Here is a snippet of our ‘Art of Engagement’ white paper – a free guide to help you create a really awesome digital design that will capture your users’ attention and get them hooked on your website, platform or service – and coming back again and again.
“Your website, Learning Management System, platform or service cannot simply look good and reflect the brand’s personality. It must also work well. That doesn’t mean it only achieves its aims – of course it should sell a lot of products, get a large number of new contacts or successfully train up a workforce – but it should also be a pleasure to interact with and work on. It should not be too difficult to manoeuvre around or learn how to use; users shouldn’t have to spend their time mastering the device, website or platform – their time should be spent mastering the content.
Interaction design (often abbreviated to IxD) is all about getting digital things shaped perfectly for people’s use. The aim of IxD is to create a digital website, service, system or platform that satisfies the needs and desires of the majority of users. Getting this right – in combination with pleasing aesthetics and a fabulous personality – really is the art of engagement.
So what can you do to improve your IxD? One way, which complements your campaign to overhaul your system’s aesthetics and personality, is to focus on affective interaction design.
Keep in mind when you’re designing your website that whatever you decide will elicit emotional responses from users. For example, using dynamic icons, sounds and animations can help convey a sense of urgency or operation; a feeling that the user or learner needs to do something. Make the emotions elicited by the interaction in-line with those elicited by the aesthetics; lively cartoon animations will look out of place on a website that sells black and white photographic prints, for example. But if the brand’s personality is fun, exciting and full of wonder, a cartoon character helping to guide the user around the platform will work well.
Interface design choices like fonts, colours and screen layouts can also have an impact on perceived effectiveness of a website. Indeed, research has shown that people will judge an aesthetically-pleasing website to be much easier to use than a plain, boring one – even if there is no true difference between the two. Now that’s really something.”
Want to find out more about how aesthetics and designs affect engagement and user experience? Continue reading about the secret to digital engagement by clicking the button below!
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