Marketing to a Younger Audience — How Great UX Design & UI Helps
From Generation Alpha pre-teens to Gen Z in their early teens, digital marketing is allowing brands to market to younger audiences in innovative and engaging ways that were only pipe dreams just a few decades ago. With the ultimate goal being to provide excellent online UX (User Experience) that leads to sales and growth, it makes sense that UX design plays a huge part in making this achievable.
This article covers the development of an e-commerce project that showcases how UX design and the digital elements it lays the foundation for can be used to develop and deliver a platform that is perfect for marketing to today’s demanding, creative young audience, providing great UX to them and their parents.
Whether you’re a millennial or a Gen Xer, you likely have memories of countless toy adverts strategically placed between your favourite cartoons and kids TV shows when you were a child. For some, these ads were programs in their own right; filled with magical items kids could only dream of ever actually owning.
As for others, as they grew a little wiser — although still within the range of the target audience — they started to see these ads for what they really were; just commercials selling things, rendering them not as impactful.
What digital platforms like websites, microsites, and gamification can do is break down such marketing communication barriers in the minds of a young target group. Digital allows a level of interaction and engagement with brands and their products in ways TV commercials can’t. UX design is crucial in facilitating this, providing UX to children that makes it easier to imagine a product in their own hands while buying into a brand beyond just a cool ad designed to capture their attention.
So when wholesale brand DCK wanted to enter the direct-to-consumer sector for the first time via the launch of Flitzy, an accessories brand for young girls, and brought our creative digital agency on board, we approached the task knowing how important UX design would be in building a website marketed at a young audience. The final product had to engage them in ways unique to their age group (predominantly ages 5 to 9) while also catering to parents who will browse the site with their little trend-setters and would be paying for the products and services Flitzy has to offer.
Before getting into the details of the UX design development for the website, let’s quickly look at the platform that served as the foundation for the final digital product.
Shopify E-commerce Website
As an experienced Shopify agency that has been involved with projects that have proven how successful the e-commerce platform can be, SMACK decided early on in the project’s development to build Flitzy on a Shopify theme. Specifically, we wanted to take advantage of the flexibility and fluidity that Shopify’s Liquid code and template language allows (see what I did there? Fluidity…liquid…No? I’ll walk backwards out of the room very slowly; you won’t even notice I was here).
Liquid facilitates the loading of dynamic content; a website feature we knew would be vital for making the UX of Flitzy’s young target audience memorable and engaging. Having had previous experience working on an e-commerce website targeting a younger audience with similar products, this Shopify coding feature was something we believed would make sense for this project.
We wanted to build a website that is as lively and zestful as a child’s imagination is but as robust as an e-commerce website built to be used by an older audience. It was important that the site is fun for children to navigate and interact with while being simple for adults to browse and make purchases on. Shopify proved to be the perfect choice for the UX design ideas our creative marketing team believed would work best for this project.
UX, UI, and UX Design
Before we go into how we developed the UX for Flitzy, let’s quickly cover what the three elements in the title of this section mean.
UX (User Experience) can be described as all aspects of the interactions a customer has with a business, its products, its services, and how the customer feels about these interactions.
UX is not limited to just digital or online interactions, but in a world where all of a consumer’s customer journey can take place online, UX has become attached to digital platforms, so much so that people often confuse it with UI.
UI (User Interface) is strictly a digital concept and is but one factor that contributes towards positive or negative UX. Ever tried to click a button on a website you’re browsing on your smartphone that’s so small, you end up accidentally clicking the button next to it instead? That’s poor UI contributing towards negative UX. Within UI is usability which refers to how easy it is to use an interface and how well it serves its function.
UX design on the other hand has to do with the process of designing products that allow user experiences to take place in the first place. The very webpage you are currently experiencing is the delivery of a product of UX design. Our hope is that along with the lovely design and layout of the page, elements of UI — such as the navigational links and share buttons on the left — leads to you having a positive user experience with our brand. It is highly likely that the quality of the UX of our site will influence whether you contact us for our digital services or not.
How We Approached Developing Flitzy’s UX Design
Our approach towards UX design very much contributed towards our decision to go with Shopify as the foundation the website would be built on. Although the plan was for the site to have a separate section (called Flitzy World) that was more focused on further engaging the core target audience, the site had to be built on an e-commerce platform that offered flexibility, allowing us to develop a user interface with great usability and utility for the adults that would be making purchases for their children.
On top of this, UX design that is catered to what makes a brand and the products and services it sells unique plays a huge part in our development approach. SMACK is not a one-shoe-fits-them-all digital agency. Part of why we love what we do is working with clients across various sectors, all with their own USP and individual brand identity. Finding ways to express this through UX design and UI for businesses is our passion.
As for the Flitzy World section of the website, our creative UX design team wanted young would-be trend setters to be in love with the design and atmospherics of the section which would motivate them to interact with it.
