Why UX (User Experience) is Essential to Branding Photography
In any business, user experience (UX) is one of the hallmarks of a good brand. Coming from a personal journey where we are moving from the wedding industry to become a full-time product designer, we saw how valuable user experience is to any product, service, and event.
User experience goes beyond a simple buzzword in marketing. It is a legitimate must-have for any branding effort, whether you’re doing traditional or digital marketing. Here’s why UX is important to your brand and why should make sure you optimize it for your needs.
What is User Experience (UX)?
Before we learn the importance of UX, we need to define the entire process first to create a baseline of what we know. User experience design is all about crafting a specific product or service around its ease of use and general sensation.
It sounds vague but it’s hard to quantify what people will experience with any product. Whether you want a website to have a strong cybersecurity measure or an app to make it intuitive, the goal is to reduce friction. You want to make the user feel empowered and happy while using your product, as well as have them do as intended.
In weddings, a bad user experience equates to a guest going home unhappy because they didn’t know anyone and didn’t interact during the entire time. In websites, bad UX means the ergonomics of the website is all wrong. Commonly used features are either out of place or missing and everything is not aesthetically pleasing.
The general feeling of bad UX can make your target audience feel frustrated and annoyed. On the flip side, excellent user experiences make people come back. They’re enough to make people feel satisfied and happy to use the product again, rather than feel unmotivated as they use it.
Why UX Design Matters
Imagine UX as the general feel of your brand. As you prioritize user experience, your number one goal becomes creating a positive time for your audience. For websites, for example, this means you’re building a website that’s easy to navigate, with products and information that is easy to locate.
When you’re aiming for good UX, you want to engage your customers comfortably. You want them to feel that they can contact you without much hassle or complete a sale with no hitches. Products and services with superior UX can be so good that customers don’t feel the experience at all with how natural everything works.
Effective user experience anticipates many of the pain points that people experience when dealing with a product. Going back to the website example, most people have several common expectations for a website. While designs may differ, many expect intuitive navigation, easy-to-find contact information, and one-click access to products.
UX design pinpoints potential issues during the brand’s design phase and resolves the problems that they expect customers will find within the design. With this philosophy, you make everything smooth and seamless for the user while getting to push the audience towards actions you intended them to make.
How Can You Design The Ultimate User Experience?
Now that we know how valuable UX design is to every brand, how can we adopt good design principles to maximize the UX potential of our products and services? The answer relies on a number of important areas that lend towards building a smoother overall feel.
Build A User Persona
The first step into any UX design is to understand the target audience that you want by building a user persona. By knowing who will use your products and services, you can streamline the design to fit the general voice and emotions that they want to experience.
Consider the niche of your brand, including several demographic information about your audience. Take into account their age, technical skills, gender, income bracket, geolocation, and even specifics like accessibility needs.
Account for the mood that you’re targeting when they use your products and the outcome you want them to experience.
Define Problems and Pain Points
Once you know for whom are you designing your products and services, it’s crucial to start defining the problems inherent to your niche. Go towards product research, looking for forms and designs that work without becoming too much of a distraction.
Product design phases change depending on what you need to resolve. You want to spend time doing research on areas of your branding where you’re more likely to hit a snag and why. Understand the needs, wants, fears, and motivations behind why they should go with your brand instead of a competitor.
Identify standards within your product niche. If you own a website that has several products, you need to know how everyone categorizes the products for more intuitive categories. See where it’s best to put your contact page and how to put landing page buttons and calls to action.
Build A Functionality Map
Once you understand how your target audience wants to enjoy your brand, you need to start building what is known as a functionality map. This map creates a general hierarchy of functions that you want your product to feature.
For websites and branding materials, you want to list down pages, categories, and sub-categories that you need. For products and services, you want to route out the steps you want customers to experience within the buying cycle. Creating a functionality map can help you understand how your audience can go from point to point.
Another way to do this is to build a goal map, emulating the entire customer journey. Identify pain points, as well as motivations on why they would do certain actions.
Maximize Your Touchpoints
Once you have a general overview of the entire experience, find ways to maximize your touchpoints with the customers. Touchpoints are places where you can perform lead capture and have your target audience put your product as part of their considerations.
Where can you find your target audience? How can you lead them to your products and services during specific buying cycles, especially when they’re ready to convert?
