The world is quickly becoming a place where brands differentiate themselves not on product, or price, but on the quality of the experience they provide.
Obviously, you can keep (or lose) customers with a good (or bad) experience. But the impact of experience goes far beyond retention.
Your audience is weighing up customer experience when they choose whether to become your customers, how often or how much to buy from you, and whether to provide the reviews and advocacy that convert your next set of loyal fans.
Whether in-store, on the phone, or online, customer expectations are high. But on digital channels where you can’t offer personal service, how do you ensure the platform you build isn’t just functional, but experiential?
At Cyberlation, planning for human-centric experiences is at the core of every digital strategy we create, and guides each individual deliverable that comes from our team. We’re emboldened by the challenge of turning designs and code into interactions and emotions – it’s by delivering these experiences that we help our clients grow and stay relevant year after year.
Experiences Matter
When people interact with your brand digitally, impressions form quickly and stick for a long time. And people don’t keep their opinions to themselves – their point of view gets shared with friends, families, and total strangers. So when you’re creating digital experiences for people, the stakes are high.
Cyberlation was born in the digital era, so we’re no strangers to shifting UX and design trends – we’ve seen more than a few fads come and go. We evolve and innovate, drawing on the expertise of cross-disciplinary teams, but we have one touchstone: giving the best possible experience to the people using your site.
Creating human-centric experiences for your audience is about giving users exactly what they need, eliminating friction, and injecting a bit of brand personality into the process. To do all that effectively, requires a strategy.
Strategizing for Success
At Cyberlation, we look at your brand’s entire ecosystem in order to create a digital strategy. This means getting a deep understanding of your business goals, how your site or app will serve your business, and what it will need to do for you. We want to understand how the experience we’re creating will fit into your existing workflows, collaborating with you to digitize those workflows where necessary.
It’s also important for us to really get to know your competitors. We want to understand who’s out there, how they set customer expectations, and where there may be opportunities to differentiate your brand or outperform the competition.
Most important of all, we go deep into the data to discover the behavior, motivations, and needs of your audience. This involves qualitative and quantitative research, surveys, and interviews – any information we can lay our hands on.
Building an experience is not just about following best practices. A strong digital strategy ensures that the most important audiences, functionality, design direction, and business goals are surfaced at the very beginning of the process, laying the foundations for everything else.
Thinking of the User
You know what they say about failing to plan. And planning is absolutely essential to everything we do in experience design – ensuring our strategy is implemented, and that design and development are set up for success.
Once we get a sense for what makes your audience tick, our information architecture and user experience department uses that information to build out personas – representative examples of your different customer groups, with context and background about them.
Personas are essential to our planning process, because they ensure each and every feature we recommend helps your audience accomplish a task they need to do. And when we define the tasks each persona will need to complete on site, we ensure each task is broken into subtasks so that scope is clearly defined during planning.
But the real test isn’t what we think of our planning – or even what you think of our planning. It’s what your users think.
That’s why we are passionate about putting our prototypes in front of users and getting honest feedback about them. Do they work? Are they confusing? Can users perform the required tasks quickly and easily? User testing is the simplest and best way to cut through opinions and get to real answers – ensuring your stunning web or app designs are built on a solid foundation of outstanding user experience.
Design never stands still, and any brand investing in a new site wants it to look and feel contemporary. But the philosophy behind website design should stand the test of time.
At Cyberlation, we have a clear philosophy: websites should combine human-centered design and strong storytelling with a clear focus on supporting business goals and driving action.
We believe that discovering and serving the needs of human users – your brand’s audience – is the single most valuable thing a website design company can do for you as a partner.
But to be clear, we don’t believe in putting feel-good interactions ahead of the bottom line.
Brands are increasingly competing on customer experience even more than price or product. Our job is to deliver that great experience and keep you competitive. But it’s also our job to combine the art of great design with the science of driving conversions and encouraging the right actions at the right time.
We know you’re not just looking for an amazing designer (although we have those). You’re choosing a partner to help guide you through the process and realize your business goals. And we’re passionate about a collaborative process that uncovers your brand’s story and ensures that story told in the most compelling way possible.
