Imagine walking into a multinational telecommunications office for support, only to be greeted by fabricated hard-sell tactics. Their answers are scripted and rigid, with a dismissive and bored attitude. Now, that’s just a horrible way to treat people!
Products are designed for people; so shouldn’t businesses approach marketing as a human concept? Your website’s no exception. Consumers won’t view your website thinking about all the mechanical algorithms that go into online marketing or how many keywords you have in one sentence. They’re here to engage or get information.
If you take a look at the latest 2020 web design trends, or any of our web upgrade services, you’ll see that they’re engineered to cater to your website’s audiences.
People don’t want to interact with machines; people want to have personalised experiences and feel like there’s an actual person on the other side of the interaction. Because, ultimately, you’re not developing a website for yourself. You’re creating a human touchpoint for your customers.
“Because, ultimately, you’re not developing a website for yourself. You’re creating a human touchpoint for your customers.”
Humanising Websites Leads to More ROI
Humanising experiences on the web leads to greater ROI – for the simple reason that you get more people who want to experience what you have to offer, again and again.
And it’s not just about making it user-friendly. It’s about establishing a brand voice and personality behind your website that isn’t sterile or mechanical. As it is, many consumers encounter bad user experience with excessive market-ish pop ups throughout their entire navigation of certain websites.
If you keep triggering an ad every time you click on something, it’s insensitive and honestly just desperate of the website’s management team. Yet it’s so common!
If it’s not advertisement pop ups, it’s a newsletter subscription prompt. If it’s not a subscription prompt, it’s a pop up about cookie disclaimers. It just amounts to bad usability when you create so many obstacles for your users. Why wouldn’t you want them to be converted ASAP?
These elements should be designed so that they don’t interrupt user experience and leave the entire navigation of the website seamless. A great example is Facebook or YouTube, where notifications are visible enough to produce a subconscious but very tempting urge in users to check them out. Proof that they don’t need to be overly in your face or confrontational.
Even Google has been a long-time advocate of using organic content rather than cramming keywords into websites for SEO. Which websites get clicked on more often, have the most organic and helpful content, and provide a high usability rate? Those are the websites favoured by Google.
“Real content written with the purpose of benefitting the viewer is favoured by both Google and online consumers.”
Based on user behaviour, content that’s written with meaningful purpose comes across more natural and human. People are more inclined to click and read it rather than reject it as some run-of-the-mill spammy markety advertisement. When consumers are able to feel your intentions as an digiligent and well-meaning person, you build trust and authority.
As a result, more websites will want to create links back to your content, aka backlinking, which is ultimately one of the best things for publicising your website to a whole ton of potential viewers on search engines.
With users in mind, you’re focusing on providing a more personalised customer experience. When you look at big, high-profile brands, such as Starbucks and Apple, it’s so undeniably clear that customer experience and personalisation have replaced the old methods of advertising and marketing.
“Customer experience and personalisation have replaced the old methods of aggressive advertising and marketing.”
The results are evident – powerful branding with customer experience gives rise to more sales, more traffic, more organic inbound marketing, and more product led growth for business.
To Humanise Experience, We Need to Understand User Behaviour
Avoiding Retyping Email or Password for Confirmation
The majority of users tend to copy and paste their emails or password whenever the next field asks for a confirmation, especially mobile users. Doing this during account registration and eCommerce purchases not only compromises account usability, but it also affects the user’s relationship with the brand if something goes wrong with delivery.
Still, we can’t expect to change entire patterns of user behaviour overnight.
Many businesses such as Gmail have adopted a programming-based solution, which is to disable copying and pasting of details that need to be confirmed. To come up with a more human solution, we need to help customers understand the importance of confirmation.
When are people most worried about having provided accurate information? One instance is just before or during the purchase confirmation page of eCommerce websites.
We don’t close it immediately. Don’t we take the time to scrutinise and examine our information twice or more to make sure everything is in order? Some of us even go to our email inboxes to check for a confirmation or screenshot the page, just in case! The purchase confirmation page is probably the best place to remind customers to verify their login details, addresses, etc
Ignoring Legal Information
When was the last time you thoroughly read through a website’s privacy policy or terms of use? A trait of many websites is the lack of transparency in presenting sufficient information for users to make their own choices.
Legal information, for example, in the form of privacy policies or terms of use, always contain details that wouldn’t otherwise be known to users on the main webpages of the website. Not surprisingly, no one bothers to read them, but most agree to them anyway.
If a website you signed up with adds a clause by which you automatically give up the next 50 years of your paycheck to them, you would never know until it happens. By taking advantage of controlling what viewers see, it’s an obvious and abrupt lack of integrity, because users won’t come to know these details under normal circumstances.
Surfing the Internet on Mobile Devices
Getting your website to be mobile responsive opens your website up to mobile users who are interacting with your website on a personal basis.
They don’t think about how viewer-friendly your website is to everyone else’s mobile phones; they’re thinking about making their own purchases. They expect your website to deliver. They expect instantaneous support.
Having No Patience for Slow Websites
Increasing your website’s loading speed reduces the risk of losing customers. If your website’s going to take forever to load every time they navigate to a new page, you’re essentially blocking off your own viewership. It’s like having a conversation over a really bad, choppy phone reception.
It’s a big turn-off. Online consumers want responses to be natural, reflexive, and immediate.
Pursuing Meaningful, Empowering Content
When you think of web content, do you think of a never-ending series of ads nagging you to take up a service? Well, a forced writing style that strictly relies on business jargon and sales lingo feels like nothing more than an artificial script.
When it comes to marketing trends, younger generations of consumers and brands find more value in building a purpose rather than a plain canvas of endless self-promotion.
Websites need to have meaningful perspectives and to-the-point content that resonate with people, without overwhelming them. Customer-centric copywriting then comes into play as part of UX.
By conveying an authentic belief in the value and purpose of your product, you can empower your marketing strategies with emotions and human sincerity, delivering important branding messages to your customers. Content is indeed a powerful and provocative vehicle for customer experience.
Seeking Personalisation Within Consistency
Think YouTube, Spotify and social media platforms. Why are they so popular?
While they retain the professional user experience that defines their brand, every single unique user has a personalised space that is shaped by their preferences, likes and consumption patterns.
This is in turn utilised further by users as they interact with the website/apps, deepening their personal relationships with the brand and generating even more recommendations for them by association.
Want more tips and secrets on humanising web design?
Next time, we talk about strategies to influence physical experiences with web design. In the meantime, let us show you how we humanise the websites we design for our clients here.
Need a professional website fast or checking us out for your employer? Head over to our insane Package with our expertise bundled in one or check out our web upgrade services!
