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Great UX is more than just a great interface. Investing in user experience results in happier customers, quicker conversions and increased innovation.

Great UX is more than just a great interface. Investing in user experience results in happier customers, quicker conversions and increased innovation.t a great interface. Investing in user experience results in happier customers, quicker conversions and increased innovation.

How UX can add value to your business and your customers

User experience (UX) is an expansive field that impacts every business in the world.

That may sound dramatic, but every business has users of some kind.

Customers, clients, subscribers, readers, and even your team of writers, editors, and content managers experience how your website works so it’s important to get it right.

Every interaction people have with your business impacts their user experience.

Invest in your user experience and you’re investing in the success of your business. Research by Forrester found that every dollar invested in UX returned $100. That’s a staggering 9,900% return on investment.

So, how can UX add value to your business and your customers?

In this article, I’ll be sharing what a UX agency does and how we, as a UX agency, drive growth for our clients.

We are a UX agency that specialises in Jamstack

Here at Skyward Digital, we are a UX agency that specialises in Jamstack.

As a UX agency, everything we do is focused on making your user experience more effective in order to drive the online growth of your business. The way we do this depends exactly on what areas of your UX need improvement.

It means each and every project we work on is unique — which is pretty awesome!

Take a look at how we improved UX to help this SaaS client increase signups by 61% and win $150K more investment in their product.

If you’re still wondering what on earth a UX agency is, then let me help:

UX design focuses on the way users interact with your products and services. In UX design, we want to make sure your users have the best possible experience.

When it comes to user experience, we like to get deep.

UX design carefully balances aspects of psychology, design, development and research — all of which let us really analyse your performance and make informed decisions to improve the user experience.

Essentially, we get into the heads of your customers and make sure your design is created with them in mind.

Because user experience is key to success.

UX runs through everything you do as a brand. From your website build and navigation to customer service, user experience needs to be a priority throughout your business.

Every interaction your user has with your business has the opportunity to make or break your relationship with them.

If your website has bad user experience, it’s going to cause friction and frustration. Website visitors will lose trust in your brand and will most likely jump ship and take their custom elsewhere. Bad UX is basically like handing your customers straight over to your competitors.

Good UX, however, lets your customers easily interact with your site and find what they are looking for. It removes friction from the process so they can easily achieve what they set out to do.

It’s simple. Good UX = happier users. And happier users = better performance.

I recently tried buying some running shoes from an online retailer. I browsed their category pages and stumbled upon what looked like the perfect trainers. So, I clicked on the image to go to the product page. Only, when I got to the product page, the shoes were out of stock in every single size.

So, I clicked on another product. And guess what? They were also out of stock.

Eventually, I gave up and took my money elsewhere. I bought a pair of shoes from another brand.

A simple solution to help reduce my frustrations would be to have added a little “out of stock” notification to the category page so I knew what I could buy without having to click in and out of every product. If I still wanted to buy the out of stock runners, a simple email signup to let me know when they were back in stock would have been the perfect way to keep me as a happy customer. With UX, even the small changes can make a huge difference on your website.

But nope. This retailer didn’t do either of these things.

Investing in user experience could have prevented this brand from losing a customer.

If you want to add greater value to your business for your team and your customers, you need to prioritise user experience.

Whether your business is one-day old or 100-years old, user experience should always be a top priority. Yet, as your business grows and the need to develop new features expands, UX can fall down that list of priorities.

But it’s time to put UX back to the top of your priority list and here are the reasons why.

Investing in UX adds value to your business through:

When every step of your business has been created with your users in mind, the outcome is simple. Your users will be happier. And because they’re happier, they’ll be more likely to convert (and quicker too)!

Investing in UX means the user journey is an enjoyable route from A to B — whatever B may look like for that particular user. There’s no frustrating dead-ends, messy u-turns or confusing roundabouts. It’s just a friction-free experience as they navigate their way around your site, and your wider business.

