CampusPress reccommends SMILE for UK HE website projects
SMILE are now endorsed by CampusPress - the leading supplier of WordPress hosting to the HE sector globally.
UX (User Experience)
User Experience Design (UX) is the practice of delivering effective online experiences. The result is a meaningful interaction for your users and better conversion rates for you.
Intuitive online experiences are successful ones. Whatever the purpose of your online presence, competition is often high. This is no truer than in the education sector. Universities, in particular, have found themselves needing to work harder to stand out from the crowd. Making life easy for your users can help position you above the competition.
Placing real people at the centre of your developments is key. This begins with a series of questions. Put simply, who are your users? What content are they looking for? And how do those users behave online? This insight helps to produce design systems backed in evidence.
Over the last decade, our design tools and processes have been refined to keep real people in focus throughout. Up-front processes give us the insight to benchmark against. As wireframes, user journeys and mockups are produced, they are validated.
Validation comes in many forms, but user testing is often the most insightful. Common practices include card sorts, tree tests, interviews and remote user tests. Remote user tests are particularly useful for testing user experience (UX). A set of tasks is set to an impartial panel. The test gives our design team the evidence and opportunity to refine designs. And all of this before a single line of code is written. When conversion is imperative, these small refinements can make all the difference.
Do you have questions about our processes? Are you interested to know how insight could help to improve your conversation rates? Get in touch today.
How we helped Falmouth University restructure their homepage and navigation
We embarked upon a project of research and recommendation, to focus on homepage and global navigation suggestions.
Redesigning a College Website Using Gutenberg Blocks
Bradford College is the first SMILE project designed and built to take full advantage of WordPress' new Gutenberg Editor. Jon Bates spoke to the key SMILE team members behind this project to find out more.
Helping the University of Sunderland calculate scholarships
As a long time supplier for the University of Sunderland, they approached us with an idea to reinvent the way that prospective students are able to calculator available scholarships.
A new morleycollege.ac.uk
We've been working with Morley College and Hunterlodge Advertising to launch a brand new morleycollege.ac.uk! We're excited to show you all this new project that we've been working on.
The difference between the needs of the user and stakeholder opinions and how feedback can affect a project
When it comes to redesigning a flagship website, a prospectus, or virtually anything that requires design input, there is a 99% chance that the client will have an opinion and thoughts to feedback (rightly so, they are paying for it).…
Back-end UX and why it is equally important as the front-end in WordPress
This article provides insight into why you should pay equal attention to backend user experiences (UX) and interfaces compared to the frontend in WordPress.
Finding inspiration for your UI/UX projects
It could also be that your designs feel dated, in which case you need to refresh your design sense to create some fresh interfaces. Most user interface projects tend to be chaotic from the onset, which is usually due to…
Why is prototyping so important in designing new web properties for HE?
We recently wrote about our chosen design system - UXPin. One of the reasons we chose UXPin is its prototyping power. In this article, we'll take a look at how prototyping has evolved and the value it now brings to our educational clients.
What is Voice User Interface and how is it evolving the way we communicate with technology?
Communication between a computer and humans have always been unnatural - typing to get a response isn't the most intuitive method of conveying commands/instructions as opposed to the ease of using voice. The introduction of speech recognition technology aims to bridge the gap of communication - where computers can make sense of certain phrases and sentences.