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Action-driven design: putting UX and design theory to work
Driving action by orchestrating designs that tap into how we are wired.

Great design draws out specific feelings from audiences. Ideally, that translates into trust. Trust is essential for marketers to establish — and quickly. Quickly making an emotional connection with audiences is one thing — driving action is another.
How do you capitalize on that trust and drive people to action, especially a diverse audience with varying needs, goals, and circumstances?
After quite a bit of trial and error, we settled on a three-track model to drive action by optimizing the performance from the traffic that’s already coming to your website. We call it Action-Driven Design. The three tenets of this model are Content, UX/Graphic Design, and Transaction.

Content: Prospective students rarely read online. They are too busy and distracted for that. If we’re lucky, they’ll scan a headline and a photo caption, which means you have an extremely small window to connect, intrigue, and drive action. To capture this audience’s attention, we craft concise, authentic, and surprising copy that directly connects with the user.
We also make sure we have the right amount of copy on a page so that calls to action don’t get lost. The best calls to action on websites are obvious and irresistible. To further increase the copy’s relevance to the user and improve the site’s overall ranking on search engines, we create all content in accordance with a search engine optimization strategy.

UX/Graphic Design: Our acronym, CATCH, highlights the principles that drive action:
- Credibility: of message and sources is as important as the way we visualize it. Using key statistics, quotes, logos, and professional design help boost credibility.
- Aesthetic-Usability Effect: enhances the perception of value and usability…