Innovation is key to the long-term success of any business. Even the biggest and best of businesses can’t just rest on their laurels and expect the sales to keep rolling in. You’ve got to stay ahead of the game. UX let’s you do just that. With UX, you can generate a strong feedback loop between what your team is working on and what your users actually want and need. This real-time feedback is invaluable for making sure your business is always on step ahead.

Along with innovation, UX also brings consistency. Your users will grow to recognise your brand for its consistent style and functionality. As UX helps strengthen your brand processes and workflows, it brings a familiar consistency that your users will trust and love.

Investing in user experience will mean happier website visitors and, in turn, more sales.

But, it also impacts users on the other side of your business. I’m talking about the editors, content managers, developers… and everyone else who helps keep your website up and running.

When you invest in UX, your content managers and editors can easily and quickly make changes to your website content. This frees up development resources, is less disruptive when making large-scale changes, and can positively impact SEO. Not to mention, it reduces friction and frustration within your team.

By prioritising UX on the backend of your website, your developers will be able to easily make changes to code and test those changes. Better yet, there will be fewer chances of things breaking due to poor UX and clunky, outdated systems. It’ll also be easier to onboard new team members when the website is ready to grow thanks to a shallower learning curve and easier-to-use systems.

User experience applies to every aspect of your business.

How we use UX to drive growth for our clients

As a UX agency, everything we do is done with user experience in mind. And I mean everything.

Whatever your business plans might be, we are on hand to help you achieve new heights of business success.

Your project plan is crucial to your survival. It sounds drastic, I know. But I’m being serious.

Without a strategic project plan in place, you run the risk of wasting time and money while building a website that yields poor results and frustrates customers.

At Skyward Digital, we can optimise your project plan and improve your business strategy.

Combining our expertise in digital marketing, user experience and Jamstack technologies, we’ll help you understand how to take advantage of your market and set your business up for success.

An optimised project plan will save your business time and money by reducing bottlenecks in the process and improving the workflow. It can also minimise friction and reduce the number of rollbacks by creating a simplified workflow that provides a clear changelog and scope of work.

Understanding the roadblocks on your website is key for improving UX and, in turn, making sure your website visitors convert.

As UX and Jamstack specialists, we know how to find the things that are holding you back from achieving online success.

We can conduct a website audit that helps you identify any problems with your site and provide a clear path to solving them. We’ll even tell you the priority order of which solutions will have the biggest impact on your website performance.

This website audit will then let you really understand and improve your:

All in all, your website audit helps you fix core issues on your website — issues that you may not even be aware of.

The end result? Happier users, of course!

Regardless of what you offer, your website needs strong content.

The content on your website helps you connect with new audiences, demonstrate the value of your brand and build stronger connections with existing customers.

Your content strategy also feeds into UX by appealing to, and helping, your audience at various stages of their buying journey.

We will build an actionable content strategy that outlines the on-site content you need to publish in order to reach your target audience.

increase audience engagement and loyalty;

showcase the benefits of your brand, not just the features;

widen your reach by distributing content across various platforms;

Increase conversions by creating goal-driven content;

and strengthen connections with your target audience.

The benefits of an optimised content strategy are undeniable.

Creating designs that put your users first means you can ensure your customers have the best experience from the very first interaction. Making sure your website is both functional and pretty, we’ll develop a beautiful UI (user interface) that makes your brand really stand out.

When it comes to UX/UI design, everything we do is led by data from real users. We’ll then use this data and user insights to create designs based on your users needs and behaviours.

We’re also big on making sure your website is usable for your team. That’s why we use Figma to make sure your website is easy to use and edit. Our dynamic designs also feature reusable components so you can easily create new layouts.

After all, websites that look great and work amazingly are websites that have users leaving happy and coming back for more.

Jamstack is the new way of building websites that are future-proof, flexible and geared towards success.

Outdated websites can be harmful to your business's bottom line, but when is the right time to replace your website 

When should you rebuild your website?

