Even if you’re not familiar with what UX is, chances are high that you’ve already experienced it many times today alone. User Experience, shortened to UX, is defined as the overall experience that a user has with a company’s products or services. ‘Good’ UX design points to ease in interaction, while ‘bad’ UX is determined by difficulties in engaging with elements or aspects of those products or services.

When UX is working well, it can almost feel invisible to the user, creating a sense of seamlessness and intuition in their customer experience. When it’s not working well, it’s far more visible, creating tensions and frustrations that can distance a consumer from the brand they’re engaging with.

UX design looks to understand key considerations such as customer pain points, competitor analysis, and gaps in the market that an individual brand can take advantage of. Here, the business’s goals and objectives are at the heart of UX best practices, looking to create a user experience that aligns with the desired perception the brand is looking to create.

At RealClicks, we firmly believe that good UX never goes out of fashion. Here’s a glimpse of the guiding UX principles we use to make sure our work delivers the highest quality of customer experiences in every touchpoint, as well as what that delivers for our clients.
The seven facets of user experience design

Designer and information architect Peter Morville is responsible for developing the user experience honeycomb, which easily illustrates the seven facets of user experience design:

• Useful: questions to ask in this area include ‘is this product or feature valuable to our users?’, ‘what is the want or need this addresses?’ and ‘how does this solve a problem for our users?’
• Useable: is the product/feature easily useable by your users/customers, or is it at risk of frustrating them?
• Desirable: how are layouts, visual design elements, interactive design elements, and other User Interface design elements appealing to your users/customers?
• Valuable: do users want or need your product/service? Does it solve a problem and deliver a return on investment?
• Findable: are content and features easy to find, and how does your design help users to solve problems quickly?
• Accessible: can everyone navigate a site with ease, regardless of their physical or mental abilities?
• Credible: how can easy experiences increase the likelihood of users engaging as paid customers? How is your UX contributing to credibility with your users/customers?

For designers who are prioritising a high quality of UX in their work, prioritising each of these facets can streamline the process of creating engaging, immersive, and intuitive experiences for customers within all kinds of brand touchpoints.

Good UX in practice: RealClicks x Campion College

We recently welcomed the opportunity to work with leading tertiary liberal arts education provider Campion College, which offers students a leading blend of humanities and sciences in Sydney’s West.

As well as a thriving community that’s renowned for its academic excellence, this 10-acre Catholic student campus also offers students a rich diversity of extracurricular activities. Our task was to capture the essence of Campion College’s esteemed reputation, delivering a digital experience that mirrored the institution’s in-person excellence and authority. The secret weapon to achieving this? Clarified and prioritised UX in every aspect of our work.

We developed a brand new website for Campion College that aligned with their revised branding guidelines and embodied their values and standards to online visitors. As this may be the first point of engagement with the institution, we knew it was crucial that their website spoke powerfully to the timeless legacy of this educational brand.

With the principles of good UX at the forefront, we leaned into a design that was centred around ease of navigation, ensuring all visitors had quick and intuitive access to key information. We also made use of strong, decisive call-outs in the form of highlighted sections that drew visitors into essential content, subtly crafting an intuitive user journey that took visitors along an intentional pathway. These efforts were matched with consistent design methodologies, ensuring the Campion College branding was robustly present throughout the site to ensure uniformity and reinforce brand identity at every step. SEO best practices were also implemented throughout the new website’s design, increasing top-ranking keywords by 350% and leading to a 40% increase in website traffic.

With RealClicks’ multifaceted digital capabilities at play, this was just the beginning of seeing UX design principles employed to build a definitive and successful online user experience for the university. We also designed a Google Ads campaign that used precision targeting to achieve our key objectives of driving student intake leads. Through using demographic and geographical targeting, combined with clear, on-brand CTAs, we were able to leverage user intent to guide potential students towards taking the next step in their journey with Campion.

This paid marketing activity has been complemented by our activity within Campion College’s social media marketing. With the objective of enhancing brand awareness and generating more leads for course intakes and special events, UX principles were implemented into both content strategy and engagement alike. Tailored content seamlessly furthered our website design’s narrative, giving prospective students even more of an organic glimpse into their potential future at the institution. The establishment and maintenance of a clear brand voice also continued to foster relationships, resulting in over 2 million impressions and a 300% increase in leads.

Our work with Campion College is a powerful example of our UX principles in action, creating harmony and cohesiveness across every element of a digital brand experience. With our methodologies firmly rooted in user experience, we were able to deliver value-enhancing, on-brand experiences to prospective students browsing the institution’s website, seeing an ad on Google, or engaging with the brand via social media. Wherever that potential student went, their needs and intent were placed at the front and centre of our design and implementation considerations.

Is your UX in fashion?

With so many pressing priorities, it’s easy for business owners and decision-makers to put the prioritisation of UX on the back burner – until it’s all too late. If your UX considerations aren’t at the very front of your digital strategy, it’s time to meet our team and discover what’s possible when every inch of your digital experience is shaped to delight your users.