What Consumers Expect in Digital Design

Big title! This is what happens when I don’t write for a few weeks…shame on me and my business travel! My business trip was truly awe-inspiring…but that will be left for a different post. This post will focus on the psychology of the consumer mind as it relates to e-design (I just love the terminology I create!).

As I was doing some research, I came across a video which I found increasingly relevant in the way we think about user experience in the world of e-publishing. Advertisers, designers, epublishers…pay attention! This is for you!

At this point, we are all familiar with Flipboard and if not, review here. Consumers are not interested in just reading. They want involvement. In other words, they want to engage, they want to dictate the content they read by curating, by co-creating. Nothing new here…or is there?

In fact, if you want to be successful at attracting consumers and as well, understanding them, you need to allow them to dictate the direction of the content you present to them. After all…”content is fuel to the social web but context is king”. I just cannot get enough of that phrase!

There is nothing worse than making your reader sift through content they do NOT want in order to locate the content they DO want. Giving them the opportunity to create their own emagazine and making it easier to read and share, copy and paste, highlight, favorite, comment, like or perhaps very soon, unlike, will give your reader a BIG reason to return (assuming your content is worth reading!).

By understanding consumer behavior and how they interact with content will very much dictate the direction of your marketing strategy. For instance advertising, which is a big challenge for epublishers today, may get a helping hand with how the content is laid out and how the reader is interacting with it. Advertising may in the end not be seen as a nuisance but as a complementary addition to an article (especially if created in a format that is not seen as intrusive but informative).

Take a look at the video and the out of the box design thinking and how it relates to today’s digital expectations and capabilities.