The 8 Step UX Check for Media Planners, to Drive Higher ROI for your Clients

User experience (UX), is an industry buzz word often referred to when talking websites. So what are the core foundations of UX and how can we ensure our client’s sites are up to scratch before allocating activity, driving a paid audience to their landing pages?

The below eight elements can be utilised as a key check list by Digital Media Planners, to cross-check our clients sites, before pushing paid advertising to their landing pages. The point of running through this check list, is to flag any issues with the website that should be raised with the client prior to campaign commencement, to ensure an intuitive user experience. In turn this will optimise campaign activity and create a greater ROI!

1.      Page Load Time

The first and most important test before driving digital activity to a landing page is ensuring the page has a fast load time. A key tool to check your pages average page speed load time is Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool, this site ranks both mobile devices and desktop page speed times out of 100 and will list out optimisations needed to better your sites speed.

2.      Mobile First (is a must!)

Google is moving towards a Mobile-First index rather than a desktop first index. This means that un-responsive sites that aren’t dynamic cross platform, will rank poorly and will lower relevancy scores. If your site is not mobile first, this needs to be updated asap! An easy and free tool to check this is test my site.

3.      Interaction Design (IxD)

 IxD, looks at how a user interacts with a site focusing on usability and functionality of the site. A way to test this, is to visit the proposed landing page and go through the motions of a conversion or the final campaign objective/action that we want users driven to this page to take. If it’s difficult to follow, clunky or things take ages to load, this needs to be raised with the client. A good site, will use interactive elements such as burger menus, easy to edit forms or sticky navigation bars to enhance the user experience. The point of diminishing return is needed here to find a happy medium between 'user experience' and 'page load time' utilsing the right amount of interactive elements, that won’t slow down the site.

4.      Information Architecture (IA)

 IA applies to both the front user-facing interface and the back end code of the site. IA looks at hierarchy of information ensuring the most important information is above the fold and easy for the user to access/find. When applied correctly, IA will ensure both the front user and back end user can navigate their way through the site easily. Sites that demonstrate this have the key action points and most important information towards the top and are user intuitive.  

5.      Visual Design

This basic element that adds to the overall UX can all too often be overlooked! Things such as small fonts, pixelated imagery, contrasting colours (in a bad way), hard to decipher typography and overall messy design should be avoided! If it hurts your eyes to look at a site, something needs to be fixed! In web-interface design, minimalistic, complimentary colour schemes with bold fonts are the current trend and make for a pleasant site experience.

6.      Typography

 A combination of three typefaces seems to be the ‘go to’ for most sites. A combination of serif and san serif types, across Header 1, Header 2 and Body text with a feature type for quotes or call outs is often practiced. If you’re stuck on finding complimentary fonts there are a few helpful sites to visit, one of my favorite is font pair Simply type in a font you’d like to work with and complimentary fonts will appear.

7.      User Interface (UI)

A site with a well laid out UI will be easy to read, user-friendly, efficient and enjoyable, producing the end result with ease. If every page on site is different, hard to navigate and/or creates an overall dull, frustrating experience this needs to be addressed. The user and their needs must be put first!

8.      Content Strategy

The content strategy looks at the overall content on site including, copy, images, marketing, PR, SEO, SEM, IA, UX and design to name a few. The content strategy has to ensure the sites tone, appearance and usability reflects that of the brand it’s representing and in turn is tied together to talk to the products end user/target audience. If your clients site does not reflect that of the overall brand or advertising in market, this should be flagged. Dynamic Sites include a content managements system (CMS), to ensure content can be updated/refreshed easily by the marketing team. If your clients site does not use a CMS, this is something to recommend. Sites built through WordPress include these but other systems such as 'PHPmyadmin' can be incorporated at minimum rates. On a side note, a nice tool to keep on top of current trends that can help with content ideation is Google Trends.

If any of these 8 steps rank poorly, or are not up to an appropriate standard, this is something to raise with your client and SEO team to be improved by the Web Dev team prior to campaign commencement... if possible! If not, these are great talking points to be recommended as improvements for future campaigns.   

I hope this can be used as a framework to help drive stronger performance for you and your clients. If you have any questions, think I’ve left anything out or you disagree with any of these components, please leave a comment below and I’ll get back to you. Enjoy!

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Cross-Channel media planning is my primary profession however what most people don’t know, is that as well as full time work in adland, I undertake a double degree part-time in Business majoring in Advertising and Fine Arts majoring in Interactive and Visual Design (IVD). IVD includes practical and theory based studies around Web Dev, Digital design & uses in the real world. Luckily for me, this goes hand in hand with advertising, digital media implementation and digital recommendations, ensuring I have a breadth of knowledge in the digital space from both a media, advertising, implementation and creative background. Read more about my dual roles and their benefits here.

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