Here in Dubai and all around the UAE having a website has become an industry standard for any businesses regardless of size or sector. There was a time when the websites were used as an online brochure, just a static website with a few standard internal pages. The web design market in Dubai was also treating websites as a product and businesses was taking it as a one-time investment with at least 2 to 3 year lifecycle. However, things have drastically changed since past decade, with the rise of smartphones and digital technologies a business website have become a service rather a product which transformed it into a very powerful communication channel. Businesses have started realizing the potential of their corporate website and leveraging it as a marketing channel to generate more sales and conversions. This also gives rise to the online businesses creating new market sectors and industries such as e-Commerce, online services or e-services, online portals, etc. Businesses have started to integrate their websites within their internal business processes to improve customer experience and customer journey.
The business websites can be classified in several different categories such as corporate website, e-Commerce, Blogs/News, Portfolios, Services, Online Databases, Forums, Social Media and much more. In this blog we will discuss how a traditional business whether small or large can leverage the website to improve their internal workflows while maintaining a great user and customer experience. The internal workflow will impact the outcome of the business, whether we talk about producing high quality products and services or satisfying your customers, nothing is possible without improving your workflow and processes. Websites are not just a communication tools, but can be effectively used to offer a variety of services to maximize the customer happiness and customer satisfaction. In this blog we will discuss how a human-centric or customer-centric web design of corporate website or web apps can maximize the efficiency and productivity of related workflows.
What is Human-Centric Web Design?
The customer-centric or human-centric web design is often confused with a web design that is intended to offer a better customer experience. However, that is partially true, in fact a customer-centric or human-centric web design is a website designing process that includes deeply analyzing and understanding the purpose of the website or web app, customer perceptions & expectations, and the problem solving ability of the final web design which makes it human-centric or customer-centric. The primary objective of creating a customer-centric or human-centric web design is to offer an excellent customer experience and functionalities to solve customers’ problems and satisfy their needs. These abilities of a human-centric web design provide a structure to relevant workflows and maximize the productivity by leveraging automation and digitalization. As the human-centric web design is all about solving problems and providing what customers need, this is what makes it superior from the traditional web designs.
Here are some key benefits of a customer-centric or human-centric web design:
- Help businesses understand their audience and customers
- Help businesses identifying the problems and difficulties their customers are facing
- Systematic approach to improve workflows
- Maximize the customer experience and usability of the system
- Completely customized solution to maximize the productivity
- Integration and automation facilitates both external and internal processes
- Improve customer interaction with the business and gain their trust
- Offer 24/7 services and solutions to customers’ problems
- Increase customer satisfaction which drives customer loyalty
- Minimize risks, avoid repetitions and maximize the ROI of the website or web app
The customer-centric or human-centric web designs are getting popular as the websites are becoming more functionality oriented. As the actual web designing phase started with intense brain storming and research to identify the needs and problems of the customers, so the final solution is mostly highly appreciated by the customers and users. As the entire scope of the website is well-thought off, so the designing and development phases are quicker and more cost-effective. The customer-centric or human-centric web designs are tend to perform much better than traditional designs.
How Human-centric Web Design Improves Workflow?
The human-centric web designs revolve around humans/customers, which means the primary purpose of the website is to serve the humans/customers and not the other way around. In fact most of the time the businesses or even the web design professionals consider human factor only as an essential part of the project. However, the customer-centric or human-centric web design philosophyis that the primary reason of creating a website or web app is to cater the needs and solve the problems of the targeted audience/humans. Although this may sound not much but in reality this ideology can make a huge difference. Here is how a businesses can build a great customer or human-centric web design which help them improve workflows and the final outcome.
Human-centric Web Design: Exploration and Inspiration Phase
Same like any other project the human-centric web design project also begins with a requirement gathering and discovery phase also known as exploration and inspiration phase. This is one of the most important phase in designing human-centric web design project. As this will determine if the final outcome will succeed or not. That is why the exploration and inspiration phase should be done with great care. Usually businesses appoint a manager for the web design and development project. That manager is responsible for the research and discovery. The human-centric websites are aimed to cater the needs of your customers and audience that is why it is crucial to understand what their needs are. For that the project manager can take input from sales teams, support staff, stakeholders, and any other relevant customer facing team or personals. This can be a good kick start for the exploration phase. Furthermore any other analytical data or customer insight can also be included in this research.
The aim of exploration and inspiration phase is to understand customer’s minds, their needs, their desires, their problems and their expectations. For that all the information should be gathered from all possible sources. Mostly businesses also include customer feedback and ask them direct questions to understand their opinion. At this stage it is also important to do a competitive analysis and see what other websites are offering and how you can build a better and improved version of those relevant features. At this stage the web designer should create multiple MVPs or minimum viable products. The MVP in case of a web design could be a rough sketch or concepts on a drawing board, a wireframe, or even a mockup design. These design options should be shared and discussed with the stakeholders and with the customers/end users if possible. These discussions can help gathering a lot of valuable data which can be very helpful in creating your final human-centric web design. The good thing about a human-centric web design is that it doesn’t only focus on solving the problems of the customers or end-users but it also help facilitating and improving internal business processes.
