Product designers (nowadays intended as digital product designers, while physical product designers are more commonly called industrial designers) are some of the most sought-after professionals by tech companies today. But, despite the popularity, there is a lot of confusion around what this role is about, and I believe it’s impossible to give an exact definition, considering that every company has slightly different responsibilities and requirements attached to this position.

I heard a lot of people saying product designer is just a new more trendy and siliconvalleyish way of calling a UX designer. I do not agree. I think a product designer is a more horizontal position compared to a UX designer. A product designer should take care of, or at least be involved in, all the steps of the creation of a digital product.

The skills of a digital product designer

Even though this is a transdisciplinary role, it doesn’t mean that a product designer should be able to do everything alone. It should know at least a little bit of everything though.

Here is an example of the skillset of a hypothetic product designer:

The height of each bar can be different for every individual, of course.
Let’s take a look at what each one of those represents and why it is important.

Business

Design is not art. Ultimately design has to be sold. To do so, the first step in each project is research. Research on the market, on competitors, on target users and the feasibility of the project, you can have the craziest ideas, but in the end, you’ll have to stick to a certain budget.

To come up with concepts that make sense to pursue, it’s important to know what the market is, what are the chances of your product to succeed. You can even consider doing a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats).

Strategy should be one of the core skills of a product designer.

UX Design

Even though in the chart above UX is just one of the columns, it actually spills over many others. Usability, accessibility, information architecture, good wireframing are the basics of any project. After researching the market and the target users, in this phase the product designer defines personas, users journeys, understand pain points and find opportunities.

IxD (Interaction Design)

A product designer should have a good understanding of how HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) works. Some possible questions to answer: what gesture could trigger this action? Is this going to be a modal, a drawer or something else? Is this contextual menu triggered by a double-tap or a long press? Etc.

UI Design

The aesthetic-usability effect is the “tendency to perceive attractive products as more usable. People tend to believe that things that look better will work better — even if they aren’t actually more effective or efficient”.

In Italy, we say “anche l’occhio vuole la sua parte”, which is hard to translate literally, but it basically means “looks matter”.

Copywriting

Text can be both in the UI (UX writing) and in the content (Copywriting). A text can be the label of an icon, a CTA inside a button or anywhere it’s needed to help users through a particular flow. As much as UI, motion and sounds it helps to set the tone of the product.

Motion Design

It’s not enough for things to look good, they also need to move in the right way. Movement is important not only to please the eye and delight users, but also to provide feedback, to clarify hierarchy, to enhance interactions and make them memorable.

Also, microinteractions (for example animated icons) are a very important component of today’s products.

Sound Design

This often goes together with motion. Sounds can also provide feedback and they can set the mood of the product, along with UI. UI, motion, and sound should work well together in perfect harmony.

Product designers don’t need to be musicians or sound designers, but they should be able to understand where a sound is needed and what kind of sound fits best in that particular case.

Coding

I wrote a full article on this topic. To sum it up: no, you don’t need to be able to write code, but having a basic understanding of how code works can be REALLY helpful, to understand the feasibility of a project and to talk with developers and give them the right feedback.

On this topic, I’m reading right now a very interesting book by John Maeda, called “How to speak machine”.

Content Design

I won’t annoy you with the usual “content is king” (Bill Gates) thing, but yea, of course, depending on the kind of product, content plays a key role. The product designer should also understand and define not only what’s the best way to present content inside the app/website, but also what this content is and how to design it.

Marketing

The life of a product heavily depends on marketing (among other things). Marketing can be the tool to drive the critical mass that makes the difference between a success and a failure. This should start to tickle the interest of the target users even before the product is out in the wild, and then push it as high as possible, the sky’s the limit. If a product is not marketable, there must be something fundamentally wrong in its concept and/or execution.

ASO/SEO

ASO (App Store Optimization) is the app-world version of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Grasping at least the basics of these could make a huge difference. ASO is not just about keywords and description, but also sizzle reel, icon and screenshots.

User Testing and Analytics

User testing can come into play way before the product is out. It can be used to test a particular feature or interaction, a component and more. Depending on the methodology you could have or not user testing, maybe you release and MVP and test with real users a limited version of your app on which you then iterate future releases. In this case it’s important to be able to read and understand analytics, find what is working and what is not based on data and charts and come up with improvements.

An orchestra conductor

The product designer shouldn’t be a one-man-band taking care of all the above alone, but she/he should be the conductor of an orchestra of specialists.

She/he can take care of one or more aspects of the app creation, if she/he has the right skill set to do so, but has to get the support of a team for all the rest.

To complete the chart above, the relationship could something like this, with each vertical role covering where the product designer alone can’t reach with her/his skills:

As I mentioned in the beginning, it’s hard to give an exact definition as the role has a very blurred perimeter, varying quite a bit from company to company, also depending on how the team is structured. But I believe the product designer should, in any case, be a horizontal figure with a wide array of skills and possibly 1 or 2 vertical ones, in what is often defined as a T-shaped role.