It doesn't matter if you're a billion-dollar business, small local company, or solo freelancer; an eCommerce company, SaaS, nonprofit, or something else. Your website is where your customers start their purchase journey, so it's essential to get it right.

But your business isn't static, it changes and grows over time, and that means you'll be changing your website too. Making content updates, adding blog posts, and improving functionality. Your website has to work effectively for everyone, from your customers to your team.

But the more time and money you've spent on your website, the less likely you are to want to start over.

Technologies move forward at an astounding rate, and as your business grows, you've got to be ready to take advantage of that. You can't afford to get left behind.

Your website will probably need a rebuild if it's failing in one of these areas:

if your users are getting lost and not converting as expected

if your editors can't add or update content without help

if your developers take too long to make code changes

Your marketing team is constantly releasing new content and making updates to older content (or they should be), and it's essential to make their job as straightforward as possible. Whether you're creating campaigns for different holidays or are regularly writing blogs for SEO impact, you need an excellent editing experience.

As your site grows, so does your brand. Over time you will find that your brand messaging has changed, especially when considering old content that hasn't been updated in years.

It may not just be content that you feel you've outgrown, but your entire brand image. It's only natural for your design to reflect your values.

When this happens, you'll find that your website will need a significant change. That will probably mean a rebuild.

As your company grows, you may also find that your audience changes. Maybe you're niching and becoming more targeted, creating products for different audiences to expand your reach, or changing directions entirely.

When this happens, you'll find that you'll need to adapt your brand to match your new goals. This could mean a content rewrite, rebranding, or a total rebuild.

Whatever your issue, a change in audience is a common problem that often prompts a redesign. Now you need to update your content and maybe even branding to focus on your new target audience.

As your company grows and your strategy matures, you'll need to edit content more. That means a team of copywriters and editors who can quickly get content out on the website.

If your team is struggling to add new products, write blog posts or make changes to existing content on your website without the help of developers, it's likely your Content Management System (CMS) is holding you back.

It's essential to choose the best CMS for your needs. There are many great options to choose from, but you need to pick one that works with your specific workflow.

Rebuilding your website with a specialized CMS will significantly improve your team's workflow, saving time when adding and updating content.

Your users are the center of your business, so you have to serve their needs. How you do that will depend on your customers, your target market, and how you want to be perceived. Your customers' experience will always be a core part of your online strategy, so it's necessary to get it right.

Your customer's experience starts with your website. So if your find that most of your customers ignore your website or are trying to use your website but can't reach their goals, it's time to look at what you could do to fix that.

A redesign of your customer-facing website will often provide a fresh look and feel, enticing customers to engage more with your website. It'd be also an excellent opportunity to research what your users are primarily trying to do and help provide a better solution.

We've all run into websites that load slowly. We've also all heard that every second your website takes to load loses 7% of your users. Slow loading is frustrating, and your users know it best, so it's essential to make sure your entire website loads as quickly as possible.

Suppose you have a global business targeting many different countries. Then it's even more important to achieve higher speeds as some countries still rely on 3G or don't have a dedicated network built for fast internet.

There are many reasons why performance bottlenecks can build up, but if your website is slow, you need to fix it, or your customers will go somewhere else.

Our preferred solution is to work with the Jamstack, which removes many of the performance bottlenecks you might usually run into. Whatever approach best suits your business, be sure to prioritize the performance of your website.

Yes, I know it's 2021, so you'd be forgiven for thinking that every website worked on mobile. But you might (or might not) be surprised to hear that there are still many websites that don't work on mobile!

Mobile is more important than ever. With more people owning mobile phones than desktop computers and around 60% of website traffic coming from phones, you have to pay attention to your mobile visitors.

Google knows the importance of mobile too. Last year Google switched to mobile-first search analysis, which means that if your site isn't responsive, you won't get nearly as much search traffic (even when searching on desktop).

