UX Solutions for Personal Branding

User experience (UX) increases a website’s quality and makes business or personal websites stand out. Among many competing UX strategies, you might wonder which ones are effective for you and boost your brand.

What Is UX Design?

UX design is about putting customers first through meaningful product design. In practice, UX design often applies to any website and mobile app development. It combines research, usability testing, and design to create a seamless user experience.
UX designers consider more factors and go beyond user interface (UI) design. They work based on data, research insights, user-centered principles and translate those into actionable design aspects, like site architecture, buttons, navigational menu, and page layout.

What Is Personal Branding?

Personal branding is a marketing strategy for individuals to promote themselves as brands. It’s a compelling way of telling their stories or journey to the world – regardless of the personal branding purpose. The practice of personal branding consists of:

• Settling on your personal branding identity. It’s about deciding who you are, what you do, and how you communicate the identity to others. Focus on one industry, share your expertise, build your way upwards.
• Creating purposeful content. Meaningful content brings a significant impact to your branding efforts. Create a content strategy to align it with your identity, and why should others pay attention to it.
• Developing a personal website and social networks. Your website and social networks will be the audience’s first impression of you. Consider these personal website examples to help create the right website.
• Establishing and maintaining connection. Being consistent in branding efforts means establishing and maintaining relationships – with the audience, potential partners, or employers in the short and long terms.

How to Use UX Principles to Improve Your Personal Website

After understanding UX design and personal branding, let’s move to UX principles. Here are ten ways to use UX principles to improve your personal branding.

1. Determine Your Target Audience

Determining your target audience allows a more accurate content delivery, as you’re able to meet their needs. It also results in better planning and execution to improve your website, so your efforts don’t go to waste.
Align the target market with your branding personality. Understand that different age demographics prefer various products. For example, generation X chooses stellar customer service, while millennials enjoy more visual, casual, and trend-based content.
Avoid providing content for everyone, and make it more focused instead. The answer to questions like “Who buys my products?” helps you find out its benefits to your clearly defined target audience.

2. Create a Visual Hierarchy

In web design, visual hierarchy is about organizing content and web pages for a better user journey. The visual order highlights your unique selling point, which leads to increased overall site traffic and better lead generation.
Creating a visual hierarchy is more comfortable with a content inventory or site map  - use these to understand your resources better. List the highlight pages, then follow a proper formatting style. For example, use larger font sizes for headers, different fonts and styles for buttons, and a separate color scheme for links.
Use the Gestalt Principles to understand human behavior when encountering visual objects and reflect them into your design. Also, remember to include the visual hierarchy for mobile UX design.

3. Keep It Consistent

time of your website and its product. Moreover, websites with consistent content have better SEO performance thanks to less editing.
Whenever possible, be consistent by following page design standards, especially those related to your line of topics. Aside from the benefits above, consistency avoids confusion as it ties your whole website content together.
Keeping consistency starts by providing what your users want – this is again about research. Be consistent with your language and visual aspects. However, leave little space for flexibility and growth.

4. Choose the Right Colors and Fonts

Colors and fonts play essential roles in UX design. They work to fulfill the website’s aesthetics and improve the average time spent on the website. They also make your content more engaging, strengthen your branding persona, and help embed it in the audience’s mind.
Please choose the right colors and fonts by aligning them with your personality. Learn from the color spectrum and typography principles to connect them better. Consider mobile users and prioritize to increase clarity and visibility.
Also, remember to measure the design performance. Test and obtain feedback to learn the audience’s reaction. From it, you’re able to keep what works and throw away what doesn’t.

5. Add Personality to Your Design

Personality to your design makes it more acceptable by the audience as it provides human-like characteristics. Adding character goes hand-in-hand with your website’s colors and typography. It makes your branding interesting and increases loyalty.
To do this, start researching the market and audience behavior. Personify your brand complete with the traits. Reflect it through how you communicate with your audience. Apply the personality with consistency.
List which aspects to use to represent the personality – like adding videos, animations, or other interactions. Add a human face through illustrated characters or brand mascot.