There is a myriad of methods out there to choose from when it comes to the product design process and development. In this article, we would like to give an overview of the steps and frameworks we consider essential and provide a toolbox you can pick ideas from when designing a Minimum Viable Product, which is the first version of a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers, create value and provide feedback for future development.

The ideal product design process can vary depending on different factors, such as the project scope, the size of the company, budget, deadlines — just to mention a few. In a good design process, the business requirements meet the user needs, which are satisfied within the feasible technical possibilities.

Even UX studio’s product designers don’t have just one, crystal clear and always followable guide for design processes. We all see the necessity of getting together from time to time and share our experience and knowledge acquired from different projects and clients with each other, so we can improve our processes effectively, meeting the requirements and demands of the market.

We encourage an Agile style of work, working in design sprints, but we are flexible. Should you need help with product design, fill out our contact form and let’s discuss how we can help you.

Steps of a user-centered product design process

The Double Diamond is a product design process with four phases: Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver. The product design process starts with a “diverging phase” of the diamond, a problem, and topic discovery. We do not define anything yet, but we step back a little and open our minds to new insights.

The second part of the diamond — Develop and Deliver — mainly feeds from the product discovery findings. However, the Discover-Develop tracks can also run in simultaneously and support and feed into one another at regular intervals, so this is not a linear process.

Step 1: Product discovery – What problem we want to solve and for whom

Product discovery is the preliminary phase of every human-centred product design process, and its purpose is to base the product idea on real demand.

However, carrying out research is important not just at the beginning, but during the project as well, whenever there are too many open questions and uncertainties. Validating ideas helps us to avoid burning money and waste time.

We need to reach out to both the stakeholders and the users to explore the problem (and opportunity) space and find the real pain points we want solutions for.

There are two frequently used product discovery activities we’ll be looking into a bit more:

• Workshops (e.g. kick-off workshops),
• Exploratory research; user research 
  (Market research findings are also important. We don’t do this one, but if you’re curious about the differences between user and market research, check out this article.)

Kick-off workshops
Meet the client, understand the current state of the project and the additional knowledge needed.

Workshop techniques are great for acquiring domain knowledge in a topic and get acquainted with the stakeholders. To create the first draft of our roadmap, we start every project with a kick-off workshop that usually takes about one to two days. At this time, we get to know the company, its processes, and roles and gather all information we can about the project.

If the client already has some quantitative and qualitative data about the market, client segmentation, competitors, target group, buyer personas, we go through them, make a common understanding of the objectives and facts, and build assumptions and hypotheses.

The more variety of expertise involved in the workshops, the more insights we can utilize from different stakeholders of the company. It’s important to understand experiences on previous solutions and key business objectives (such as KPIs, success criteria). 

Kick-off workshop techniques frequently used by us:
/Note: At this point, most of the workshop deliverables are assumptive, and that’s fine because we’re going to research what we need to validate or change.

• Assumption matrix: We collect the stakeholders’ beliefs about different topics, find the most important, high-risk “leap of faith assumptions” so we can validate these with research and find out if they’re real.
• Persona and/or Jobs-To-Be-Done workshop: Assumptive personas are our best guesses on who will use the product and why. It helps us to recruit for interviews and for the client to empathize with their future users.
• Customer journey workshop: These workshops help us get a view on how people navigate through the product or service. It is also an excellent opportunity for knowledge sharing with our clients.
• Value Proposition workshop: We map out the perception of the value of the product identified by users.  We also validate assumptions and thus Value Proposition for each customer segment. This provides vision and guides the design.
• Brand Vision, Mission, and Values: The best way to reveal the vision is by asking the brand’s key personnel why it was created. For every answer, they provide, make it hard on them, and keep asking why. After a few rounds of whys, we get to the heart of the matter.

At the end of the kick-off workshops, we should have a clear overview of what we don’t know but should do so we can create a research plan to kickstart our discovery.

If you’d like to know more about how to organize a kick-off workshop, check out this article.

Research
There are a couple of research methods out there; however, in the discovery phase of a product design process, we don’t aim to evaluate possible solutions yet as that comes later with usability tests. Still, we may already have assumptions to validate, and we certainly need to have a well-defined topic and a target group that is interested in our topic. At the same time, it’s crucial to keep an open mind to be able to discover entirely new aspects and problems of our audience.

Of course, the research method that requires the least experience and professional knowledge is desk research, available for anyone who has a computer with internet access, an account for social platforms and some time to dig up the pain-points of online communities, find opinions and reviews shared in social platforms, forums, mailing lists, or blog comments.

Diary study can also be useful in some cases, or, if you want to gather data on a larger scale, you can use online surveys — preferably with a mixture of open-ended and closed questions — that can be used with qualitative insights from other methods.

