How Does Graphic Design Impact User Experience on My Website?
By Natasha Gayle | SEO Specialist, BGD Digital Marketing
July 19, 2021
Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes
Graphic design is an important part of how you communicate with people, and it can connect everything in your marketing strategy, creating not only more customers for your business but advocates for your brand.
It displays what you have to offer in a beautiful and clear way!
Let’s try a quick visual exercise for a moment. Stop and think about your favorite brands…
Nike
Google
Disney
What do you see?
Do you see a product? A logo? A person? A pair of mouse ears?
Odds are that whatever you see, it’s something you closely associate with that brand because they’ve done a great job incorporating it into their marketing (their website, their products, their social platforms, etc.). And they’ve used graphic design to do that.
Below, we’ll talk about some of the ways graphic design impacts user experience and give you ideas for how you can incorporate it into your marketing!
3 Ways Graphic Design Impacts User Experience
1. It’s Your First Impression
Have you ever met someone for the first time, only to have made a really bad first impression? Maybe it was something you said. An awkward question you asked. Seeds stuck in your teeth from that Everything Bagel you ate that morning.
Whatever made the bad first impression, you probably couldn’t forget it easily.
The same can be said of your graphic design and brand.
If users come to your website and see something like this:
What emotions do you think they will experience?
Anxiety
Skepticism
Distrust
Confusion
I mean, after looking at this site, would you trust their advice on how to design and rearrange your home?
Your graphic design is the first thing people see about you and the first thing you’re communicating about yourself! It can and will affect how people view you and your business.
Now let’s compare and look at a site that has great graphic design:
Source: Say Cheese P’mento
Notice the difference? Such an amazing contrast between the two examples!
2. It’s How You Communicate
People are visual.
Source: Thermopylae Sciences + Technology
It’s no wonder I can’t remember most of my history lessons from school growing up. It’s harder to retain the information without any visualization!
If you want to help people process and retain the information you have to give them, you need to focus on ways you can do that visually.
One of my favorite quotes from Albert Einstein is: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t know it well enough.”
How can you simplify your message and add those visual elements to your website, your emails, your social media posts? Do that and you will communicate more effectively with users.
3. It’s Comforting
Graphic design is like that hot (or iced) cup of coffee in the morning. It’s familiar, it’s comforting, and it’s necessary to get through the day.
Your graphic design is a key component of your brand. When you create consistent, visual elements for your website, social platforms, and other business assets, you help your customers know it’s you every time.
That familiarity is comforting to people.
Do your favorite brands do that for you? Are you comforted when you come across their brand on social media or online somewhere? If you want your customers to feel the same way, create that brand experience for them so they can!
How Does BGD Digital Marketing Approach Graphic Design?
Our goal with our graphic design is to provide our clients with a sustainable brand that will grow their business.
Before we design anything, we have an entire strategic building process to get to know your company, your goals, and any existing assets you already have. Then we identify how the current design (logo, website, infographics, etc.) is not meeting your goals so that when we design something, it meets your company goals now, in 5 years, in 10 years, and so on and so forth.
So many graphic designers want to create something that is on trend, but that doesn’t help build your brand narrative and it’s not sustainable.
We want to provide you with something that will last and stay true to who you are as a company.
