By Joe Mallek, Senior Partner

Face it — regardless of your actual business model, to the outside world, you are the sum of your digital parts.  Customers expect brands to interact and transact seamlessly across multiple digital channels. Once you accept that your aggregated digital touchpoints effectively are you in the eyes of your customers, the better your chances of success.  Put simply, no matter how stellar your products, customer service, or offerings may be, optimizing your day-to-day digital engagement is where you stand the greatest chance of unlocking your potential.

Now, your website may not be the only way customers interact with your brand, but it's often the first. It's your handshake, your storefront, and your sales pitch all rolled into one. It is a core component of the multi-channel ecosystem that makes up your organization's “Digital Twin.”  

Given this, brands are discovering that design without function is merely decoration. They are evolving and enhancing their sites to incorporate concepts of Functional Design to better engage and serve their customers — and are seeing meaningful business impact as a result.

While aesthetics play a role, functional design ensures your digital experience can do more than just look good. It engages customers, meets their expectations, and drives measurable results.

A Note on Design Evolution

If you already have a website, the principles and tactics outlined in this article represent key opportunities — but not the only paths — to elevate your digital presence. Think of functional design as a spectrum rather than a checklist. Your journey to the next level depends on your current capabilities, your users' needs, and your business objectives.

What is Functional Design?  

Functional design is an approach that combines visually appealing, high-performing, and intuitive designs to enhance usability, accessibility, and business outcomes. While aesthetic design focuses on appearance, functional design can help streamline the customer journey, reduce friction, and create purposeful interactions.

Building a Functional Framework Starts Simply  

Effective functional design creates exciting connections between what your customers need and what your business offers. Getting what we need is something we can all relate with. So, take a few minutes to click around on your site. Put yourself in the mindset of a new visitor coming for the first time. Consider exploring:

• Ways to showcase your value proposition clearly from the start

• Opportunities to enhance navigational simplicity

• Strategies for building trust through user-friendly experiences

• Methods for measuring success beyond just revenue growth, such as visitor engagement and retention

Functional Design Fundamentals  

Adopting a Functional Design mindset shouldn’t be intimidating. The number one rule is “make the experience as easy and empowering as possible”.  Which often translates to obvious concepts that we’re all familiar with:  

Usability

Consider how visitors might find what they need more easily. It’s about making navigation intuitive so that both first-time users and return visitors feel confident and can accomplish their goals quickly. This leads to a smoother user experience and directly impacts key metrics like engagement and conversion rates.

Speed

Nobody has patience for a slow site. A study by Google shows that pages loading in under three seconds see bounce rates drop by up to 32%. Small improvements in speed can create meaningful gains in user satisfaction and conversions.

Personalization

Personalization isn’t just about showing the right products, it’s about adapting the entire experience to user intent.  

Here’s how leading brands make it happen:

• AI-driven product recommendations: Use machine learning to suggest relevant products based on browsing history, like Amazon’s “customers who bought this also bought” feature. This enhances the shopping experience by intuitively guiding users to options that suit their needs.

• Dynamic content adaptation: Personalize on-site content to match user preferences or past behavior. For example, returning visitors might see a homepage featuring products or content related to their previous interactions, keeping them engaged and boosting conversions.

• Location-based customization: Tweak content, offers, or layouts based on geographic location. For instance, an e-commerce site can display local delivery options, region-specific deals, or language preferences.

• Behavioral triggers for messaging: Send timely, relevant messages based on user actions, like abandoned cart reminders or flash sale alerts. This urgency drives user engagement and prompts action when they’re most likely to convert.

• Cross-device experience synchronization: Whether browsing on mobile or desktop, users should encounter a consistent, cohesive experience, increasing the likelihood of conversion.

Accessibility

Functional design opens your site to everyone. By adhering to established accessibility standards like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, you create an inclusive experience that expands your audience and benefits all users. Key accessibility elements include:

• Keyboard navigation and screen reader compatibility: Critical for users with mobility impairments or visual disabilities. Ensures they can fully navigate your site without relying on a mouse.

• Descriptive alt text for images and multimedia: Provides text descriptions for images, videos, and other media to aid visually impaired users. This also helps improve your site's SEO by making it more discoverable.

• High-contrast color schemes: Improves readability for users with low vision or color blindness by providing sufficient contrast between text and background.

• Clear heading structure: Organizes your content logically, helping all users, especially those using screen readers, to quickly navigate and find what they’re looking for.

• Responsive design across devices: Guarantees a seamless experience on all screen sizes and devices, whether desktop, tablet, or mobile. This ensures that accessibility isn’t limited to a specific device or format.

Drive Business Outcomes That Matter

Beautiful design might catch a customer's eye, but functional design delivers real business outcomes. And that’s what really counts. If your website isn’t making it easier for customers to engage, convert, and return, it’s a missed opportunity.  

Here's how you can evaluate your website's performance through an executive lens:  

Conversion Rates

Conversion rate benchmarks vary significantly by industry, but if your conversion rate is below the 3.3% average, it signals a revenue opportunity. A high-performing site minimizes friction and simplifies the user journey, driving customers to complete the key actions that matter most. By identifying and addressing areas where users drop off, you can optimize performance and grow your bottom line.