Changing your site to focus on mobile users is essential for a competitive website and making your customers much happier.

If you want to make changes to your website but can't, development complexity is probably the culprit preventing you from doing so.

Development is expensive and, when set up the wrong way, can be a massive bottleneck for making even simple changes, making critical tasks fall behind, and your whole schedule slows down.

Revisiting your development approach and making improvements to simplify builds for your developers can relieve bottlenecks and speed up development time make growing your website traffic far easier.

One of the biggest things holding back technological growth in many companies is hanging on to outdated tech. This doesn't necessarily mean that old technology is wrong, but change happens fast, and it's easy to fall behind, missing out on all the benefits brought to you by modern web standards.

In the last 5 years, we've seen the rise of Single Page Applications, which have evolved to provide better performance and a simpler development workflow with frameworks like Nextjs, Gatsby, Nuxt, and Sveltekit. 

To grow your website fast and flexibly, utilizing the Jamstack is critical. Separating your technologies into their individual concerns allows your business to focus on improvements in specific areas without worrying about knock-on effects in other areas. This kind of specialization simplifies how your software communicates, making it easier to deliver more futureproofed results.

Switching to Jamstack is a phenomenon happening across the web. Ecommerce websites are being powered by more and more specialist tools, like Next, Shopify, and Stripe - all different services linked together through the Jamstack.

By switching to modern technologies, you allow your developers to focus on the areas they're good at, reducing mistakes and delivering better results.

It's no secret that most companies have some kind of technical debt. We often make compromises to allow features to be delivered on time or on budget. Sometimes this debt can show up as bugs. Other times, it prevents us from making changes easily or adding functionality as quickly as we'd like. Once debt builds up, it can be hard to get rid of.

If you're struggling to make code changes because of technical debt, sometimes it's easier to start over. But doing this is pointless if you don't set yourself up for success. The last thing you want to do after rebuilding is to have the same thing happen again in a year.

You need to ensure that your process provides the support necessary for your developers to do the best job and set your code up for future success. This often means allowing more time for changes upfront to reduce the time updates will need in the long run.

Adding automated tests into your workflow is a great way to ensure that code changes always function as expected without side effects, even in future updates. Building these into your workflow can help provide a better review process by clearly showing if something is broken. This allows the reviewer to give better feedback and trains your developers to work more effectively while thinking about the long-term effects of their changes.

Creating a seamless process amongst the team can also help streamline changes in the future by helping designers, project managers, and other stakeholders understand how developers work best so you can continue to get the best results.

Making changes to your website is hard enough. A successful company needs to change its website easily and adapt to new approaches the business wants to take. This often requires adding new functionality to your website, like new help articles, docs pages, testimonials, and more.

So when it's time to make changes, you want to choose what works best for you. Working with vendors like WordPress can seem like a simple option now, but you might regret not taking a more flexible approach when you're locked into their plugin ecosystem.

We recommend Jamstack websites because of their flexibility. Separating concerns makes it very easy to add new functionality where you need it, whether that be a store, a payment provider, or something else. If it exists, you can probably use it.

Mobile apps are a great example of why Jamstack can help your business quickly adapt to new opportunities. Having your data in a single place and accessible from multiple sources means that your app and website sync automatically when your data updates. Using a Jamstack approach means you can easily add new ideas like Apps, PWAs, link multiple websites, or even allow others to use your data with minimal effort.

Completely overhauling your entire website isn't risk-free, despite the advantages that can come from making such a shift. The good news is that these risks are easily mitigated with the right approach.

Rebuilding your website may not be the cheapest option now, but in the long run, it is likely to save you a significant amount of money and break free of the restrictions that currently hold your website back.

So when you do rebuild your website, here's what to look out for:

With any website rebuild, you'll find that your ranking on Google is at risk. You're making a significant overhaul to your website, which means it'll need to be re-crawled and re-indexed.

Are you deleting lots of old impactful pages?

Are you correctly redirecting unused pages?