That just leaves the question: are our designs good? While you’re here, check out our case studies and decide for yourself.
A People-Centered Philosophy
Design trends come and go. Cyberlation has been around long enough to see skeuomorphic design, flat design, parallax, long scroll pages, brutalism, drop shadows, mobile design, Flash animation, and the rise and fall (and rise again) of the gradient. We keep up with the trends, but we try to see past them and focus on people.
Before we’ve even designed a pixel, we’re seeking to understand our users and make decisions based on how they think and what they want. That means audience research and a robust digital strategy is an integral part of our web design process.
As a web design agency, we know how easy it is to be so focused on selling your wares that your audience gets sidelined. But if you’re going to ask people to reach deeper into their pockets or take a chance on your brand, meeting them on their terms is how you get there. That’s why now more than ever, any brand needs a website that caters to the user and provides real human experiences.
A Story-Driven Approach
When we’re designing for people, it’s important to remember people are storytellers. Sharing and listening to stories is part of what makes us human, and all great brand experiences begin with storytelling.
What does it mean to tell stories in a visual context? Storytelling is much more than writing lengthy copy or clever one-liners. Every aspect of a website, from design language and image selection to content and user experience, comes together to either tell the story or distract from it.
Every brand has its own story, but at the heart of every brand story is the brand’s promise to its customers. Are you promising fun and excitement? A safe pair of hands? From that core promise, every picture, every icon, every page, and every point of interaction needs to advance that perception and develop your story.
Best practices are important and our gifted designers know them backwards – especially the usability standards required to achieve Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance. But even if best practices drive a conversion, but they won’t truly create a relationship. Real customers are made when their loyalty is earned. If your brand isn’t giving users that kind of experience, your competitors get the chance to pick up the slack.
A Partnership Mentality
Cyberlation started out as a website design agency many years ago, and we’ve designed websites for big brands and rising startups alike. We’ve seen the evolution towards more audience-focused websites – and helped brands move with these changes as they happen.
Whether you’re building a website for a new business or you’re ready for a redesign, our team of web designers can help you show off your brand. We live in a mobile-first world, and we wouldn’t dream of starting a website without responsive designs for mobile, tablet, and desktop.
We get that redesigning a website is a big step for many businesses. There are big design decisions to make and many stakeholders’ views to consider.
How you’re guided through the process is almost as important as what’s ultimately designed.
We take an iterative, dialogue-based approach to design, exploring ideas and directions and leaving ample time and space for feedback and refinement. You’ll get a clear sense of what your options are and how they affect the overall design. And we’ll help guide the conversation to generate the most valuable,relevant feedback possible from your wider team.
Cyberlation is more than an award-winning website design company. We’re a true digital partner who helps brands make deeper connections with your audience and accelerate growth.
Building an app for your brand isn’t about filling a missing channel. It’s about giving your customers a richer experience that puts their needs and motivations first.
Mobile technology has taken over the world, and it’s not done growing. Tablets and phones have become some of the most critical channels for brands to engage with their customers.
That doesn’t mean that an app is right for everyone. Mobile web design has come a long way, and websites offer versatility that apps can’t always match. Also, new mobile apps can be hard to discover, which means you need to be prepared to market an app robustly.
But if your app has a valuable job to do and the right support behind it, it can be an incredibly powerful tool for your brand. It might even achieve the holy grail – daily use and engagement by your target audience.
As with any design work we do, at Cyberlation we take a human-centric approach to app design that involves getting to know your users in depth. An app is a tool, and we spend a lot of time designing not just the look and feel, but the cues and interactions that inform and guide users.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t also have fun – we also spend time thinking about the little touches that will surprise and delight people, creating moments that express your brand’s personality and keep your app fresh and interesting to use.
Built for Your Brand
Before our talented designers start thinking about how to approach your app design, we begin a deep discovery process that includes stakeholder interviews, business data research, and prioritization of your brand’s objectives. It’s critical for us to understand what you intend to accomplish with your app, and what actions you want your users to take.
