Marketing in Malta

It seems that most companies are still not getting what makes great design and are happily approaching it subjectively. The key to really great design is to move away from opinion and towards observation if you really want to maximize the return on investment from the user experience. User experience design is not merely aesthetic. Rather, its aim is to guide and facilitate users’ behaviour, which can be observed and measured.

For example lets look at the recent Malta Jazz Festival website, the designer and client opted to go for an all Flash approach without any alternative for the user. As the festival was heavily promoted within the tourism sector you can expect that a fair number of individuals would be browsing via mobile devices, especially when you take into consideration the rise of such platforms internationally. As you can see from the screenshot below the website was totally inaccessible on the iPhone and the majority of mobile platforms that do not support the Adobe Flash plug-in. As a result, all mobile users had to look elsewhere for information and ticket bookings….

Limiting the user only leads to frustration and a loss in fulfilling the goal you set out to achieve. Allow time and expense in your budget to take the user experience into account both during design and after the launch.

The key to calculating a user experience return on investment is making the connection between user behaviour and business goals. When aligned with a business objective and a financial outcome, the design can be targeted to influence desired user behaviour.

So to sum it up the key to good design is a design that achieves the goal of connecting users behaviours with financial returns.

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