Stephen Murphy is Commercial and Marketing Director of Webfactory, which was established in 1995. The web design agency has over 40 people on the payroll and works with utilities, insurance, pharmaceutical, entertainment, automotive and FMCGs. Its office is a restored Victorian building overlooking Ha’penny Bridge in central Dublin.

In recent Webfactory website builds, what have been the features deployed to improve the user experience?

We believe that having a strong emotional connection with users can make them forget about the technology they are interfacing with.

Take a moment and think of a website or app you frequent. Consider why you have such an emotional connection with it. Many aspects of emotional design trigger this. Engagement can take a user on a journey; tone and voice can tell a story; visual language can convey a mood. All of which are there to provoke an emotional response.

An emotional connection, whether it’s a positive or negative one, it’s something we always remember. Something that lacks any real emotion is often forgotten about.

We recently worked with AIB in changing their tone and voice for their digital products. Previously it lacked consistency, was overly corporate, internal facing and product led. AIB now provide simple, clear and friendly tone and voice that is customer focused, thus bridging the gap between their offline and online personalities.

Emotional engagement and good UX should support your brand values. Taking the user on a memorable journey while performing their task will trigger a positive emotion that will entice them to continue using your website or app.

One of my favourite experiences would be the Hailo app. From the minute you open the app, book, wait, board and leave your taxi, you have total control and transparency because of the app. Hailo provide many levels of engagement: from seeing where your nearest taxi is, the character that’s introduced to visualize you hailing a taxi, to being onboard, these small levels of engagement make you feel in control and safe.

For the type of UX result that Webfactory implements, what are the technical and resource challenges facing the web design agency?

There is always the clash between what is desirable from a UX point of view versus what the IT capability of delivering is. Identifying this gap early in the process is something we are specialists in, as we want the best possible solution for our clients and their customers.

We will often agree suitable workarounds where there are barriers to our vision. These may be permanent or semi-permanent depending on the scale of the issue. Typically though, these are in key business processes such as registration or self service functions that we want to see available for the customer on digital channels.

This capability of understanding both business and user needs we would see a major differentiator for Webfactory.

Where is corporate Ireland with regard to responsive web design and refitting websites for mobile usage?

The overall web stock of corporate Ireland has improved dramatically in recent years. Given the high rate of internet usage (73%), the lag time from where the market is and where corporate Ireland is online has narrowed.

There are now very few corporates without at least a reasonable online presence. There will always be some better than others, but digital is such a large part of corporate affairs, HR, marketing and lead generation that the channel is now taken very seriously and has associated KPIs and international benchmarks.

With web browsing from a smartphone device now running at 75%, responsive design has become the new normal for our agency. Indeed for some clients mobile first design is where we are beginning the design journey. This decision has to be based on both the usage of the site via Google Analytics and then the key tasks the site has, so that a balanced view as to what is the best approach to take in the design phase.

The bottom line is that mobile use of the web is now the majority use of the web, and corporates as well as SMEs need to change to reflect this. We do not recommend retrofitting of sites as this generally does not work effectively. A redesign with the mobile user in mind will be more effective in the medium term. For example, a large utility client of ours experienced a 300% uplift in web leads following a mobile first strategy.

A company has an old, non-responsive website and requires a modern online tool.  Should they start over from scratch?

In short, yes. There is generally a positive business case for a scratch redesign, as the older sites tend to not have taken into account the way content and services are used on mobile devices. A new responsive build also allows for upgrading of the CMS, ensuring SEO and content are updated and, critically, that online services such as pay a bill, sign up for direct debit or any other e-commerce facility is properly handled on the mobile device.

One of our clients had a desktop site and a mobile version of it that was getting no traction at all. We did a business case for a re-build with a payback within 18 months and the new site paid back in less than six months.

• Click here to view 2016 Survey of Digital Agencies in Ireland published in Business Plus magazine