When going through a rebrand, if your team isn’t prioritizing your end-user’s needs, it may be time to reconsider your UX strategy. Even if you have a great UX strategy with your old branding campaign, you need a refreshed UX strategy that balances with your new look. At STAUFFER,  we incorporate good UX practices into all of our creative work, ensuring a seamless and intuitive user journey. As leaders in this arena, we specialize in bringing ingenious UX solutions to make complicated things look simple.

STAUFFER’s decades of combined experience and leadership have provided numerous brands, organizations, and higher learning institutions with the right kinds of UX for their rebranding initiatives. By cobbling together their loose thoughts and sketches and bending them into dynamic bits of immersive communication, our rebranded platforms provide pathways for engaging with their audience and driving intuitive and familiar conversions with the end user.

Harmonizing our UX capabilities with a client’s vision can be streamlined when they understand the basics of good UX and do the necessary homework internally to find what UX principles their audience identifies with the most. This article will explore UX as a concept, how to find it, make it yours, and bring it to fruition. Let’s get started.

Understanding User Experience (UX):

UX refers to a user’s overall experience while interacting with a website. It encompasses many factors, including the website’s usability, accessibility, and visual appeal. Good UX design enhances user engagement, increases customer satisfaction, and ultimately drives business growth. When it comes to online rebranding, incorporating good UX practices is crucial to ensure a successful transition.

For many clients, this comes in the way of a website or an app; however, the theory of good UX is interwoven into every individual item within that project. That means UX is part of the coding, graphic design, copywriting, everything. Great UX must be baked into every part of a rebrand, and when done properly, audiences will gravitate toward it, thus building a sense of identity for that brand and, ultimately, trust with its customers.

Step 1: Researching Good UX Practices

The first (and most crucial) step to understanding what UX works with your rebrand lies within the prep work set out before you even begin. Auditing what your competitors are doing is a great first step.  A competitor analysis identifies industry best practices and notes what’s successful with similar websites, inspiring what path you should take in your journey. When researching your competitor’s similar products, ask yourself: 

• What is this site or app good at making the end user do?
• What is this competitor’s site or app trying to persuade the end user into not doing?
• What can our organization provide to make our site or app better than the competitors?
• Where can our competitors compete better than us, and how can we outshine them with our own strength?

Utilizing user feedback and conducting surveys can also provide valuable insights into the existing website’s usability issues. Exploring case studies and industry reports highlighting exemplary websites with excellent UX design can offer valuable insights.

Our Executive Creative Director, Ish Obregon, provides this insight on market research.

“Competitor analysis is not just about identifying what’s working for others, but also understanding what’s not. By learning from their mistakes, you can avoid making the same ones and create a unique user experience that meets the needs of your target audience.” 

Step 2: Recognizing Good UX Elements in Websites

Identifying clear navigation structures that enhance the user journey through the website is at the heart of good UX. Evaluating and identifying the responsive design elements that work for your audience ensures that you are serving content that is compatible with the devices in which they are accessing them. STAUFFER pours through the data and analyzes the most intuitive layouts and visual hierarchies that result in the easiest and most palatable format to keep users engaged and reduce bounce rates. In addition, we also factor in speed; assessing fast loading times is also crucial to minimize bounce rates.

Step 3: Conversions, Conversions, Conversions

Conversions are the core of what makes good UX, however. Designing toward leading the end user to a desired engagement (booking a consultation, filling out a survey, making a purchase, viewing your video, etc.) should permeate every bit and bauble you put into your project. These parameters include:

• User-centered design
• Intuitive navigation
• Clear and compelling calls to action
• Responsive and accessible web design
• Fast loading times
• Personalized experiences

By prioritizing these principles, businesses can create a user-friendly environment that attracts visitors and encourages them to take desired actions.

Step 4: Implementing Good UX into the Online Rebranding Process

Collaborating with experienced web designers or agencies specializing in UI/UX design is essential to implement good UX practices in the online rebranding process. Ensuring consistency across all brand touchpoints by aligning branding elements with the website’s overall look and feel is also vital. Conducting user testing to validate the effectiveness of UX improvements before finalizing the rebranded website is a critical step that ensures the website meets the user’s needs and expectations.

Ish has this to add:  

“Competitor analysis is about identifying our competitor’s positioning in comparison with our own. The more we know about our competition, the better we can identify our unique competitive proposition; this strategic step helps further align our brand goals with our user strategy to create a unique user experience that meets the needs of your target audience.”

STAUFFER’s UX capabilities and ability to manifest our clients’ desired outcomes start by understanding the client’s goals and the end users’ preferences in completing that objective. Once you understand the UX principles you love and the needs you need to accomplish, bring your discovery notes to STAUFFER, where we can flesh things out and take it to the next step.
Implementing good UX practices can lead to a successful online rebranding process by enhancing user engagement, increasing customer satisfaction, and driving business growth. As an Inc 5000 listed company, STAUFFER specializes in bringing ingenious UX solutions to make complicated things look simple. We encourage businesses to prioritize user experience as a critical factor in future digital initiatives to ensure the best possible outcomes. Once you have your ideas together, let’s schedule a time to talk and make it happen.