If you've moved to a new domain, are you correctly redirecting from your old domain in every instance?

Are you providing all the SEO tags google and social platforms need?

It may sound like a lot of work to make sure that all these things are correctly updated. But losing ranking due to mistakes made during migration can be very costly.

People don't like change, and that will include your customers. Even if you're creating a modernized design with a better User Experience, loyal customers might lose interest simply due to shock.

That's not to say you shouldn't make those changes if they give your customers a better experience, but you might need to temper how much you change in one go.

If you're looking to make a significant overhaul to your application while also keeping your customers happy, make sure that you ease them into the new design. 

You'll often see this with updated branding on services like Google Docs, where significant changes often allow customers to continue using the old version of your software for a while. This helps ease them into the new designs, allowing them to compare differences between them while also getting used to the idea that the older version won't be around forever.

One of the other problems of making significant changes to your website is that it's almost addictive to find new ideas to add when you know you're going to be changing everything anyway. 

While adding new features that benefit your customers is a great approach, it can also add significant complexity to the project and make it harder to reach a point where it's possible to launch.

When releasing a new build, it's important to focus only on what's essential for the initial release. That could be just a couple of pages (we launched the first version of the Skyward website with just one page).

Nothing is stopping you from adding more features later.

Our recommended approach when you're looking to rebuild your website is to break it down:

Build your MVP: This is the bare minimum you need to get your new website up and working and allow you to add content. What this looks like depends on your business

Approaching your project like this helps you prioritize what's most important while ensuring you don't keep making changes without ever releasing them.

For some projects, your MVP might need to be large, especially if you're replacing something that already exists, and that's okay. 

For other projects, even massive projects can be broken down into more minor changes that are easier to build, allowing you to slowly migrate piece-by-piece. 

One of the benefits of the Jamstack is that it can work alongside your current technology while you're migrating. You can migrate small parts at a time.

Maybe your landing pages start out using a new Jamstack approach, then your products (while you migrate them all across), then everything else. Or you could migrate all your marketing pages to Jamstack first like we did with Pigeon Loans and then do your SaaS product later. It's incredibly flexible, and we can help you find the right approach if you need help.

So, when should you rebuild your website?

So I'm sure I've done a great job of convincing you that you should rebuild your website. If it's old, outdated, and causing you lots of headaches, you probably need to rebuild it! There are lots of reasons why rebuilding your website is probably a good idea.

But you shouldn't have to rebuild your website regularly. A good architecture will allow you to make small changes over time. All of the projects we work on are built this way, enabling effective growth.

We do this by first understanding the business needs of our customers, helping to form a good understanding between designers, developers, and the rest of the team in how features should be put together in the most effective way for the long term. 

We want you to have a great website now, but we also want to make sure you're in the best position to still have a good website in 5 years, no matter how much you change it.

And remember. You don't have to do it all in one go - in fact, we encourage you not to! Make small changes and improve continuously.

So are you looking to rebuild? Reach out, and we'll help you get started.

Follow this website rebuild checklist to improve use experience, increase conversions and make your next site redesign project a roaring success.

Website rebuild checklist: Do these 12 things before you rebuild your website

“Website rebuild” — Two short words that can send any business owner into a spiralling pit of despair.

Rebuilding your website improves user experience and can turn your site into a powerful sales machine. In a similar vein, a poorly designed website will hurt your sales and user experience.

With the right planning and research in place, you can make your website rebuild a roaring success for both your customers and your business.

Before you rip your current site apart and start from fresh, you’ll need a solid website redesign strategy. Luckily for you, we’re here to help! 

By following this website rebuild checklist, you can make your site redesign project a smooth-sailing and results-generating process.

How to know it’s time for a website rebuild?

Does updating your website fill you with fear?
Are people visiting your website, only to drop off into the abyss?
Has your brand changed direction, focus or branding since your website was first created?
Or maybe, your developers get lost in a sea of coding issues anytime they try to make one simple change to your site?

