Why UX Is Important For Advertising

In today’s day and age, consumers share an intense dislike of advertising. Whether they’re scrolling through their phones or on the web, no one likes disruptive advertising while they’re trying to surf the web. Having to design around the advertising brings in UX, otherwise known as ‘user experience’. What user experience boils down to is the overall experience a person has while using a website or app on a device. This experience is particularly important in how easy it is.

So what does UX mean for advertising?

It means that advertising should now blend seamlessly with UX and not disrupt the flow of the user. So, time to adapt those obnoxious pop-ups, auto-playing videos, and flashy banners to not interrupt the UX. To have this work, advertisers and UX designers need to work together. Advertisers create the ads customized to their audience and the UX designers can use those creations in their work to enhance the experience of the audience. The results of this can be ads that the user can actually make connections with.

UX and advertising in action

One company that combines advertising and UX pretty seamlessly is Instagram. Instagram’s now integrated story-sharing feature gives users the ability to share photos and videos like Snapchat. While tapping, watching, and swiping through the stories of who you’re following, advertisements are intermixed, but they’re made to look just like a regular Instagram story. Instagram does this also in the flow of their users’ newsfeeds. Advertisements are intermixed with the regular feed and are designed to flow seamlessly with the user’s experience of the app.

UX and advertising in the future

In a survey of 283 respondents, one of the biggest obstacles to quality user experience was “ad clutter.” Advertising and UX going forward will have to continue to integrate the right content in the right context in the right way to avoid all that clutter. Page load times, responsive designs, clutter, should all be considered in creating an effective UX/advertising experience for users. The thing is to not disrupt the user’s flow, so UX and advertising will have to constantly innovate and improve on their efforts to enhance the rich user experiences going forward.