Understanding Purpose-Driven Design

Written on 08 August, 2016 by James Keble-Johnston
Categories Blog

Have you ever visited an eCommerce or business service site and instantly felt at home?  Without struggle, you navigate through the pages, find what you are looking for, and get to a point of feeling like you have achieved what you came to do in the first place.

Purpose-driven design is becoming more important thanks to the fact that designing a well-structured website is not the challenge it used to be.  Engaging users and providing them intuitive layouts colours and worded functionality is all the difference between sites that convert, and those that see loss of traffic without success.

The first step is identifying who your ideal site visitor is and what you ideally want them to achieve by visiting your website.  This might be to call you, add something to a cart, stay on the site for a certain period of time, or even visit a certain number of pages throughout the duration of their visit.

 

Imagine you are a trade or service site and the top two things you wish your visitors to do is either call you or request a quote.  Placing the phone number in the top right, using a clear font size and colour is surprisingly still an easy component many sites overlook.  The second point of success (the request a quote), simply needs a clear submission form with the least number of fields required in a prominent position.  Ideally, we want the words ‘request a quote’ to be a button/action in the viewable area without scrolling.

Purpose-driven design can extend to cater for more complex sites such as those that need to educate the user on a specific product or service (across multiple pages), or to sign them up to a course or event.  Simple word selections–such as ‘purchase tickets ’versus ‘purchase a ticket’–can encourage higher sales with contrasting button colours to highlight this as the user’s next step.

Purpose-driven design is about profiling, understanding your site traffic and applying design standards that aren’t just ‘out of the box’.  Talk to your WME account manager today to see how we can apply our expertise for your site.

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