If any of the above scenarios sound familiar, it’s probably time to redesign your website.

Businesses change. As such, so should our websites. And, as your website changes and grows, it’s important to make sure that it still works functionally for everyone who uses it — that includes everyone from your website visitors and customers to your content managers, web developers and marketers. 

If there’s a misalignment between growth and performance, there’s going to be a misalignment between expected conversions and actual conversions gained. 

Rebuilding your website could be your ticket to closing more sales.

In short, if your site is outdated, broken or not performing as expected, it’s probably time for a rebuild.

So, let’s look at the must-do actions that should be on your website rebuild checklist if you want to maximise your ROI.

The Skyward team knows a thing or two about rebuilding websites. And in this article, I’m packaging up all of the Skyward team’s knowledge into a 12-step website rebuild checklist.

Follow this step-by-step process and you’ll be able to build a website that hits your goals, makes your customers smile, and is optimised for success.

Understanding the goals behind your website redesign is crucial.

Rebuilding your website is about so much more than just making it look pretty. It also needs to perform well.

By establishing the reasons behind your site redesign, you can make sure your rebuild checks all of the right boxes. 

If you want your website to attract more visitors, then you need to build a website that is well-positioned for organic search visibility.

Alternatively, let’s say your goal is to convert visitors into customers. In this case, your website rebuild should prioritise the user journey, feature conversion landing pages, and be tailored towards closing more sales.

Identifying your goals means your content writers, designer and website developers can work together to make your new site rebuild exceeds the requirements of that goal.

Once you have your goal in mind, you need to audit your current site performance and build. 

Check how your site currently performs against your goal and other key performance indicators such as site speed, search engine optimisation (SEO), user experience (UX), and content quality.

Auditing the performance of your current web build is crucial for understanding what is and isn’t working on your site right now. This will let you gain a better insight into which pages or site elements are having the biggest impact on your website performance.

From this audit, you’ll know which pages can remain the same and which pages, or elements, need updating or scrapping and starting afresh. 

If you’re not sure where to start when it comes to strategically carrying out an audit for your website, we can help! Our amazing Skyward team will perform a full site audit that uncovers core issues and identifies opportunities for closing the gap between your current performance and your goals.

Before diving into your redesign, you need to understand how users interact with your current site.

This user journey analysis should happen as part of your audit. But, it’s so important, I thought it deserved a mention of its own!

I really can’t stress enough how critical it is that you understand your user journey. You need to know what steps people take to get from A to B on your site. This includes having a solid grasp on the entry points, the page they visit after that initial touchpoint, and the drop-off points that stop users from reaching their end-goal.

When analysing the user journey, you’ll also want to know which pages are the top convertors. You can then flag these as being your benchmark pages to help you figure out exactly what makes these pages top convertors — and how can you get all other pages to the same level or higher? 

Don’t forget to also investigate frustration points for users. Heatmaps are a great way to record user behaviour and see what journey stages are causing frustration. You can then use this data to eradicate those pesky frustration factors from your new web design.

Other factors to consider when reviewing the user journey include:

What are users searching for on your site?

Which keywords attract users to your site?

On which pages do website users spend most of their time?

Do your current users match your target audience profile?

Take everything you’ve learnt from the user journey analysis and use it to inform the interface of your website rebuild. Everything from page paths, the navigation menu, your key landing pages and content, to new on-site features and tools can all be optimised with a little bit of user journey research.

Step 4: Seek inspiration and analyse competitors

A flower might not think about competing with the flower next to it — but you sure should.

Analysing competitor performance is fundamental for seeing where you currently stand in the marketplace and what you can do better to take the crown.

I’m not saying scrutinise your competitors websites and then copy them — Do NOT do this. Copying the work of someone else is a race to the bottom, not the top.

Instead, use competitor analysis as a way to see what other people in your industry do well or where there may be gaps that you can fill. 
Audit the competition by looking at their:

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