Developing from the design perspective activates impactful messaging from a brand. As a global digital consultant, I work with a variety of clients to develop branding, graphic and web design that elevate brand messaging and overall design. In my experience, an effective brand vision is ideally portrayed from a visual design perspective from a design system created with several components in place. It is important to take a contextual approach with visual and narrative creative assets in mind. User personas, journeys, and pathways are then developed throughout the design phase with focus placed on the aesthetic and how it will reflect the brand.

My Process 

Leveraging research, creativity and strategy is key when evaluating company opportunities and brand design requirements. In a collaborative, iterative process, attention to color, voice and tonality are combined in developing a suite of creative assets for the client. Best-practices and proven solutions lead to a truly user-centered and designed focused experience. Driven by both skill and magic, my approach generates engagement at just the right moment by creating connections and authentic brand resonance.

Enhancing User Experience Through Design 

User experience and design process work together to create significant messaging. The user-centered perspective is the starting point in web design and brand development. Designing for the user creates experiences that are impactful and emotionally engaging. Brand interaction design is both an art and a science to create an end result that is impactful for the audience and brand itself.

Creating an Impactful Brand

Developing a brand begins with mapping the brand value propositions and experiential touch points, while identifying user personas and core objectives. Everything from documents, office supplies, and other forms of internal communication can be designed to unite your company. Having a consistent brand aesthetic is critical for visibility in the marketplace, building relationships, engagement and conversion.

Developing from Design Perspective 

I design marketing material for the brand audience and consumers. Often times there can be a disconnect between the brand and the audience, simply based on design integration. Creating these key design components builds brand authenticity and value for the audience when presenting a brand to the marketplace.

It is important for a brand to position itself as an expert in the products or services offered by developing validators through design. Creating these touch points create relationships with consumers, develop trust and impact conversion rates.

This process is all too common- Searching for a product or service, land on a website and then call or send an email to have a simple question answered and no response. This is not only frustrating but then a user will become impatient and move on to the next company. Conversations, transactions, and needs are met with a level of efficiency and consumers hold this standard to the way they consume products and utilize services. Chatbots hold more value now than ever and consumers want instant attention for their needs, and chatbots provide immediate satisfaction and answers.

“Chatbots can be useful in many aspects of the customer experience, including providing customer service, presenting product recommendations and engaging customers through targeted marketing campaigns. If a customer has an issue with a product, they can connect with a chatbot to explain the situation and the chatbot can input that information to provide a recommendation of how to fix the product.” –Forbes

The Breakdown of Chatbots: What Exactly Are They?

The use of chatbots vary from answering questions that a user might have when they arrive on a website, to guiding them to the right place to solve their problem. Bots help vet out questions that can easily be answered without the use of internal time, which assist free up resources in a company and eliminate customer service representative impact overall the bottom line.

“The global chatbot market is expected to reach USD 1.25 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 24.3%.” -Grand View Research, Inc.

Chatbot Versatility

There are many different ways a chatbot can function. From scheduling tasks, recommending options from movies to clothes and acting as a customer service expert. It is important to evaluate a brand needs in order to figure out what kind of chatbot will fit best for customer needs. This can be done by looking at traffic that comes to a website, and questions or most visited pages users are visiting.

Conversion rates and the bottom line is greatly impacted by implementing the right chatbox for a brand. Chatbots are not just a tool of the future, they are a critical tool for the current business model. Chatbots will continue to develop and adapt to the current marketplace to give the user the best overall experience.

In today’s tech environment, user experience design for nonprofits has become a top priority for high performing nonprofit websites. The list of innovative design trends is long, but if you are a nonprofit, you are most likely in a position that requires you to stretch your budget. Which innovations will bring you the best ROI?

Here are three to consider in the near future to remain relevant and effective in building support online.

Humanizing the Digital Experience

Increasingly, people are demanding that their digital devices interact with them as any other human being. Designers are integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to deliver on these expectations.

For profit organizations see this as a way to higher conversions and more sales. As a nonprofit, humanizing the user experience will help relate your message to the person’s emotions. The way a person feels about the interaction with your website can have a big influence on whether they become emotionally invested in your mission.

Website designers now focus on humanizing their website interactions with NLP in order to satisfy fundamental human needs, including transparency, trust, and security (all of which are also key considerations in responsibly building a nonprofit data culture). Recently on the Salesforce blog, Dr Vivienne Ming highlighted how some non-profits are using AI to accomplish this user experience design objective.

Using Voice-Activated Interface

Design trends are continuing to move away from clicks and taps to the domain of Voice-Activated Interfaces (VAI). There have been launches across an array of technologies: Alexa for Amazon, Cortana for Microsoft, OK Google for Google, and Siri for Apple, to name just a few. This impacts user experience design for nonprofits in the future.

The rapid advancement of voice-activated capabilities shows us that this technology will likely be a primary alternative or a complete replacement to the conventional graphic user interface. Gartner predicted that voice-activated interfaces would account for a 30 per cent increase in revenue for online businesses by 2018. It’s likely that interaction with nonprofit websites will also follow this trend. Imagine someone asking, “Alexa, how can I make a donation to help people hurt by Hurricane Florence?” Nonprofit websites equipped to handle VAI could see an influx of donations.

This technology will most likely live alongside graphic interfaces for the near future, and this is for three reasons. First, voice input may not always be an appropriate option. Privacy issues may demand graphic interface as an option. Second, technology does need some improvements in the conversational elements of the systems. Third, not all information is best conveyed by voice. Stories and data visualization, videos, and imagery are all highly compelling content that is invisible in voice interaction.

Implementing Smart User Experience Features

Today’s most successful apps and websites offer more than highly relevant information in an easy to navigate design. They offer an intuitive experience that minimizes friction and saves people time. People want a design that guides them quickly to their goal, and time-saving, clean designs help them accomplish those objectives. Clean design enables a person to take a minimum number of steps from the moment they visit a site or install an app up to the moment they take action.

Typically, this type of user experience design for nonprofits includes the following elements:

Guidance. This can come in a variety of forms such as direct suggestions to charming nudges, which are small rewards that can influence the person’s behaviour in the desired way.

Context. This is the specific information and features that deliver a superior experience by providing the most relevant data and features through each step of a person’s journey.

Clean navigation. Clean navigation begins with a well-designed architecture. An investment of your time on even just this one element will pay off well.

Be Aware of Options and Choose What You Can Use

As with many trends in technology today, some come and go quickly. Others remain popular and go on to become necessities. Even though you may not be able to adopt a wide array of new tools, by adding in the most relevant innovations, your message will stay on track to creating more conversions and leading to more supporters

Thinking about the future of your nonprofit website? Talk to me. I’ll be happy to talk ideas and let you know my ideas on what’s coming up. Email: tim@timadesanya.com