When building a website, digital designers have to think past just making a visually appealing page. A person’s first real experience with a company is often through its website. So, building an intuitive user experience (UX) — a product or service’s utility, ease of use, and efficiency for users — can be vital to creating a good first impression and driving a website’s performance. Additionally, designers must consider how to strategically craft a site that aligns with business goals, and work with partners to achieve it.
Two members of HDMZ’s creative team, Paige Winters (digital design lead) and Anna Tancredi (digital designer), saw an opportunity to advance our digital design capabilities. With funding from HDMZ, each of them took classes to level up their design skills to become more strategic in UX design and to better communicate the value that we bring to our partners. For Winters, that meant earning a UX certification from the industry-leading Nielsen Norman Group, while Tancredi focused on the course Strategic Business Acumen for Designers from Designlab. These proactive designers were gracious enough to share what they learned — and how that’s making a difference for HDMZ and our partners.
Supporting business goals with design
A key takeaway for Winters and Tancredi was the importance of understanding the business goal behind a partner’s request, and how digital design relates to that goal. This allows the design team to make recommendations that better support reaching the goal, and guide decision-making based on what our partners truly want to achieve. In other words, it enables designers to assess whether a strategy will move the business in a way that is helpful to our partners.
What makes UX such a critical element of digital design is that in most cases it is a user’s behavior that ultimately supports a business objective. For UX designers, recommendations are built on an understanding of how people think, and how that relates to actions taken or decisions made when using a website. As a result, knowing how best to encourage a desired behavior in a way that benefits users and businesses alike is paramount — and to do so, the designer must also know what intention drives a given project.
The importance of communication
The design team must be able to communicate how its recommendations and strategy support business objectives in language with which partners will connect. Rather than using UX or technical terminology that might be difficult to relate to, it can be more helpful to use examples that relate to business strategy. Data can also help to support and communicate digital design strategy, and make a compelling case for any recommendations. Finding effective ways to communicate is a central element of making sure that our partners’ leadership understands the rationale behind design and UX recommendations, so that all parties can support the strategic plan as it moves forward.
Leveraging user testing
Another impactful learning, particularly in UX, was the importance of user testing. Following users of the website as they complete a set task — for example, finding a patient portal — allows digital designers to gain insight on any difficulties that might be present in the user flow. By doing this instead of relying solely on the intuition and skills of the designer, it is possible to learn a great deal, with often unexpected results. Since the average user will not have the background knowledge of the site that the developer has, user testing can reveal weak spots in the design that were not anticipated, and allow those flaws to be resolved before a site is launched.
How HDMZ is putting new lessons to use
One of the ways these classes have made a difference for Winters and Tancredi is that they feel more prepared to face design challenges. When making changes that require working together with various stakeholders, they have the resources to better communicate about the project and meaningfully move the needle. As Winters explained, “No matter what projects come across my desk, I have the tools in my belt to confidently move forward with web projects in a way that puts the user forward and serves business goals.”
Moreover, these classes have changed the way Winters and Tancredi view HDMZ, allowing them to think more strategically about the company as a partner and more fully understand what we can offer. In addition to helping create better work for our clients, the fresh UX knowledge gave our team a new perspective on how our own website was built. In fact, they were motivated to implement improvements, such as streamlining the HDMZ site navigation, to make our site more UX-friendly.
A culture of continued learning
One of HDMZ’s core values is to stay hungry, and Winters and Tancredi embodied that value with their determination to grow through these courses. We encourage all of our employees to seek out opportunities for career development, and we provide support for them to take advantage of those opportunities. There is no doubt that the new capabilities and expertise that Winters and Tancredi have brought to our design team will only improve what we can do for our partners.
