With marketers increasingly following their customers online, user-experience designers and marketers find themselves going through some growing pains on their way towards partnering to create great sites. It’s happening in advertising agencies everywhere and it stands to reason that it would take a bit of doing to combine these very different worlds.
Marketers come from the world of persuasion and influencing customers that products/experiences are relevant to them and worth purchasing/adopting. To this goal, modern marketers bring incredible sophistication in research, strategy, measurement, and message-making that comes from a century of practice.
The Web is More Complex Than Other Advertising Mediums
However, the Web is fundamentally more complex than all advertising mediums ever before, and hence the IT-world has gotten mixed up with the marketers. Creating sites is much more like software engineering than traditional advertising in two main ways.
The Web empowers:
- huge volumes of information, and
- real-time interactions with customers.
Before the Web, advertisers were limited to a one-way message that could fit on a billboard, in a TV commercial, or at most, in a brochure or booklet. Advertising was about getting a customer’s attention and quickly selling an idea in the limited space and time. Hence, messaging has always been such a focus for marketers .
However, when you have a library framework combined with a software application platform , there is a lot more that marketers can do suddenly, but that power brings its own challenges. Web users tend to actively seek out information and actively “request” pages rather than to accept messages flowed at them. While entertainment is still a big goal of web-surfing, lots of users have other specific tasks they are trying to achieve online, and thus, their state-of-mind is dramatically different from someone who is reading a magazine or watching TV. It turns out that the Web is a very dynamic place – it’s user-directed; it contains machines, and it is information-centric.
With Great Power Comes Big Challenges
The problem with all of this new horsepower that the Web offers is that it is so powerful and there are so many options and so many decisions about how to use a site. In the past, advertisers were forced to be minimalists and create universal messaging for entire segments. Now, the Web lets them customize information and messages to more precise segments and even to individuals. Additionally, the Web lets marketers deliver greater depth of information as well.
Customers behave differently on the Web too. Since visitors choose which sites they use or ignore more than they do with other advertising, we need to understand our target audience even more as individuals and users in order to design interactive website experiences that people will accept. We have to figure out how to prioritize information and how organize it to enable customers to navigate the new volume of information we have for them. In addition, we need to design the site experience within the context of what our user experienced before they arrived and after they depart, as well as within the context of the wider marketing campaign.
UX Designers Are Essentially Product Engineers
This is where UX designers get called in to help. UX designers bring expertise in content strategy and interaction design and thus, tend to have close affinities with the world of software engineering and library science. They are accustomed to building software and libraries online, creating products and content structures that must stand up to the test of actual users.
Thus, marketers and UX designers approach online marketing in two fundamentally different ways. Marketers are focused on selling and messaging, while UX designers are focused on designing products. So viewing it from that perspective, it is understandable that there is a natural conflict between the desire to persuade and influence versus the desire to create streamlined relevant experiences. But that doesn’t mean the two approaches can’t learn from each other and contribute to each other; it just means it will take time, some careful thought, and mutual openness.
Comments are closed.