Research methods we frequently use:

• Semi-structured User interview is the method we use most frequently in the discovery phase, as it’s relatively easy to organize and provides great insights into exploration. The 10-15 interviews we start with usually provide enough insights to move forward. We try to recruit interviewees from each segment/target group we defined earlier and involve the stakeholders in writing the interview script.
  Our researchers evaluate the previous results before each interview and iterate the questions to get the most useful answers from the remaining interviews. If it’s necessary and our collaboration has the resources, we do follow-up interviews to dig deeper into sub-topics. 
• Field research is among the most reliable methods as it is based on observing user behavior in their environment. But for this very reason, it’s also harder to organize and conduct without influencing the users’ behavior and interfering with the natural way of executing their daily tasks.
• Competitive research can also be applied, as it’s very likely that by this point, the product team already gathered the main direct and indirect competitors from stakeholder meetings and user interviews. More knowledge about successful competitors can aid us with feature ideas or design inspirations and can help us to position our client’s product. Even if there is no in-depth competitive research, we should at least maintain a competitor list in a collaborative spreadsheet or any cloud-based tool. 

Step 2: Narrow down – Define

This step is about making sense of the data, synthesizing them, choosing one main goal to solve, figuring out the “How” and the “What”.

By the end of the discovery phase, we are likely to have enough insight to synthesize our findings, refine our previous assumptive deliverables or create new ones by user analysis, define the core problem we want to solve, build themes, and deduce potential fields of action. 

There are many synthesizing activities to use, such as:

• User personas
• Jobs-to-be-done
• How might we
• User stories
• Storyboards and scenarios

These exercises can be used at various points of the product design process; at the very beginning, in an assumptive way, it can help with synthesizing the research data and define the project scope, but it can also be applied when ideating about solutions. The when and how really depends on the team, project, and available insights. In the following section, we focus on the methods we use the most.

User Personas
These are fictional (yet realistic) representatives, archetypes of our key user groups with certain goals and characteristics. We use personas to help us understand and map out the main segments of our users, with their different goals, and motivations. We can also use them to help us empathize with them in order to make a more suitable product.

At UX Studio, we do create assumptive, theoretical persona mock-ups at kick-off meetings. If provided, we can use already existing research data (e.g., survey results, built buyer personas, or other related market research findings) to start off with, but at this point in the design process, our personas should be validated and based on real user research data.

How we create personas:
There are many contradictory opinions out there about whether it’s good to give names and faces to personas, or if demographic data is relevant if it needs to be printed or should include an empathy map, and so on. This is how we usually do it:

• You would rarely need to go above 3-5 personas, but the number highly depends on the project scope and product type; the broader the target audience, the more persona you may need. However, it’s better to iterate on categorization to avoid having too many personas as it can jeopardize your design process in the long term (it’s pretty hard to design for too many people with different sets of characteristics)
• We don’t spend hours and days creating stylish persona posters to hang them on the wall because we know they’ll change and get refined, so there is no point to waste hours with this analog process.

• Our persona sheets include goals, motivations, frustrations, behavior patterns, background, and context-specific details (details relevant based on the project, e.g., which mobile platform they use). We also add a profile image, name, some personal details, and demographic data to help with building more empathy and make them easier to remember.

There are plenty of methods for synthesizing information, but we only dig deeper into the ones we use most frequently. You can find a few related, downloadable templates here.

Jobs-to-be-done
JTBD is another framework we can use to find out more about the users’ needs and preferences. It is absolutely compatible with user personas, so often used together.

The personas focus more on the users’ behavior and attitude, thus helps with empathizing and segmenting the different types of users, while the JTBD places a more significant emphasis on features, aims to discover the purpose why people ‘hire’ a product in order to solve a specific problem and fulfill a need.

A famous JTBD example is about McDonalds milkshake. When the company wanted to increase the profit on their milkshake product, they first started interviews with representatives of their persona groups, the customer types they knew to be the main milkshake consumers.

The researchers tested the temperature, the viscosity, and the sweetness of the milkshake with this group, but they couldn’t find out what the problem was and how they should improve the product.

So they tried another approach; started observing and interviewing consumers onsite, in McDonald’s restaurants. It turned out that people bought milkshakes mainly to keep them full till lunch and entertained them for the whole journey of driving to work.

As a result, McDonald’s made the shake thicker to last longer while commuting and moved the milkshake machine from behind the counter to the front, where the customers could easily and rapidly buy a milkshake with a prepaid card when rushing to work, avoiding the queues. Solving the real job-to-be-done, resulted in a sevenfold increase in the sales of the milkshake.

“How Might We”
The HMW exercise is a great way to narrow down problems and to discover possible opportunity areas.

We are not looking for exact executions on solutions here yet, but rather brainstorm, explore questionable areas of one core challenge while keeping an open mindset for innovative thinking.

