best customers and their objectives
• Identifies where they are - and how to connect with them
• Shows you how to meet their needs
• Identifies who aren’t your customers (source of the ‘white noise’ that complicates any analysis)

Read more about our User Experience Agency here.

UX Implementation PaX

Building on the earlier work… delivering everything it takes to make your strategy succeed!

Our UX Implementation PaX:

• Further reviews your current products and services
• Identifies potential weaknesses before they hurt sales or damage your brand
• Provides further insight into your best customers and their objectives
• Provides further insight into your wrong customers 
• Designs wireframes and new designs for your websites/applications
• Sets a task list and timeline for continuous improvement
• Sets goals and KPIs to measure success

Together, our PAX will help you get more from your digital strategy. And they won’t cost the earth.