6. Design For Everyone

Designing for everyone is making an inclusive website design for all visitors, including those with disabilities. It includes the functionality and aesthetics that align with web accessibility. Aside from catering to all users, making the site accessible improves its performance.
Web accessibility focuses on aspects like auditory, cognitive, speech, and visual communication. They’re reflected through design, such as contrasting colors on the whole website, making buttons more visible, and alt text on images for users with screen readers. Check these additional tips for more on web accessibility.
To further improve your web accessibility, gain feedback from users and evaluate its performance with the accessibility test.

7. Put Users In Control

Control in UX design is about letting the users experience your website with freedom and flexibility. Allow them to choose their user journey to grasp the idea of your product more comfortably. It’s also about providing options to undo an unwanted action by the visitors.
Providing control to users is adding delete, undo, and confirmation buttons. Think Gmail’s delete and undo functions, Instagram’s block feature, close ads button, “Unsubscribe” option on newsletters, or editing messages and comments on marketplaces.
Carefully add controls to your website or social media handles. Make it a balance between power, flexibility, and limitation.

8. Let Users Confirm Before They Commit

Commitment is a big thing for some visitors or potential customers – especially first-timers. That’s why brands offer free trials for your product or confirming their actions with simple “are you sure?” pages. It allows a more effortless browsing experience without feeling pressured.
Online stores add confirmation on payment pages to avoid purchasing mistakes. Google Drive informs you when you upload the same two files at once, confirming the action. Place yourself into the visitors’ shoes to understand which action needs confirmation.
By letting the users confirm, you avoid errors that affect the UX usability principle and giving the users a second chance to think of their actions.

9. Tell a Story

Storytelling is what makes personal branding the way it is. By telling a story to the audience, you can effectively communicate your goals, principles, and brand personality. Also, it keeps your content exciting and not mediocre.
Content optimization is about factoring in customers’ feedback. Let your precious audience know that you’re listening and adjust the content with their needs better. In short, they care more about your website, content, and overall personal branding efforts.
Storytelling applies to every website page and social media presence. For more effective storytelling, consider the essential elements like the people, point of view, timing, emotions, and purpose.

10. Test and Tweak

Through testing and tweaking, your efforts don’t stop when the website is running. Constant testing helps see what works and what doesn’t. From it, you’ll learn from mistakes and make better future decisions.
To successfully test and tweak, start by defining your objectives. Create the best method to gain its results, inform your audience, and analyze the test insights. Use the findings to evaluate plans, calculations, and changes to the UX design.
Consider choosing the platform you understand best that is user-friendly and easy to integrate with the website or social media content. Tweak through user testing processes, consisting of testing, analyzing, and making changes according to what you learned.

What Are the Benefits of Effective Personal Branding?

The ten ways of using UX principles result in effective personal branding. From it, you’ll gain results such as:

• Stronger online presence. By sharing your website, content, and social media posts, more people know about you and your work. Curate which information you want to be visible for smarter online reputation and safety measures.
• Increase trust and credibility. People trust you more, both from the website and Google search results because you strive to deliver quality content, search engine friendly, and the know-how to share your branding purposes.
• Maintain relationships. Whether with potential partners, social media followers, or fellow entrepreneurs, you can maintain and nurture relationships with effective branding strategies.
• Open doors to new opportunities. With existing online and offline reputations, you can gain more opportunities to build potential partnerships, brand collaborations and find future business prospects.

Conclusion

Please use the UX design principles covered in this article to improve your personal brand. They consist of ways that combine functionality, aesthetics and make data-driven decisions to improve. Focus on developing your personal brand to reap the benefits.
We hope this article helps your future branding endeavors. Good luck.

For more about the role of UX design in eCommerce, please read more here.