For this to work, first, we need a clear vision or goal, a Point-Of-View statement that is made based on a deeper user need discovery. The POW should be human-centred, neither too narrow, to sustain creative freedom when brainstorming, nor too broad, so it remains manageable.

For defining the POW statement, your previously made personas and jobs-to-be-done (as a result of your user’s need discovery) come in handy. By synthesizing the essential needs to fulfill, you can make a template like this to create your statement:

In short: 

[User . . . (descriptive)] needs [Need . . . (verb)] because [Insight . . . (compelling)]
Once you have the POW statement, you are ready to form short questions that can launch brainstorming on actionable ideas. For example:
How might we…? 

In What Ways Might We….?

What’s stopping us from…?

In what ways could we…?

What would happen if…?

Then you may ask follow-up questions on the previous questions to examine the angles a bit deeper.
By completing HMW sessions, we can get one step closer to forming ideas about exact solutions and executing the best solution.

Look and feel, mood boards, branding
Of course, at this point, we’re far from creating high-fidelity prototypes and design systems, but it’s important to set a couple of broad, basic directions to have a general idea of where we’re heading and keep nurturing the creative imagination as we progress in the design process.

Depending on how many designers working on a project, you can share the workload and either work on the same design or split up the tasks and progress simultaneously (e.g., one does the prototyping and the other building the design system and hi-fi part).

At this point, we should have a condensed brief of research findings, a strategy, and a clear idea about what problem we want to solve.

Step 3: Brainstorm solutions, define and prioritize features.

The tips and techniques mentioned here can be done or can at least be started way before this step; remember, this is not a linear process and you may use these techniques in a different order at different times of the project timeline.

The developing/ideation phase begins when we have a good understanding of the project goals, and we narrowed down what we want to solve first.
(Note: by development, we don’t mean any code-related development yet). 

If there are still open questions about what features we should start with, the Kano model and Impact-Effort Matrix could serve us well.

User journeys/customer journeys
Both customer journeys and user journeys are tools for mapping out the flows users go through, using a service or an application with one specific task to carry out.

Customer journeys/experience maps encounter the online and offline aspects of the users’ flow, providing a more holistic view of the process. As the output, the customer journey diagram basically lays out a big table. The columns of the table represent different phases or steps a customer goes through.

These can be unique in every project, but most customer journeys contain three phases: before, during, and after the usage of our product.

These can be unique in every project, but most customer journeys contain three phases: before, during and after the usage of our product.

As opposed to customer journeys, user journeys analyze a smaller part of the journey, focusing only on what happens in the application; for example, during a sign-up process. At UX Studio, we mainly use user journeys, but for longer projects with a bigger scope, especially if there is already existing user data about the customers and there is a journey that goes beyond application usage (e.g., arriving at the airport and using a ticket machine software), the customer journey is the preferred tool.

How we do user journeys: 

• To start off, determine the two or three most important goals to achieve with your product. Every journey must have a task, a motivation, and context.
• It’s also good to include a simplified empathy map nested within the journey map, indicating what emotional reaction the user has to each step. These are good indicators for us to which points we should handle with extra care and improve on. These emotions can be assumptive but also based on solid data we gathered from our product discovery and research before. Use your personas.
• Creating user journeys is still part of the experimental phase, so we encourage you not to stop with one idea but try out different paths, reorder the steps, complete the ideas, and explore. 
• You want to find many different versions for each journey, as sometimes there are great first ideas, but oftentimes these are not the best solutions. For this reason, create at least three different journeys for each goal. Then, once you come up with several solutions, decide on the winner.

User stories
User story creation is a good way to define features with stakeholders. What we want to accomplish in the product, why, and as what kind of user. It helps us stay focused on what features are necessary and what could lead to a “feature creep.”

High-level example:
As a sales agent, I want to turn more leads into customers so I can increase my income.
And a more detailed version of the example above:

As a sales agent, I want to keep track of unprocessed hot leads so I can make sure I don’t miss out on an ‘easy’ deal.

We can do it in several ways and styles, if we do it with developers, it may become more technical and scrum-oriented.

Building the IA, sketching and wireframing
Building an Information Architecture is basically the blueprint of the design structure, the foundation of our first wireframes. IA is formed by creating a hierarchy and categorization of the information that results in a coherent, meaningful, navigable system. How we sort out the features, functions, and available data in our product will have a great impact on the user experience.

Our best intentions with features can diminish if users don’t find them.
Card sorting is a great technique to validate our IA. You can do it on paper, but there are online tools that you can use, such as Optimal Workshop.

Sketching
You may start sketching way earlier, right at the beginning when the first problems gain their shapes. Sketching is great not only to serve as the base when building something but also to help understand a problem and share ideas within the team.

Sketching on paper, where complex interfaces and functions of the software don’t limit or distract us, is an effective and rapid way to explore ideas and spot any design problems early on.

