Whether your content is displayed on a website, blog or an app, the importance of getting the User Experience Design (UX) correct is almost as important as the content itself. Your platform needs to speak to the user – their needs, their desires and their wants – instantly or you will lose them.

How do you do this?

Know your audience

Once you have decided on the problem you want to solve in this world or the need you wish to fill, decide on how you will do this and what value you will bring with your product. When this decision is made, before you even start to put together the roughest draft of what your product will look like, take a look at the people you wish to engage.

Build a profile of the users you expect to try your product and create fully fleshed personas. This exercise, which to some may seem airy-fairy or time wasting, is a crucial step to understanding how your platform, its content and interactive elements fit together to solve the user’s needs or wants.

Decide on the approximate demographic you are targeting, then delve deeper and look for the real consumers. Create your ideal customer. Then step into their shoes.

Figure out how a 24-year-old trainee software sales manager might want to learn about the latest hip coffee bar in his area. What platform would he use; how will he encourage his friends to join him to try out the latest cold brew pumpkin & kale frappe with a beer and sesame cookie? How can you make his life easier (other than telling him those flavour combinations are a terrible mistake) while engaging his desire for all things new?

Take the journey with this persona to really find out how they would like the product to look, feel and act. Then, being familiar with their motivations and how they like to interact with products, you are now ready to apply the newest trends in UX design – and make your product a dream come true for the 24-year-old trainee software sales managers with weird taste buds and a penchant for all things trendy.

UX trends

• In 2018, most of the newest mobile phones on the market come with borderless screens; maybe your content should too? If you are aiming for the mobile market, it makes sense to keep up with the latest trends in the technology and apply it your design.

• Video content is continuing to grow in social media circles, with live and pre-recorded content the norm for most products. Use short videos to demonstrate your product, and give updates or run competitions – in other words, use videos in as many ways as possible!

• The use of cards to build a website/app is a trend that continues to grow. The successful use of the card structure by sites such as Pinterest and Facebook successful has lit the way for others to follow. Stacking cards on your site allows you to store so much content in a user-friendly and visually pleasing manner, making it easy for the user to see as much or as little information as they wish.

By employing these techniques, putting the user’s needs first and keeping up with current trends, you can use your UX design to find your target audience – and sell them cold-brew pumpkin and kale frappes that they didn’t even know they wanted.