User experience (UX) design and digital marketing go hand in hand to create a great product and sell it to customers. UX design puts the user in the center of the process and well-designed products are easier to market. The beauty of digital marketing is that when users love a product, they help drive sales.
What is User Experience Design?
UX design focuses on what users need, what they value, and what their abilities and limitations are. It stands at the intersection between the experiences of users and the desires of businesses. UX is made up of many interconnected disciplines like psychology, visual design, programming, interactive design, and accessibility and accommodation. UX is user-centered.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is the marketing of products or services through digital channels such as websites, social media platforms, blogs, and email. Digital marketers focus on making products discoverable on the internet, influencing customers to consider the product, making the sale, and retaining customers for future purchases.
UX Design and Digital Marketing Support Each Other
In UX design, the user is the focus, while in marketing the product is the focus. Digital marketing is the intersection between the two. When companies pay attention to the user experience, it makes their marketing more effective because they know what customers want instead of guessing. Over the last decade, companies that invested in UX design have shown strong performance in stock indexes like Standard and Poor’s.
Both UX design and digital marketing are research driven. User-centered design relies on the results of research that looks at users’ behavior and attitudes when they engage with the product. UX researchers use different types of tests during the design process to determine if the website or mobile app is easy and enjoyable to use and accomplishes what it was designed to do. Digital marketers also conduct research to determine how many people come to a website and how many people buy a product once they are there. They look at how customers get to the company site. Is it by searching for the product name or description, through an ad placed on a social media platform, or are customers connecting through email?
User experience research points to what the customers want and where the pain points are, while marketers sell products to customers. When both perspectives are represented, each makes the other’s job easier. An understanding of digital marketing helps create a good relationship with customers. For example, search engine optimized (SEO) keywords allow users to find the company’s website easier. When SEO is built into the design, that makes the marketer’s job easier. Satisfied customers on social media can become some of your best salespeople by posting about their experience with the product.
Digital Storytelling
Digital marketing is an important part of telling a brand’s story and UX design can support that. Plus, marketing is smoother with a well-designed product. In the entertainment industry, binge watching is a good example of using UX design to build customer engagement and keep them coming back. Giving users the option to watch episodes one after the other instead of waiting for them to air once a week gives the customers more control over their viewing experience.
UX design and digital marketing both rely on psychology, although they have different goals. By designing user-focused products, UX design is an important part of brand storytelling and marketing is smoother with a well-designed product. It is important to work toward balance between marketing and user experience. A product with a poor user experience is difficult to sell, but too much focus on marketing can ruin the user experience. The two must be kept in balance to ensure both quality and success.
Where Does Digital Marketing Fit Into the UX Design Process?
Some designers see the UX design process as having four steps and some see it as five, but all consider UX design as a collaborative, team process with steps that repeat as they are needed. The UX design process sets out to discover what users need or want to do, where problems come up for them, and how a product can be designed to help them meet their goals. Digital marketing can fit in in several places.
Empathy
The first stage of UX design is empathy. It is important to focus on the users and this is done through research in the form of surveys and interviews to find out what the experience of the user is like. What are they trying to do and where do they run into problems? What do they enjoy about the experience and what do they dislike? Observing and listening are important skills at the empathy stage of the process, and these observations can be valuable to marketers as well.
Definition
In the definition phase, the UX Designer uses the data collected through research to create a detailed description of the user experience. This phase involves creating user personas, scenarios, and journey maps to uncover patterns and trends, which can also help define the target audience for digital marketing.
Personas
Personas are descriptions of fictional users of a product. They are brief, only one or two pages, with a photo, vital statistics, a short bio, and other information relevant to the project. These descriptions are made up from a pool of answers from real users who participated in surveys and interviews. Because they are created early in the design process, personas can be a useful tool to keep the project on track.
Scenarios
Scenarios are the settings for the stories told about users and the way they use a website or app. Scenarios help with usability testing and ideation when coming up with new ideas for a design. Scenarios can be simple and task-focused or more complicated and include more detail.
Journey Maps
Journey maps incorporate personas and scenarios to look at how a user accomplishes particular goals. The scenario is broken down into phases and the steps the user takes within them. There are user journey maps and customer journey maps. While they are very similar, a user journey map is more common when a team is designing a new product such as a website, while a customer journey map can be used to study satisfaction with an existing product and help to increase sales.
Ideation
Once the patterns emerge, design enters the third phase in which team members generate ideas about how to solve problems and improve the experience. These ideas should be based on the results of the earlier research and the outcome of the definition phase. Including a marketing perspective in the ideation phase brings a different perspective to the process and lays the groundwork for future promotion.
Prototyping
A prototype is a simulation of a website or app that gives an idea of how the product will look and feel to users. The amount of detail in the prototypes is useful for looking at user behavior during the testing phase.
Testing
The next phase is testing the product or website to see if the user experience is what the team expected. Although the instruments are different, testing is also important to digital marketing. Depending upon the results, changes are made to the design to improve the user experience. Marketing attracts new users to the brand and increases engagement, which leads to future improvements in the user experience.
Where to Learn UX Design or Digital Marketing
If you would like to learn more about UX/UI design or digital marketing in order to switch to a new career, one of the best ways to do that is to sign up for classes. You can choose classes that meet in-person or online. Some people prefer to attend brick-and-mortar sessions when learning new information, but that isn’t always available. Live online classes have a similar set-up with a real-time, remote instructor who can answer questions and take control of your monitor—with permission—to show you how to do things. Training is part or full-time and available weekdays, weeknights, or weekends.
The best way to prepare for a career shift to a field like UX design or digital marketing is to enroll in a bootcamp or certificate program. These are intensive training courses that run from a few weeks to a few months and another plus of training is that you will leave class with a professional-quality portfolio that you can show to prospective employers.
Conclusion
It’s easy to learn UX design and start a new career. Check out Noble Desktop’s UX design classes and digital marketing classes. You can choose between in-person sessions in NYC at Noble’s location or sign up for live online UX design courses and attend from anywhere. Use Noble Desktop’s Classes Near Me to find other UX design bootcamps in your area.