We don’t need to be skillful sketch artists or graphic designers who can draw and paint photo-realistically. The point here is not to create a refined artifact, but to focus on single ideas, flows, and possible layouts, and use simple placeholder boxes for images and text. It’s about exploring ideas of execution, so no need to worry about the copy yet.

It’s very recommended to showcase these first sketches and wireframes to the developers and other team members at an early stage because they can assist us with information on what is feasible technically, which saves us from unnecessary rework.

A blank paper and a pencil are all you need, but if you’d like some guidance, you can download sketch mockup sheets from here.
The output, a wireframe, is basically the skeleton of our upcoming prototypes — a barebone, static structure that will soon evolve to a refined design. Wireframes can be made on digital platforms as well using tools such as Axure, Adobe XD, Sketch, Figma, or even Photoshop.

At this point, you should have the concept, the “what to do”, and the strategy of how to prioritize. We have the definition of our MVP, the core features, the core problem we want to solely focus on. 

If you are searching for the most suitable UX agency, contact us, and let’s see how our UX experts can help you with your current challenge.

Step 4: Narrow down – Deliver

Prototype, test, iterate, implement.
This phase is all about doing the right thing in the right way, reaching our goal, refining our MVP, and implementing the solutions. 

Low-fidelity Prototyping
Making our ideas tangible with quick prototypes and test them out as soon as you can save a ton of time and resources. For the sake of definition, what we call a prototype here is a modest-looking clickable digital product that resembles the features we aim to develop, but in a simplified way.

Paper prototypes exist too, but we prefer the freedom and opportunities only digital solutions can provide. The goal here is to find out the usability issues before starting the detailed designs to avoid burning time and doing reworks.

How we build prototypes:

• We mainly use Axure for interactive low-fi protos. With Axure, you can add dynamic elements, Javascript, create databases, which are uniquely complex features in the world of prototyping tools.
• There are always three essential questions the user needs to be able to answer on every screen you design: Where am I? What can I do here? How can I move forward?
• Forget lorem ipsum and be scarce with dummy text. A sensible, contextual, guiding copy is just as important as visual hierarchy and affordances.
• Follow UI patterns and keep best practices in mind (a couple of great resources of inspiration: Mobbin, Muzli, UI patterns).
• Keep it simple. We’re testing the usability of layouts, key user flows, and navigation at this point. Don’t test refined visuals yet, unless it’s not an MVP and you are testing already existing features in a live product.
• Design for mobile first if the project allows you.

Create the first protos as soon as you can and evaluate them for usability tests. Refine your prototype iteratively after every usability test until you’re confident that you ruled out every major usability risk. (And of course, later on, continue usability testing before and during every new feature.)

High-fidelity prototyping
Now that you have the base of a usable product, it’s time to make the whole thing sexy by adding the visual attributes, colors, icons, shadows, and images and refine the look and feel. The product’s design language has to be in harmony with the target audience and should be aligned with the brand’s vision. When testing the high-fidelity prototypes, visual elements are also important, and it leads to creating a stable, harmonized design system that you can rely on. 

Quick tips for hi-fi prototypes:

• We mainly use Figma, Sketch, or Adobe XD in UX studio, however, the choice often depends on the preferences of the client’s team and the technical requirements. 
• Create and maintain a design system based on brand guidelines and vision. Design systems facilitate effective collaborative work, alleviates decision fatigue, and assist designers in keeping consistency throughout the product. Even if it’s an MVP, you’ll be wanting to scale up your product if everything goes right, so building a design system is inevitable at some point when managing a successful product design process. It’s better to start building it sooner than later. 
• Some tools, like Figma, have a built-in collaborative feature (that sadly Sketch still lacks), but Abstract also can be a great complimentary software for version control and storing files in the cloud. We export our design files to Zeplin for the developers.

Ideating and prototyping should be an iterated process, such as continuous discovery with user research beyond MVPs.

Takeaways

Launching the MVP product doesn’t mean the job is done, and the product design process is over. Testing and designing should be an ongoing, iterative process that is the key to improve the product and bring it to success. 

Follow along with the metrics; get client feedback, use analytic tools and heatmaps (such as Google Analytics, Countly, Hotjar), do A/B testing, and measure the success of your choices. 

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, this collection of ideas and steps are not set in stone, simply aimed to raise awareness of the available tools and methods to start off a product design process. The whole process becomes super iterative when working in a dynamic environment, such as agile.

The main takeaways perhaps are to make your process user-centered, apply design thinking, and execute it as a non-linear, iterated process. Do user research whenever you can to design with the people, not just for them.

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The internet is no place for a slow website. The average Google user (i.e. your customers) just won’t put up with websites that take too long to load.

Naturally, this sort of behavior is what led the search engine to include site speed as a ranking factor ever since 2010.

Of course, Google has always been good at the “carrot and stick” approach. In this case, the carrot was some simple encouragement to work on site speed (“Hey, we really want websites to be a better experience for users and you should totally work on that.), which then turned into a stick when things weren’t changing fast enough (Your site’s still too slow! Looks like new penalties for you!).

