By Danny Groner
UX designers work hard to make the pages brighter and easier to navigate for everyone. But one thing that some companies may lose if they overlook the importance of their design team is the expertise that their UX team has in actually selling products or services. In short, they put on more than a pretty face.
Executives should learn to welcome the design team into discussions about campaigns, advertisements, and messaging, as the UX team can contribute thoughtful suggestions about how typical people react. They’re the ones at a company most directly in touch with the research and information that guides a team courting new business or keeping existing clients happy. Here are a few thoughts on how businesspeople and other marketers can take advantage of UX design principles.
One of the core principles of UX design is crafting a natural flow for users to discover their desired results by following a clear and simple path of interaction. Marketers would be wise to follow suit. Designers know that the best way to court and keep people is by telling a compelling and addictive story. Why not try to do the same with your marketing materials? Start with your desired user outcome (i.e. a form signup, login success, or some other interaction) and work your way back. How can you get someone to engage with the process long enough that they’ll stick around to hear your pitch, or to register to hear more about your company?
The first rule is that familiarity breeds comfort. When people see someone or something they recognize they’ll feel calmer and less skeptical. This especially holds true with people – we instinctively react with greater familiarity and comfort when there is a person involved – we’re also much better at information retention when a person is involved in the transmitting of the information. In visual storytelling, if the same person appears throughout your communication, it’s a much more consistent way to reinforce your messaging.
Start telling a more human story with your pitches. Shutterstock now offers a “Search by model” feature that makes it easy.
Here are five ways this feature will get your marketing team thinking more like designers:
1. Powerpoint presentations.
As you turn research and data into slides, you might consider brightening them up with some graphics. Having the same model appear on each slide, posing in different ways and calling attention to the relevant information, is a great way to keep people focused. Visual aids come in handy, but adding a familiar assistant will go that much further.
2. Travel brochures.
When booking tickets and making itineraries for our vacation getaways, it’s useful for us to see someone in the pictures enjoying the sun, nightlife, or other perks. We imagine ourselves in that spot, and it becomes an emotional experience from the get go; we grow to crave that time away even more. A smiling model appearing in different locations and hot spots will act as a personalized travel agent walking potential customers through the amenities on hand.
3. Educational worksheets.
If you’ve ever attended a daylong workshop or continuing ed course, it’s a reminder that sitting through classroom time can still be a drag, even as adults. Course instructors can borrow a lesson from elementary school teachers in this way and spice up their worksheets with a Mavis Beacon-like presence, courtesy of a stock model in the margins. It’ll help reinforce the material for more visually-oriented students and keep things interesting.
4. Article series.
Website editors occasionally report on the same subject at some length, and using a model to illustrate each article in the series is an effective way to demonstrate that they are meant to be tied, or read, together. For instance, if you were covering the ways that different social media platforms influence our decision-making, you could have the model at the top of each article demonstrate different emotions related to the various platforms.
5. Product how-to guides.
When unveiling a new product or feature, it’s often best to do so with an assistant to outline, explain, and showcase it at work. The narrative you hope to develop in the introduction is greatly enhanced – and this is particularly true online – by an assistant who appears on screen to show off the ins and outs of the system. Even if the terrain is new to them, if the graphics are compelling enough, people will flock to the next page in hopes of learning more.
Author:
Danny Groner is the outreach manager at Shutterstock.