Blog Post Title Four

A good UX starts with the basic question: What’s the action I want users to take?

Whether it’s email, website, app, or landing page, use this goal as your north star. Let’s say ours is to sell a product.

Now that we’ve got our north star, the next step is understanding the journey that users take to get there. For our website, the journey might be: Home page —> Product page —> Buy.

Next up, content and design. The design should be simple, clean, and intuitive. Keep the “Shop now” buttons front and center and navigation clear. Any copy should reinforce the main goal.

Ask yourself, “Does this element lead users to my goal?"

Maybe you wrote a really nice story about your dog, but that won’t be useful since you’re selling landing gear for airplanes. Scrap it. Throw it away. Destroy it with a lightsaber. You know, just don’t include it.

So we’ve built a basic framework for our website. What if we want to add extra content that doesn’t necessarily “point” to the main action?

Totally relevant question. Thank you for asking. You can add content, like a blog, as long as it reinforces expertise in your product. This helps build your brand equity, showing you know what you’re talking about.

BUT

Make sure it has a secondary place in your website hierarchy. Don’t put “READ OUR BLOG” front and center on the home page. Put a link to it in the footer. Curious minds will wander down there.

And for every blog post you write, make sure it links to something else. Never write a blog post with a dead end. Make sure there’s a CTA or hyperlink to reinforce the behavior you want the user to take. That goes for every page. About us, Refund policy, Terms, Where to find us… these should all have a button to lead the user where you want them to go (in our case, the shopping page).

Another way to see it is that your website is a maze where all paths lead to shopping.

Let’s take a look at another example: Email.

The main purpose of most marketing emails is for customers to click through. So the email should be set up in a way that encourages that action. The SL and PH should encourage opens. The layout should be set up where the CTA button is near the top (“above the fold”). And the copy and visuals should be enticing enough for the user to want to click. All of these elements encourage the user to click through. Once they do that, the email has served its purpose.

There’s so much more to say about UX, but the main takeaways are:

- Establish the action you want users to take
- Understand the user journey
- Design your assets to encourage that action
- Make it simple, clean, and intuitive