Insight Of The Week

Failure to understand the identity/niche of a company interferes with sense-making, creates anxiety, and impacts on trust.

What does this mean for your customers? When brand identity or your value proposition is unclear and users cannot clearly understand what you are offering, users are more inclined to abandon the website without fully engaging and this will ultimately affect conversion rates.

Usually brand identity is seen through a marketer or designer’s lens and watching your customers interacting with your website can shed light on whether or not this brand identity is resonating. 

When one can’t easily identify and articulate what a website does it’s also difficult to build a feeling of trust for the company and their offering. What are the company values? Is this a reputable and reliable brand? At the end of the day you want customers to be able to say they trust you and can articulate what sets you apart from similar websites.

As we go through life our brains naturally try to parse information in a way that creates a deeper level of understanding. When we first arrive on a website we get frustrated when our brains have to struggle to make sense of a brand identity, vague visual concepts or confusing information that is not necessarily where we would expect to find it. This increases anxiety and often leads to a potential customer ending their journey prematurely. The greater the effort involved in parsing information, the more fatigued a customer will quickly become.

Testing the website with a range of demographics can quickly highlight which groups are giving the website more favourable scores for NPS (would customers be likely to recommend you) and SUS (ease and smoothness of the experience).

With user testing we can identify any issues or disconnects early and pinpoint your true demographic which may be different to your perceived demographic. We can also use moderated sessions to explore the step-by-step process of brand engagement and identify exactly how testers engage with the branding, where and why they develop incorrect understandings of the company, website, app and services. It means we can also trace the cascade of sense-making issues that occur when they fail to understand your brand identity and value proposition.

This provides you with a unique opportunity to either tweak your website to suit the original demographic or to embrace the reality and rather tweak your branding/brand statement to cater to the alternate demographic.