This week our dev team went to Digital Shoreditch, a festival bringing together the creative, tech and entrepreneur community. On the ‘Make’ day, UX, wearables and virtual reality were centre stage. With a smorgasbord of sessions to choose from, Digital Designer, Sanj focused on the UX sessions.
UX, or user experience, involves a person’s behaviors, attitudes and emotions when interacting with a digital product such as a website, a web app or a mobile device. No longer is the focus on aesthetics and brand alone; websites have become so complex and feature-rich that, to be effective, they must have great user experience designs.
So Sanj’s top UX takeaways from ‘Make’ day at Digital Shoreditch were:
- B2B marketers are forever balancing product messages vs marketing messages, selling large and varied products and product versions and dealing with multiple decision makers. UX is overwhelmingly important in the B2B world.
- Poor UX is a poor brand experience. How your customer feels about you can be impacted if they have a frustrated or broken experience.
- UX needs to be at the heart of design. For agencies this means it needs to be considered right at the beginning when creative teams are testing the big idea.
- We are no longer designing to a single canvas. A user may use their iPad on the train to work, an HP laptop in the office and then take calls on their Blackberry. We need to account for all devices and screen sizes.
- User testing shouldn’t be overlooked. Agency and client testing isn’t a substitute for the value of insights gained from actual user testing.
- Make sure aesthetics do not blur the message. In a creative industry, this point can be difficult to digest.
- Oh, and finally – there are a lot more beards in Shoreditch than in Soho.
Sanj checks out a pair of augmented reality goggles.
Want to find out more about UX and B2B? Look out for Sanj’s upcoming blog post that will take a deep dive into why UX should be a priority in B2B, or give us a call to discuss further.