This ranking factor then also started to have an impact on the mobile algorithm, too.

And yet, despite the seven years or so that site speed has officially been a ranking factor, many websites still struggle with it.

The thing is, there are a lot of factors that act as a type of speedbump on your path to internet success. And a lot of those things are either built into the structure of the website, part of a flashy design trend, or added in as an app or widget.

It’s hard for websites to give up the flashy bits that seem so modern and, well, flashy. And it’s hard to want to dive into all that old coding or wade through all the parts of the structure that could be slowing a site down.

But there are some simple things that anyone can do to spot the major speedbumps that are in your way and clean some of them up.

What is Holding You Back?

There are a lot of things that could be weighing down your site, including:

• Huge images that remain uncompressed
• Apps and plugins that are unoptimized and not doing anything useful
• An overabundance of ads
• Too many widgets
• Ancient, unoptimized code
• Too many redirects
• Poor hosting

Why Does It Even Matter?

Site speed matters because Google wants to appease its searchers. And searchers don’t want to wait.

Google ain’t gonna help ya out if they think you can’t deliver the answers that people want as quickly as possible. They want their users to “Trust In The Algorithm,” and that means the algorithm has to deliver relevant content along with the best user experience.

A fast-loading page delivers a better user experience. It helps visitors see what you have to offer, makes it easy for them to complete order forms, and lets them navigate right over to the next possible purchase.

In other words, site speed is an integral part of user experience.

Does It Make a Difference Beyond Rankings?

There have been studies over the years that show a definite correlation between site speed and increased conversions and returns. In one case, Walmart found that they could get a 2% increase in conversions for every 1 second of site speed improvement.

Now, 1 second may not seem like a lot, but it actually when you’re talking about load times that are 4 or 5 seconds in the first place, you’re actually talking about a 25% increase. So how about this: the study also found that for every 100 milliseconds of improvement, revenues grew by up to 1%.

But what happens if we look at this from the other side. What would happen to your revenues for every 1 second of increased load time? Can you expect conversions to drop by that much?

Maybe.

It’s better if you never have to face this problem yourself, so let’s just focus on keeping websites running as fast and smoothly as possible.

How to Speed Up Your Site

Keeping the site speed as fast as possible can seem a little overwhelming at first. There are just so many variables that could be contributing to the problem.

Where would you start? What elements have the largest impact on the load speed? What can be changed to get the most immediate impact? What… is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow? (11 meters per second, but it must be one of “those” days if I’m already defaulting to Monty Python quotes….)

The simple answer is to start by going straight to the people who are judging your site. They have a very clear list of how they’ll be judging you in this respect.

You can start by heading over to PageSpeed Insights and have Google analyze your site speed. This will give you a good overview of your current situation and where you can make improvements.

Of course, this might be filled with a more technical jargon that you really want to deal with, but you can check out this page to learn more about the specifics of Google’s Speed and Usability Rules.

For now, we’ll just take a quick look at them all so you have a basic overview on the elements that contribute to site speed.

How to Improve Site Speed

Avoid landing page redirects – A redirect adds additional request-response cycles, which is just adding more work before a page can be displayed.

Enable compression on your website resources – You can reduce the size of the transferred data by up to 90%.

Find ways to improve server response time – Your server response time should be less than 200ms.

Take advantage of browser caching – Some resources can be cached by the browser to load previously downloaded resources from the local disc instead of the network.

Optimize your images – Optimized images have reduced their file size without impacting the quality to save many bytes of data.

Optimize CSS and HTML coding – External stylesheets have to be downloaded and processed, which can extend the time it takes to render the page.

Prioritize your visible content – If many trips to the network are required to render the things that appear above the fold, it can cause a problem.

Remove render blocking JavaScript – Avoid or minimize the use of JavaScript that must be fetched before it can be executed.

Use asynchronous scripts – Asynchronous scripts load more quickly, which means users don’t have to wait for a script to finish loading before the page fully renders.

There are a wide range of tools available that can help you deal with many of these things.

How to Improve Usability

Avoid plugins when possible – This has become more important with the trend towards mobile, since many of these plugins lead to hangs, crashes, and other problems. There are a lot of native web technologies that can do the same things these days.

Configure the viewport – It’s important to specify a viewport that adapts to different devices. This will make sure mobile devices render correctly.

Size your content to the viewport – If your content isn’t working in concert with the viewport, the images and text may be bigger than the display. This really negatively impacts the mobile experience.

Size tap targets appropriately – If users are going to tap buttons or images on the site, then make sure that they’re sized to make it easy.

Use legible font sizes – If the font is too small to be readable, you are making it too hard to consume. A base size of 16 CSS pixels is recommended.

There are a lot of things that can get in the way of a great website experience, and if you have one or more of these things slowing down your site, it might be time to re-evaluate the user experience and see if you can’t smooth out one or two of these speed bumps.

