Rebranding without considering user experience (UX) is like giving a broken car a new coat of paint without addressing the mechanical issues. In this article we discuss Don’t Overlook UX Design When Rebranding.
If you invest in logos, color schemes, and an overall flashy new look without addressing how your brand functions — especially online — you may end up putting a lot of time and resources into a failed effort.
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The Importance of UX in Rebranding
There are many different reasons to rebrand. Your brand may no longer fit your market, you may be trying to keep up with industry trends, or you may even be trying to distance yourself from negative associations with your company’s past.
Regardless of the reason, rebranding requires an impressive amount of effort and strategy.
You must conduct extensive market research, identify your target audience’s current pain points and proclivities, develop a new or at least improved brand identity, and create a new marketing collateral — such as a logo and ads — that use your new style.
At the same time, you must maintain your research and development, sales, customer service, HR, supply chain, inventory, and all other aspects of your existing business as you phase in your company’s new look.
With so much going on, it’s easy for your customers’ experience to be lost in the mix.
Nevertheless, it’s absolutely essential that you keep the customer journey in mind as you go along.
The experience that each user has when they come in contact with your brand isn’t just important, it’s critical to your company’s success.
The return on investment (ROI) that you receive from a quality UX includes:
- Better word of mouth and customer recommendations.
- Improved customer retention and repeat customers.
- Enhanced loyalty, trust, and credibility as a brand.
- Improved authority within your industry.
In other words, if you maintain quality UX throughout your rebranding efforts, you’ll ultimately feel its benefits.
Not just in a metaphorical sense, either, but directly through an increase in your bottom line.
UX Priorities to Keep in Mind While Rebranding
While it’s good to understand that UX is an integral part of the rebranding process, that knowledge alone won’t be enough.
You must create a strategy as well so that you can plot out precisely what UX goals you want to meet.
Here are a few of the most important of those goals to keep in mind, especially when it comes to rebranding your company’s website or app.
Put Yourself in the User’s Shoes
Perhaps the most important principle that you should keep in mind when rebranding is the concept that you should always put yourself in the reader’s shoes while designing a website.
You can start this process by creating a buyer persona to better understand your target audience.
Once you have that customer perspective fleshed out, consider what your ideal audience member would experience if they arrived on your site looking for answers to their problems.
Be Thoughtful About Navigation
The layout of your website shouldn’t be clever or complex. It should be simple and straightforward. Menus should be easy to find and understand. Customers should be able to easily identify what it is they’re looking for and how they can navigate there.
Even seemingly obvious things, such as a shopping cart, can have a significant (often dreadful) effect on your site’s UX.
For instance, if a potential customer happily loads a product into their cart but then can’t find the button to cash out easily, or if they’re asked a dozen unnecessary questions during the payment process, they may give up, causing you to lose a sale in the process.
From your landing pages to your company blog, your storefront to your shopping cart, always provide consistent, easy-to-understand navigation to help your customers through their journey with aplomb.
Prioritize Loading Time
Loading time can be the bane of a website’s UX. According to SEO guru Neil Patel, if a page takes just four seconds to load, you will already have lost 25% of your website traffic before the content is displayed.
The point is, the time that it takes for your website to load can seriously impact the user experience. That’s why it’s important that you do everything you can to ensure that you’re achieving your optimum loading speed on a regular basis.
Research and Innovate
As you go about creating a high-quality experience for your website or app users, it’s a good idea to put a little research into your competition. Spend time analyzing competing companies’ websites and applications to see what parts of their design have been a hit with your shared audience.
Read reviews, as well, in order to see which features are especially lauded and which ones are particularly despised. This provides you with helpful material to work into your own website’s design.
In addition to finding inspiration from your competition, it’s worth taking some time to brainstorm any UX innovations that you might be able to provide as unique features on your own site.
Innovation is already an important part of the branding process, and using it to improve your UX as well is an easy win-win.
You can get your existing customers involved in this process, too, by asking for feedback and ideas for what they’d like to see or what would have made their past experiences better.
Analyze and Adapt
Finally, always take the time to set up analytics tools to help you track how well your website is functioning. Simple, free tools like Google Analytics provide an excellent base of information, such as how much traffic your site is getting and where that traffic is coming from.
If you want to get serious about your analytics, you can also try using a tool like Crazy Egg, which enables you to create heat maps to see where visitors are moving on each page.
This can help you decide where to place calls to action and how to better lead your audience through the customer journey.
As you gather information, you can use it to adjust and adapt your new UX in order to better meet your customer’s needs.
Integrating UX into the Rebranding Process
User experience is part and parcel of a successful website — and as such, it should be deeply integrated into your rebranding efforts. If you don’t do this, you may end up with a website that is all flash and has no substance — or even worse, frustrating substance.
Instead, take the time to come up with a UX strategy that you can actively implement as you execute the rebranding process.
By knitting the concepts of rebranding and user experience together into one process, you’ll be able to maneuver your company into the best position possible when the dust settles and your rebrand is complete.
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