Reports from market research firm Forrester show that a well-designed UX can increase a website’s conversion rate by up to 400 percent. With numbers like that, it’s no surprise that UX design is a perennial topic in marketing circles! But today, we’d like to go beyond these basic principles and review a newer way to look at the UX: Anticipatory design (AD).

Renowned author and UX expert Steve Krug is renowned for a reason: He knows what makes a good user experience. As we’ve discussed, a central tenet of the UX is creating simple web interfaces that are compelling, easy to understand, and most of all, intuitive. These are lofty goals to reach for those unfamiliar with the web development process, but for designers, it all begins in one place: The wireframe.

The customer experience is the most important element influencing your business’s success, and today’s customer experience centers around the company website. Conversion rates improve when a well-crafted user experience is aesthetically pleasing, intuitive, and improves customer loyalty, so it’s in your best interests to make sure UX design surpasses customer expectations.

The traditional website development process typically attempts to solve the problems of a company’s current site; whether it has outdated content or broken links, needs a refreshed look and feel, lacks the latest features and functionality, or because it’s no longer generating the right kind of leads for your business. The pages are developed independently based on the content that’s there and in isolation of other pages within the site.

The power of color in web design is well-established. Most of us know the basics of color theory already: Blue is soothing. Red is passionate. Orange is energetic. It bears repeating, but it’s not earth-shattering news.

What’s more interesting to us than color psychology is how you can leverage this psychology to drive on-site behavior. Can you use specific colors to influence action?

The most obvious target for this, of course, is your website’s CTA.

It can happen to anyone and happens more often than we like. You hire a web design company or developer to build a website with the loftiest of goals, only to be served up a web asset that’s nothing like you envisioned.

Oh, maybe there were some red flags along the way that you overlooked. Maybe you didn’t vet your developer or web design company carefully enough. Maybe they assured you that delays were a natural part of the process. Or maybe they promised you that even though each deliverable was different than you imagined, the end result would come together as your vision brought to life in perfect form.  

Regardless of how it happened, your new website doesn’t cut it. What happens now?

We’re long past the days of “stock photos” being shorthand for lazy design. These days, many high-quality stock libraries are produced with care and are vetted by teams of creative professionals to make sure the images are up to par.

There’s a lot of work that goes into stock photos, and website owners shouldn’t underestimate their potential.

If you’ve followed any of our previous blog posts, you may have noticed that we’re not big fans of clutter in web design. Websites rife with distracting text and imagery overwhelm users and steal attention away from the most important aspects.

Here are three essential considerations for an e-commerce website designed with concise imagery and messaging.

Your website’s primary goals are to provide information, interact with visitors, and, eventually, set them on the road to conversion. Of course, “conversion” can mean many different things: Providing an email address, downloading content, receiving a quote, or even purchasing a product outright.

The web has come a long way from the clunky gifs that would often fail to load on Geocities. CSS animation has been building a reputation for itself as a design industry darling for some time now and not without good reason. There are unique benefits to using CSS animation in your web design in regards to functionality, UX design, and style.