According to expandedramblings.com, WordPress now powers 27.5% of the total websites available on the internet worldwide. The platform has evolved from being an easy-to-use blogging tool to a popular and open source platform for publishing and maintaining impressive websites.
This platform is used by Fortune 500 organizations such as eBay and UPS as well as by eminent publications like CNN. Moreover, WordPress has an extensive plug-in library and several customized themes that provide ready-made frameworks for creating an influential website.
But these pre-built tools have their own demerits such as they offer generic layouts, limited customization, and support, etc. These are the integral driving forces behind the success of every web portal. As each of them is unique and blessed with specific needs you can’t force fit one size fits all approach as it could lead you to create an online store which isn’t in accordance with your requirements.
To identify the target audience and design a website that sync with their exclusive preferences, behavior, buying habits, etc. isn’t easy. But it’s not impossible as it can be made much easier by hiring a web development agency who has a wealth of experience in creating WordPress websites with implementing design thinking approach.
You can easily take professional help for building a responsive and intuitive site but before finalizing to work with someone let’s understand the ways in which you can apply design thinking approach to elevate your website built with WordPress. But first, let’s understand this approach in detail.
What Is Design Thinking?
Design thinking primarily pays attention to users’ needs and ways to realize them. There are three key stages of this approach:
- Comprehend
- Discover
- Materialize
It’s a continuous process where you can revisit the earlier stages and modify elements in order to make it more efficient. Here, every individual stage is dependent on the prior one so that nothing important gets missed out.
Why Is Design Thinking Approach Important & How It Can Be Used To Elevate Your WordPress Website?
The sole objective of any web portal is to help the business increase sales and profit margins. But it’s not that easy. You can pick WordPress as the platform to build your website but what about the design? How to create a web design that helps convert better?
The answer is by applying design thinking approach. How? Let’s understand this by breaking down the above-mentioned three stages into the following six subsets.
Empathize With Targeted Customers
It’s obvious that a solution is built for a specific set of users in order to resolve their pain points. So, when embarking into designing your WordPress site, in the first phase you learn about your user needs. Observe them and listen to their issues and gain an overall knowledge of their needs and demands.
Make sure to keep factors such as age, gender, region, niche segment, demography, etc. when studying your target audience. This will help you in building a WordPress site that is blessed with a layout which is in accordance with users’ needs and serves their purposes.
Defining & Framing The Issues Precisely
The second stage is to work on the insights you get in the first stage and recognize the major issues faced by your users. Frame these problems properly and create user personas and different scenarios to get a better idea. Also, articulate the solution requirements.
Identifying the issues can help you in framing out the flow of your web design. It will also give you an opportunity to look at problems from a human-centered approach and find their solutions accordingly.
This will make your WordPress website user-friendly and interactive that can respond to customers’ actions and encourage them to take the desired call. Also, you can integrate the landing page of your WordPress site with one of the top CRM tools you are using so that to grab the attention of quality leads and nurture them with the motive of getting converted.
Ideate To Look At Issues From A Different Perspective
In this stage, you can begin with designing your WordPress site. But remember you shouldn’t consider obvious solutions to the issues. Rather, work on innovative and fresh ideas to discover something unique.
Here, your development team can bring a fresh perspective to your problem and do a bit of an experiment. You should pay focus on broader ideas and use your creative skills to identify the best one and build a web presence that stands out.
Prototyping, Refining & Testing To Figure Out What’s Working Best
It’s the testing phase in which you compile a few of your most promising ideas and create interactive prototypes with the help of developers. Here, your aim is not to build the ideal product in the first attempt but to recognize potential issues and refine the MVP by incorporating necessary modifications in accordance with the customer feedback so that the end solution can be flawless.
Ideally, each and every prototype should be rigorously tested so that you can ensure it’s free of any technical issues or bugs. Eventually, once this stage is completed you will be getting the final design for your WordPress website which will be seamless and impressive.
Updating With Modifications At Regular Intervals Of Time
Your WordPress website can’t be static and hence it’s mandatory to keep it up-to-date and relevant in accordance with the new consumer requirements and issues. It will make your website an asset for your business which can be used to satisfy end users and bring in new customers.
In a nutshell, design thinking approach can be used with WordPress web development in order to build online stores that are highly scalable and reliable. Moreover, this approach is believed to be the best way to create an intuitive web design that can easily win customers’ hearts.