There are several answers you can find for this part, from social media, traditional advertising, to search engine marketing. You also need to resolve several issues indirectly related to UX design, including your ability to stand out from the competition.
The Bottom Line
User experience is an important part of a customer’s journey. Big brands spend millions upon millions to create a seamless journey for their target audience. If you don’t have millions to burn, the smartest way to do UX design is to do the smart approach.
Spend time learning about your audience. Find their pains and motivations and give them the solutions they need. Anticipate obstacles and handle them correctly. Rinse and repeat. Knowing what to do is half the battle. The other half starts with optimizing customer experience for smoother, easier conversions.
Paso Robles, California Wedding at Cass Winery near San Luis Obisbo
I had the honor of photographing my cousin Jenna’s wedding to Kellyn, after a year + of reschedules and uncertainty. It was SO WONDERFUL to be with family, hugging laughing and dancing. Yay science for getting us to this point.
Both the ceremony and reception were at Cass Winery in Paso Robles, with many guests flying into San Luis Obisbo. We stayed on site and then a few days after at the raddest spot- San Luis Creek Lodge. Even got a surf in near Morro Bay. We may have eaten our weight in sandwiches at High Street Deli.
Jenna and her identical twin sister grew up in North County, San Diego, and Jenna met Kellyn whilst attending Cal Poly in SLO. They now live in San Francisco, where Kellyn has been working as an Engineer since graduation and Jenna is an educator and 49ers Gold Rush dancer.
It was so nice to be around family, sharing silly memories and capturing every moment of this wedding weekend for Jenna & Kellyn. Congrats, y’all !
Atlanta Cabbagetown Engagement Session
Rachel and Ben’s Cabbagetown Engagement session on a warm Spring afternoon. We are all starting to get vaccinated, and slowly emerging (safely) from our shelter in place year. Looking forward to capturing these two’s wedding later this year in what we can hope will be a different reality!
Sunset Arabia Mountain Family Photos
Arabia mountain with the whole family ! Finding a day of the week that worked for all the ladies was no easy task, but we found a Tuesday and went with it ! Lucky for this fam, one of them is a hairstylist, so at least the getting ready was going to be dialed. It was so fun to capture this gorgeous autumn day in such a weird year.
Studio Portraits // Mask on
With so many kiddo birthday parties needing to be rescheduled, we had confetti, Highland Bakery cupcakes and balloons to ourselves. Even a cute 80’s themed boom box ! I have resumed photoshoots in a private setting, with masks on, proper airflow and longer lenses for distancing. I’m also regularly getting COVID testing. These kids loved running around the 10,000 square foot space (which I think is safe to assume is larger than their normal playroom at home :)
Thanks to all my repeat clients booking during crazy times !
Family Portraits in the age of Social Distancing #wearamask
Baby Clay’s 1 year birthday party had to be postponed indefinitely because of Coronavirus. We decided to swap their event session for a family portrait outdoors and were so happy to find a slice of nature to ourselves. I have have just started providing photography services again, photographing on longer zoom lenses (so I can maintain a 6ft distance) and wearing a surgical mask. Clay’s smiles prove he was pretty stoked to get out of the house, too :)
What does a branding photoshoot look like ???
I get this question a lot: “I run my own ____ company. Do you do this type of photography ?” Yes.
The Atlanta based Digital Marketing + Social Strategy firm, Juniperus, hired me to capture their re-brand, and it was such a rad collaboration that I thought I’d share a few ways a simple Pinterest board and 20 minute phone call can really help your vision become an actual image.
Be you, and say it loud.
Hood River Oregon Engagement
In between small bouts of rain, we ran around, shared dumpling shop recommendations and captured Tess and Chris’s engagement session from always at least 6 feet away. Weddings and events may look a lot different in a time of physical social distancing, but love is not canceled. I was traveling in our converted camper van and was able to connect with this couple even though we typically live on opposite ends of the country (Portland and Atlanta). By checking local ordinances beforehand, we were able to utilize this beautiful space in Hood River, Oregon to capture their love.
Graduation ceremony may have been cancelled, but it's still a big day to celebrate
Graduation being cancelled couldn’t keep Kim down ! We (keeping 10 feet away, alone in a 10,000 square foot warehouse) had her dress up, don her cap and gown, and celebrate the hard work she’s put in to earn her Master’s Degree. Stay positive everyone !