Contrary to what many people think, graphic design isn’t a dying industry. Looking closely, however, it’s easy to see why some people would believe so. From the field being saturated to the advent of free and user-friendly graphic design software, it’s clear why some have given up on graphic design. 

Is graphic design dead? The answer is a resounding NO. Recent studies conducted by IBISWorld show that in 2019 alone, the industry generated a revenue of $15 billion with an annual growth rate of 3.5%. It is expected to grow further at a rate of 2.7% to become a $14.8 billion-dollar-strong industry. 

Penji is a living proof that graphic design is alive and kicking. We’ve helped thousands of businesses with all their graphic design needs. If you’re still in doubt, read on to learn why graphic design isn’t dead and is here to stay. 

Why Some People Think Graphic Design is Dead 

It may come as a surprise to you that there are people who think that graphic design is already dead. Especially for the graphic designers themselves who have experienced tight competition, it’s understandably so. As long as there is access to cheap computers and free design software, fake graphic designers will proliferate. It is sometimes overtaking the jobs of qualified ones. 

Also, websites that offer to create a logo for you for just five dollars, and other similar gimmicks, give the impression that graphic design is dead. With these channels, you’re sure to get cheap graphic design, nothing else. For your business to stand out, a generic logo or website from a template just won’t cut it. 

A few business owners are also to blame for graphic design’s perceived death. Some entrepreneurs think that graphic design is a one-time thing. After the website, logo, and letterhead have been designed, it’s time to let go of the designer. Later, we’ll discuss why this shouldn’t be the case. 

Why Companies Hire Graphic Designers 

Any seasoned entrepreneur can tell you that graphic design is an essential part of business. But factors such as limited finances can make these business owners forego their graphic designers. And some think that after establishing their brand identities, there is no longer a need for a designer. 

Graphic designing for your business is a continuous endeavor; here’s why: 

Consistent Brand Identity 

Your brand identity is your main point of communication with your customers. Entrusting the continuity of the scheme to someone who doesn’t understand graphic design can be a significant blunder. Your visual identification deserves to keep its integrity, and only a professional can help you achieve this. 

Cleveland Cavaliers hired an external graphic designer for their fan engagement platform. The brand identity, as you can see from the photo below, shows that it remained intact and recognizable. 

Create smart, effective campaigns efficientlyMeet your conversion goals using visuals that stand outI need this!‹›

Become an Inspiration 

Great design inspires. Your customers, as well as employees, can benefit from this graphic design advantage. Excellent visual design can attract customers and encourage your employees to promote your brand. 

Provide Adaptability 

A good graphic designer can prepare your business for the ever-changing digital world. Technology is continually changing, and your brand has to keep up. Good design can ensure that your website and other design materials can be viewed on multiple devices and platforms. 

The Firefox logo had been through many redesigns in its history. This image shows the transition from detailed design to something more streamlined. The logo was simplified to fit beyond the normal website browser. 

Gain Fresh Perspectives 

Graphic design can also become stagnant, and a professional designer can help maintain the freshness. You’ll gain new perspectives from someone outside of your business and provide you insights you may have never seen before. A good graphic designer will work with you to create new ideas that will keep your business on its feet. 

Creativity Will Love On 

Advancements in technology will make us think that AI will replace most of the work humans do. This may be so, but specific industries that require creativity will never succumb. You may have the most exciting website in your niche, but without innovation and creativity, soon enough, it’ll become boring and stale. 

Stand Out From the Competition 

A professional graphic designer can help you stand out from the crowd. The WordPress templates shown below serve a purpose, and sometimes you’ll find a website design gem through a template. But don’t be surprised if you see some other websites to have that similar look as yours. Your company is unique, and its overall design should show how one-of-a-kind you are. 

Saves You Time and Money 

Business owners have a lot on their hands. If you leave the design work to a qualified graphic designer, you’ll be free from the burden of getting the design right. You’ll have more time and energy to focus on what matters most in your business. 

Why Graphic Design Will Never Die 

Every aspect of your business will always require graphic design. And not just a one-size-fits-all plan, but a quality graphic design that’s uniquely yours. Whether it’s your website, promotional paraphernalia, corporate branding, web and print design, it has to include graphic design as an essential component. 

In this fast-paced world we live in, is graphic design dead? Not only is it alive and well, but it’s also here to stay for good. Graphic designers are integral parts of a business and will contribute to a company’s success. Graphic design has become an indispensable asset and investment for a business. 

How to Get the Most from Graphic Design 

Great graphic design is a business investment that will reap lots of benefits for your company. If you think that finding the right graphic designer is a difficult task, Penji can help you. We have vetted designers that can provide you with all the graphic design you’ll need. 

For a monthly fixed price of as low as $369, you can have all the design, plus all the revisions you need. We’ll always make sure that you get the designs you love.