The human-centric web designs tend to help both the customers and the businesses.The human-centric web designs provide both the information and the functionality. Hence the UIs (user interfaces) should be easy-to-understand and intuitive to ensure a better user experience. Thanks to the modern technologies, the websites can be integrated with other databases and internal systems which help bringing innovative features for the customers. The automation help offering services 24/7 via online, which help improving customer experience and customer satisfaction. It is important to consider all limitations either by the technology or by infrastructure at the exploration and inspiration phase. At this stage all risks should also be analyzed, for example, if you want customers to pay via your website, then all necessary security features should also be consider which could impact other features and design. This will help you build a realistic and more feasible concept at this stage which can easily be transformed into final product.
Human-centric Web Design: Development Phase
Now that the research is done and MVP is finalized the next phase is to design and develop the full-fledge website. This phase start with the web design. The web design will based on the MVP that you have finalized earlier, the full design or the wireframe is a good start. Then the programing and coding phase comes. Remember you are not aiming to create a perfect product, the human-centric web design is all about creating a perfect solution for the customers’ needs. It is nearly impossible to make it perfect all the time due to a lot limitations, barriers and technology itself. However, with a proper research and plan you can easily achieve a perfect balance between the needs and desires of the customers and the business needs. The human-centric web design based websites not only cater to the needs of the customers but also help improving internal processes as well. The efficiency and productivity is also an essential ingredient to cook this recipe. There are a lot of moving parts and all of them need attention, do not get overwhelmed with only one aspect of the web design or functionality, pay attention to everything.
The human-centric web designs are created for humans, the primary goal is to offer a satisfactory user experience via customer journey, user interfaces, and customer experience at the website. That is why it is important to share the progress and development with the stakeholders and also with the customers or selective focus group to maximize the potential of the final outcome. Selecting the successful minimum viable product/prototype is a best strategy, however, during the designing and development phase it is also important to take as much feedback as possible. This will help you saving a lot of time and efforts too and with minimum efforts you can add more value to the website or web app. It is important to choose the right CMS (content management system) technology for the website. The right CMS will help businesses easily control and update the content and information on their website and it also allow them adding more pages without taking help form the website development team or web programmers. Once the design and development phase is completed the next phase is to deploy and launch it.
Human-centric Web Design: Deployment Phase
Once the web design and the development phase is complete, it is time to put the website on an appropriate hosting to make it live. This is the launch phase. The launch phase is not as that simple, it involves pre-launch activities then launch and even then the post-launch activities too. The pre-launch activities include, UAT or user acceptance test, which is a kind of soft launch. The UAT is mostly done in the production environment, so it is important to make sure you have already acquired a good hosting plan to host your human-centric website. As the human-centric web design is aimed to add value to user experience, the hosting plays an important role in user experience. A slow hosting results in long loading time, which is extremely bad for user experience, in fact a slow hosting alone is enough to ruin all the efforts you made to prepare the human-centric web design. That is why it is crucial to get a good hosting and make sure the website loading time is super-fast. After publishing the website on the live environment then conduct a UAT.
The UAT is usually conducted by the business team, stakeholders, and selective customers or a focus group who can provide first hand feedback about the website and its features. It is extremely important to conclude the findings of the UAT and try to implement them on the website. Usually there are only a few days between the UAT and the launch date, so it is better to make selective changes during that time and implement rest of the feedback at later upgrades or if possible delay the launch data and implement all of the changes. This happens very rarely as all stakeholders were fully engaged throughout the web design and development phase so usually at the UAT very few changes are expected. However, it is important to take those feedbacks seriously. After the UAT the next step is the launch. During the UAT the homepage is usually showing ‘under construction’ message. On launch date the proper website is posted at the homepage URL with all its internal links and everything else.
After the launch the post launch activities should be carried out. The post-launch activities include collecting analytical data and user feedback from the website. For that any web analytical tool such as Google Analytical tool can be integrated with the website. These tools will help you understand the performance of the website in the search engine and they will also provide more valuable data to understand user behavior and demographics. Along with the analytical data collection the user feedback collection is also important. For that a small feedback form can be implemented on the website via a pop-up box. The feedback form should be small and with limited questions only, too many questions and people will start skipping it, too less questions and you won’t be able to get the desired information. The analytical data and the user feedback is a great source of information. It help businesses understand how successful their web design is and what else they can do to make it more human-centric. The human-centric web design doesn’t mean a perfect product, but it means a perfect solution as per the needs and desires of the customers.
Conclusion
A business website plays an important role in present marketing landscape. Here in Dubai and all around the UAE the businesses spend a huge amount of resources and efforts on their digital strategy. And the website is the center point of a digital strategy. Earlier websites were just a source of basic information about the business, now a days’ they have become a very powerful tool to leverage digital marketing and to offer services to your customers. There are several different types of the websites, the human-centric or customer-centric web designs are gaining huge popularity in recent years. It is because of the drastic change in the customer behavior and market trends. Here in UAE particularly the customers have started considering user experience a lot since past few years. As the markets are rapidly growing the competition is increasing, this is also impacting the market trends and customer behavior. Which is why businesses have started changing their strategies and practices too.
The human-centric web designs and web apps are proving to be more successful and are helping businesses to improve their internal and external workflows and processes. If you want to learn more about the subject or if you want us to help you create a cost-efficient human-centric web design for you, please feel free to contact us through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get in touch with you soon.
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