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Designing for Millennials: Key Business Lessons
Millennials are a generation that has grown up simultaneously with our modern communication technology revolution. They’ve witnessed the emergence of the internet and the world wide web, were the first social media users, and are commonly known as ‘digital natives.’ Tech is what they grew up with, and so it is imperative for businesses to know how to optimize UX designs to get their attention. Here’s how you can effectively design for a millennial audience:
Speed is the name of the game
Millennials have an extremely short attention span. To be exact, it’s about 8 seconds, which is less than that of a goldfish’s. As astonishing as that might seem, it is imperative to consider it and make your UX design accordingly. Therefore, speed becomes a deciding factor and the odds are not in your favor since millennials are also extremely impatient.
This means that it doesn’t matter how attractive or intricate your UX design is, if you don’t provide an experience that will load quickly, chances are they won’t stick for it. You need to make sure that you optimize your product for speed, especially if it involves a variety of media such as videos, plug-ins, pictures, and much more. Do anything and everything you can to ensure that the user experience is quick and seamless because speed is one of the best ways to satisfy an impatient millennial audience.
Storytelling is in
Storytelling is one of the most efficient ways to smoothly connect with your millennial audiences with minimum effort. When you form an emotional bond through relatability and by weaving an interesting and engaging experience that follows a journey, your UX design has achieved the ultimate end goal, which is to ensure that you gain a user’s attention repeatedly.
When your millennial customer connects with a product through a compelling story, they will remember it and even promote the brand. You achieve this by simply integrating a series of meaningful and interconnected images on your website, and place relevant texts and supporting graphics. This will ensure that they come together as a singular entity that speaks to your millennial customer about shared interests and values.
Optimize mobile versions
It is no secret that millennials are a generation of smartphones and the golden digital era. They use their phones for everything they do: making calls, texting, surfing the internet, shopping, and everything else in between. 93% of millennials, aged between 23 and 38 own a smartphone and use it every day.
Moreover, it’s almost always when they’re commuting or bored, and hence, optimizing the mobile version of your UX design becomes more significant than ever. If you’re targeting a millennial audience, you need to ensure that your UX design works efficiently on mobiles, perhaps even better than the desktop version. That’s how important and crucial the mobile versions of your design for millennials users is.
Don’t impose apps downloads
Millennials are tech-smart. You can’t force them to download more apps than they already have, or you will drive them away. If you impose app downloads through your UX design, it can be extremely counterproductive and can account for a bad and unsatisfactory user experience.
Mobile applications may provide a plethora of advantages when it comes to controlling and enhancing user experience and collecting precious user data for better insights, but they aren’t something millennials are keen to download more of. Instead of imposing app downloads, your UX design should focus on reducing the friction between your target audience discovering your brand, and consuming your product.
Minimalism is your best friend: quality over quantity
When you provide a high-quality UX design with a clear and distinctive focus and call to action, you get your target audience’s attention. This is essential especially if you’re targeting millennials, who are already overexposed to digital content daily through loud social media channels and marketing gimmicks.
Don’t overcomplicate your design. Don’t choose elaborate and hefty customer journeys that will bore them halfway through the process. Instead of focusing on the quantity or the volume of your UX design, focus on its quality and experience. Minimalism is your best friend, and when you provide a straightforward focus to Millennials, you give them a unique and desirable perspective that will mostly work in your favor.
Don’t be a bore: make your designs innovative and unique
Finally, there is content overload on the internet today. You need to ensure your designs for millennials are innovative and unique to remain fresh and relevant in the mind of your young audience. This doesn’t imply that you should be mindlessly pivoting your product or changing its design aesthetic endlessly. Instead, it means that you should find new and interesting ways to highlight the key fundamental values of your brand and deliver a consistent user experience.
This can be accomplished with in-built flexibility mechanisms so that basic elements can be constantly modified and improved with time and in sync with emerging trends.
Millennials have been called an elusive generation, and rightly so. They can be difficult to understand and figure out since they work by leveraging communication technology that they’re comfortable with, and yet are even considered as lazy for being overly dependent on the same. However, whichever side you’re on, it is pretty evident that you need to get their attention to make your brand a roaring success.