It’s also important for us to explore what your team likes, or doesn’t like, in the design of other apps, so we can gather direction and gain inspiration. We like to open a dialogue from the very beginning of the design process, to ensure we understand your needs and expectations and can give good advice about how best to meet them.
Created For Users
It’s been a decade since apps were introduced to the mobile market. Over that time, apps have changed dramatically. As user behavior, preferences, and expectations have evolved, so has the thinking and execution behind app design – being human-centric and focused on users’ needs is now make or break for brands entering the space.
During our app design process, we do extensive audience research in order to understand how an app can solve your customers’ problems. Our goal? To create personas and example user journeys built on data, user interviews, user testing, and competitor analysis.
This thinking is what connects the app’s design, messaging, and task flows into a seamless experience, encouraging loyal customers to engage day after day.
Designed for Engagement
Apps work best when designers get out of the way of what users want to do, so naturally, we design with that critical point in mind. Above all else, it’s important to design interactions that make tasks easy for users to understand and execute, which also helps to streamline app development.
But that doesn’t mean the imagination has no place: an app should be enjoyable to spend time with, too. That’s why our designers are always looking for places where accomplishing a task can add a little moment of joy to a user’s day – and create a positive interaction that builds loyalty to your brand.
Many sites give customers a way to make a purchase. What’s harder to deliver is a great experience across the entire digital journey, from discovery to purchasing decision.
As online competition increases, margin pressures grow, and your audience becomes more and more discriminating, effective eCommerce website design becomes critical.
There are best practices in eCommerce, but no magic formulas. Success requires a delicate balance of business savvy, brand strategy, user experience, content, and intuitive design. Getting it right means finding your “sweet spot” – as well as a willingness to test constantly, so you can iterate and learn.
When you partner with Cyberlation, our years of eCommerce experience are just a starting point. We apply an in-depth, problem-solving approach to your brand and business challenges. We don’t just check boxes to deliver a digital storefront – we help you create experiences that drive your brand forward.
Experience Is Everything
In the offline world, a sales team can walk customers through the sale; online, this experience is left in your customer’s hands. That makes it all the more critical to have an ecommerce website that matches (or better yet, improves on) a customer’s offline experience.
It’s through great experiences that users become customers and customers become brand champions. Creating an engaging and meaningful shopping experience is about building a relationship with your audience – and building enough trust to turn browsers into buyers.
Beyond the Storefront
Customers and prospects expect a lot from your site, and there are undeniable eCommerce website must-haves. Useful, engaging content. Effective ways of engaging with products. Convenient checkout. Clean design and consistent branding. Organization and navigation that work for both search engines and people.
But following best practices can only take you so far, and a user-friendly digital storefront is only half the equation. The other half is deeply understanding what your audience needs and delivering a shopping experience that educates, actively solves problems and meets objections, and makes your brand truly memorable.
In many cases, an eCommerce site isn’t just a new channel, but a first step towards digital transformation at scale. For a site to work as advertised, offline processes must often be intelligently reimagined and digitized in ways that meet carefully defined business requirements.
Does your business typically fulfill large orders or small ones? Do you introduce new products every year or every week? What is your discounting and promotional strategy? What products are usually bundled or re-ordered? These questions aren’t curiosities: they’re mission-critical (or should be).
Built To Sell (And Scale)
As experts in eCommerce, we take pride in eCommerce website development that sets up brands for digital growth at scale, while ensuring customers are getting the unique experience they demand. And when these two things come together, good things usually happen. We attack the eCommerce challenge from both sides, not only stepping into the shoes of your customer, but also getting to know your business in a way that makes us a true digital partner.
When you work with us, we put together a user-focused strategy, partner with you to define your online sales process, and deliver a website that creates a bespoke digital experience, from front-end features to back-end functionality.
And we believe that if you’re not testing, improving the user experience, and exploring technologies like personalization and AR/VR, chances are you’re leaving money on the table. Launching a new eCommerce website is only the beginning of the journey – and, we hope, your partnership with us.