In order to make interactivity possible for both the main site and Flitzy World, the UI for the site had to be intuitive yet playful; dynamic yet faultless. It had to serve its purpose for both children and adult users alike. The idea is that all of this would contribute towards positive user experience which would lead to website traffic, conversion, and sales.
Emotional marketing is not just about using the right words to spark feelings in people; it’s also about experiences and interactions. Although they might not be able to fully comprehend it yet, the rides are not what children really remember about a visit to Disneyland. What has a long-lasting impact that makes them want to visit again and again are the memories of being in a place of wonder with friends and family.
For children, it’s dad lifting them up to give Mickey Mouse a high-five on the way to the rides; it’s mum laughing when she got ketchup all over her blouse while eating the Pirates of the Caribbean-themed food after the ride. For parents, it’s watching the wonderment in their children’s faces as they take in the theme park. These moments provide the context that makes the rides worth queuing hours for and makes going back always exciting.
We wanted the Flitzy website to be a place of wonderment for children to visit and develop positive emotions and fond memories of browsing with their parents so they’d want to visit multiple times.
We aimed for UX design and UI that would create the emotional context for the products and services being sold on the e-commerce website. Below are a few of the UX design and UI elements we used to make visiting the website a positive user experience.
Animation for engagement
For this particular project, it was important to break the mould of a traditional Shopify e-commerce website and build something dynamic. Flitzy’s young trend-setting target audience knows cool when they see and experience it, after all. To that end, we built a wireframe that incorporated gorgeous and colourful illustrated badges, parallax scrolling, a news-style ticker, and responsive CTA buttons into the UX design and UI to really bring the website to life and make it engaging to experience.
Media for enhancement
With the target audience in mind, we used multiple media options to enhance the features of the UX design and UI of the website. For some navigational badges, we incorporated sound that captures the magic of experiencing the site. We made the images of our Gen Alpha models stand out by framing them with either animation or glittery, eye-catching borders.
Narrative is a powerful tool, especially for marketing to younger audiences who are more impressionable than most. It’s the reason why most ad campaigns have a character whose story the audience is motivated to follow ad to ad, campaign to campaign.
We were lucky enough to have three lovely girls (including YouTube sensation Like Nastya as a fourth) be the leads in Flitzy’s narrative. We used beautiful images of the girls to tell a story, placing them in strategic positions across the site.
Rather than use static coding for the product images on the category pages, our UX design team made it so that another angle of a product could be seen when a user hovers their cursor on its image.
A beautifully shot video sits cleanly on the homepage capturing the essence of Flitzy as not only an e-commerce website, but a fashion experience for young girls.
Apps for repeat business and CRM
With Flitzy offering a subscription service that allows customers to get Flitzy Boxes (packages containing products) quarterly, incorporating the right app in the backend to serve this function was vital.
For this, we took advantage of our partnership with one of the best subscription solutions agencies out there, ReCharge. Together, we worked at achieving a subscription feature that makes signing up for the boxes and making payment for them a smooth, intuitive process that isn’t at odds with the feel of the rest of the site.
It goes without saying that customer relationship management is an important business strategy for any company. Customer retention strategies go a long way in achieving successful CRM. DCK tasked our UX design team with incorporating a loyalty/rewards program into the website’s design and functionality.
Again, we leveraged our partnerships, this time with a fantastic e-commerce platform called Yotpo. Yotpo specialises in integrated solutions for reviews, visual marketing, SMS marketing, and of course, loyalty programs. Combining our development expertise with the Yotpo team’s specialty in customer loyalty programs proved to be a winner.
Having established agency partnerships with these two companies allows SMACK to have early access to new features that we can implement on our clients’ websites and other digital products, driving innovation. It also means we have a dedicated support team that can assist with any issues swiftly.
Extra UX design and UI features for interactivity, branding, and repeat visits
To make Flitzy’s Shopify e-commerce website more than just a transactional platform and to truly cater to the CORE target audience of young fashion-savvy girls, our UX design team built a section on the site called Flitzy World. Here, the young audience can access quizzes, colouring in book downloads, and mindfulness tips. Since the process of doing any of these activities has to be intuitive and easy to accomplish, UI and usability was important here.
Branding has evolved over the last two decades. As part of marketing strategy and PR, companies have to go out of their way to be more personable, socially conscious, and provide engaging experiences in order to provide all round positive digital customer experiences.
Conclusion
The final product of this project is something we are proud of and the client is very happy with. Digital marketing that targets a young audience via an e-commerce website requires attention to detail beyond the standard. Children visiting the site have to be presented with a digital experience that captures and engages their attention, fuels their imagination, and makes them want to come back time again like they would their favourite kids YouTube channels or websites.
By developing great UX design and UI with the target audience in mind while leveraging the right digital solutions and assets for the right features, a Shopify e-commerce website that does more than just sell products but provides excellent UX is achievable.
SMACK has worked with retail brands to design and build e-commerce websites for different target markets. Be they young pre-teen trend-setters or care-free wine connoisseurs in their early thirties, contact us today to see how we can help your brand reach your audience in engaging ways that benefit both the customer and your company.
