Key concepts for impactful UX design
The decisions that make a photography site convert, drawn from the client sites we have built and watched.
Impact Is Measured, Not Admired
A site is doing its job when strangers get in touch. Everything else -- the animation, the type, the grid -- is in service of that, and any of it can be wrong however good it looks. The only way to know is to watch what people actually do.
The four concepts below are the ones that changed the numbers on client projects, rather than the ones that changed how we felt about the design.
Reduce the Number of Decisions
Every choice you put in front of a visitor is a chance for them to choose nothing. A page with one clear action outperforms a page with three almost every time, even when all three are things you would like them to do.
On a photography site that action is nearly always the same one: get in touch about a specific kind of work. Make it the loudest thing after the photographs and put it where the scroll ends, not only in the header.
The best interface decision we ever made for a client was deleting two of their three calls to action. Enquiries went up by a third.
Answer the Question They Actually Have
People arriving at a studio site want to know three things: whether you shoot the thing they need, whether you are available, and roughly what it costs. Sites that answer all three convert; sites that hide the third in a contact form collect enquiries from people who then disappear.
Publishing a starting price is not a commercial risk. It is a filter, and filtering is most of what a small studio needs its site to do.
Make Speed Part of the Design
A photography site is heavy by nature, and every second of load costs a share of the people who asked for it. Modern image formats, correctly sized files and lazy loading below the fold are not technical housekeeping here. They are the difference between the work being seen and not.