The only thing is that you’ve never formulated a social media strategy for your company before. Sure, your business has a Facebook and Twitter account that it occasionally posts on with an interesting industry article or to get the word out about a promotion, but that’s about the extent of it.

You hear how your company needs to be present on social media, but you aren’t seeing the results that are everyone keeps claiming are yours for the taking.

Effectively posting on social media requires a well-thought-out strategy that must be continually tweaked and re-implemented. The occasional posting about company news or promotions will no longer cut it.

How do you start a social media strategy? There are so many social media channels out there, which ones should you post on? What kind of content should you post to get the most engagement? Should you pay to promote your posts? Do you know where to look to see how well everything is performing?

Before you get overwhelmed, here is a guide to get you started on the right path of a successful social media strategy for your business:

Step 1: Set Goals and Objectives

Before you start a campaign in any business, you need to have goals and objectives in place to assess progress and know whether you’ve achieved success. A social media strategy is no different. If you don’t have any goals or objectives written out, you won’t know how your campaign is performing. These provide the foundation of your blueprint for your strategy.

Every subsequent course of action within the strategy is aimed at meeting or exceeding these goals and objectives.

With goals and objectives, you can quickly see when and where your social media campaign is going awry and make immediate changes to put it back on course.

When creating goals and objectives, it the S.M.A.R.T method is a good starting point. According to this method, the goals and objectives are to be specific (S), measurable (M), attainable (A), relevant (R) and time-bound (T).

Step 2: Do a Social Media Self-Audit

After creating the goals and objectives for your campaign, you should look at where your current strategy stands.

What social media platforms is your company currently posting on? What kind of material is being posted? How much or little engagement is there? When do you post? How often do you post?

It helps to create a spreadsheet to document your answers to the above questions. Use this spreadsheet and compare it against your strategy’s goals and objectives. Are there things you’re already doing well? What needs changing in order for your goals and objectives need to be met?

Besides looking at the health of your current social media channels, be sure to completely fill out your company’s social media profiles, with a clear, identifiable picture and keywords. Completed social media profiles make your brand easier to find by consumers and it adds to your brand’s credibility and authority.

Step 3: Research

Maybe your company is posting on the wrong social media channels, or posting the wrong type of content, or is currently not on another social network it could leverage for increased attention. Maybe your posts are going out at the wrong time.

It can be tempting to be on as many social media networks as possible. The downside of this is that you will wear yourself out, waste valuable time, and produce hurried, boring bulk postings.

Social Media Strategy 2.jpgYou need to do some research on your industry, your desired audience, and even your competitors. Where are your ideal audience members most active? When are they most likely to engage? What interests them and what messaging catches their attention?

There are multiple social networks that allow you to gain insights into these questions. Facebook, for example, allows users to target specific audiences, see the interactions on their posts, the best and worst time for post engagement as well as demographics of those that interact with the posts.

In terms of scheduling posts, there are automation tools such as Buffer and Hootsuite that allow you to sync and schedule posts on multiple social networks in one place.

Observing what your competitors are doing and how well they’re faring on social media can give you tips and tricks on what to try out and what to avoid when formulating and implementing your social media campaign.

Step 4: Create Quality Content

You can be on every social media network and still not get the engagement and conversions you’re looking for because your content is bland, sales, useless and impersonal.

You won’t know what to write without first identifying your ideal audience and social media networks. When coming up with content, you want to not only catch people’s attention, but you want to make your brand stand out as an authoritative and trustworthy source of information in your industry.

As you do this, it’s important to design your content to take advantage of each individual platform. Twitter, for instance, only allows for 140 characters and utilizes hashtags. Instagram, and Pinterest utilize images. Facebook utilizes text, images and videos. YouTube utilizes videos.

Your content needs to match the format of the platform, be interesting, and be useful. It should not come off as impersonal or condescending. Have your content make your brand appear as a person, not an organization.

Like putting together a social media audit spreadsheet, and using scheduling tools for posts, creating an editorial calendar can help guide you as to what you write. With an editorial calendar, you’ll know what you’re going to write about and have details

Step 5: Continued Assessment

Once you research your audience, craft your content and schedule the posts on the appropriate social networks, you may be tempted to sit back and relax.

If you put a lot of time, resources and energy into a social media strategy, you want to make sure the ROI is worth it. Otherwise y, u’ll remain stuck and stagnant in your efforts.

Nobody wants to stay stuck and not grow.

As with any aspects of internet marketing, things in social media change constantly.

If you post a Facebook post at 2 pm one week and get a lot of engagement can turn into an ignored post the next week. Consumers also get bored seeing the same content all the time.

Social media strategies require time and a plan.

Just doing the occasional posting on a few social media channels will not result in a successful social strategy.

A well-performing social strategy begins with goals and objectives. You need to see where your current strategy is, research the best social media channels and your target customers and create high-quality, useful and interesting content.