Example Industry Conversion Rate Benchmarks:

• E-commerce: 1.8-3.3%

• B2B: 2.2-5.0%

• SaaS: 3.0-5.0%

• Finance: 2.5-5.5%

These ranges represent opportunities for optimization and growth.

Loyalty

Your website has the power to turn one-time buyers into loyal advocates. To measure how well your site is nurturing these long-term relationships, track key metrics like:

• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Shows how much revenue a customer is likely to bring over their entire relationship with your business.

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): Gives you a sense of customer satisfaction and how likely they are to recommend your brand to others.

• Repeat visit rate: A higher rate means your customers are coming back, showing strong engagement and satisfaction.

• Time between purchases: Shorter gaps between purchases usually mean customers are consistently finding value in what you offer.

Experience Quality

You’ve got all the pieces: personalization, speed, design—but how well does it all come together? Great experience quality is about how the pieces work together to create a fluid, intuitive experience. Does the design serve the user, or is it just decoration? Are the interactions effortless, or does the user have to think too much?  

According to Forrester, customer-obsessed organizations report 41% faster revenue growth and 49% faster profit growth compared to organizations that don't prioritize customer experience.

Operational Efficiency

Operational efficiency is about how well your website functions behind the scenes. Imagine it like closing your store in the middle of the day—every delay, whether it’s a slow load time or a system breakdown, quietly costs you customers and revenue. Consider the full impact of your website's performance:

• Server response times: Faster load times mean users stay engaged and take action faster.

• Content delivery: Ensure content is accessible quickly, regardless of location.

• Administrative overhead: Simplify management tasks to save time and resources.

• System integration: Ensure your tools and systems work together without friction.

• Maintenance and updates: Keep everything secure and up-to-date with minimal disruption.  

3 Key Considerations When Implementing Functional Design  

Start with their frustrations.  

What frustrates your customers or keeps them from hitting ‘buy’? Find the sticking points that stall progress. Fixing these is what turns browsers into buyers and occasional visitors into lifelong customers.  Teams can uncover valuable insights through methods like:

• Heat mapping

• Session recordings

• User surveys

• A/B testing

• Analytics deep dives

Test smart ideas, not every idea.  

Not every idea warrants your team’s time. Prioritize solutions that align with key business goals—whether that’s increasing conversions, improving retention, or simplifying workflows. Focus on changes that drive measurable results, and discard those that don’t.

Create a testing roadmap based on potential impact and implementation effort. Concentrate your resources on high-impact experiments that offer the greatest return. By testing the right things, you’ll gain insights that directly enhance user experience and deliver real business outcomes.

Evolve systematically.  

To keep a site fresh and competitive, you need a clear, ongoing process to measure how its doing. Successful functional design thrives on insights about user behavior and traffic patterns. Understanding how visitors interact with your site helps you make informed decisions and prioritize the most impactful changes. Consider implementing a regular review cycle to:

• Analyze performance metrics to see what’s working and what isn’t.

• Gather user feedback to pinpoint pain points and/or areas for improvement.

• Monitor your competition for strengths and weaknesses to identify new opportunities for your own website.

• Regularly update your tech stack to avoid technical debt.

• Continuously optimize based on user feedback and performance metrics to keep your site running at its best.

To guide these efforts, leverage key analytics and monitoring tools:

• Comprehensive analytics setup across all digital touchpoints

• Clear tracking of user journeys and conversion paths

• Regular reporting mechanisms for key performance indicators

• Tools for capturing and analyzing user feedback

• Systems for monitoring technical performance metrics

These insights will help you focus on what truly moves the needle, ensuring your functional design strategy remains adaptable and effective.

Functional Design in Action: Outright International's Success  

For some brands, a lack of functional design isn’t just inconvenient, it actively holds them back. Outright International faced this challenge with a website that was difficult to manage, slow to update, and costly to maintain. They needed a modern solution that would reflect their updated branding, improve accessibility, and be easy for their team to update.  

Outright’s transformation demonstrates the power of functional design, but it wasn’t just about a new website, it was about turning an outdated system into a scalable, high-performing digital experience:

Before:

• 70% accessibility score

• Weekly content updates took 5-7 days

• Limited mobile responsiveness

• Manual content management processes

After:

• 99% accessibility score

• Content updates completed in minutes

• Fully responsive design

• Streamlined CMS with automated workflows

• 40% increase in mobile engagement

• Acquia Engage award recognition

The results showcase how functional design can transform both user experience and operational efficiency.

Moving Forward

The ROI of functional design is clear: your digital experience has the potential to engage your customers, meet their expectations, and drive measurable results. But achieving this isn’t a one-time effort.

Functional design is an ongoing process — there's always room to improve. The strategies and insights shared here are just the beginning.  

Your next steps should be driven by your unique user data, business goals, and technical resources. Start by collecting key insights, then use that data to implement functional design improvements that will directly benefit both your users and your business.

Let’s explore what’s possible.

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