Providing greater customer satisfaction is the key to determining success in today’s competitive web world. And today, UX (User Experience) plays a significant role in maximizing customer satisfaction. According to Econsultancy reports, “UX improves customer satisfaction by 75 percent.”
Needless to say, higher customer satisfaction helps in improving customer retention rate and sales. UX is usually associated with the process of website designing and developing – that is vital to the sale of your product(s). However, building something with user experience in mind isn’t easy. There are many things that you need to consider for creating a winning UX Design.
Let’s look at some of the most important factors that you should keep in mind when working on a UX design project:
UX Design is Not UI Design
This is one of the biggest misconceptions that some users (especially beginners) have regarding UX design. They believe that UX Design is same just like the UI (User Interface) Design.
In short, people think that UX design is equivalent to user interface design – that requires designing for fixed screens to deliver an enhanced user experience. While it’s true that UI design is a critical part of improving the user experience, but there’s a lot more to UX that you need to take into account.
Bear in mind that user interface design is all about improving how a user interacts with a product. But UX design is more concerned about how a user feels and behave when they use the product. This means that while the user interface only focuses on making the journey of a customer as seamless as possible, but user experience design necessitates understanding the needs and behavior of your clients.
Basically, you may come up with the best user interface, but if it doesn’t work according to your customer needs, it’s just a wasted effort.
User Research is Critical to UX Success
One common mistake that novice designers make is believing that users will act as just like they do. But that might not be the case. When working on a project, you’ll probably build a solution based on your knowledge and needs that are well-liked by your team. Unfortunately, your end-users might not share the same passion as yours. Also, their knowledge regarding what you’re offering might be limited.
Keep in mind, your customers have different things in mind, and their priorities can also differ. As a matter of fact, they’ll want to navigate through your website pages in a quick and easy way. This is why it’s critical for a UX design to be optimized for external use.
For example: Before releasing Google Buzz for public use it was tested by more than 20,000 Google employees, but the product failed once it was launched. That’s because one of the product’s feature that was loved the Google employees couldn’t impress external users as well.
And so, getting to know more about your users is critical to the success of your UX design. Performing user research can help you understand your external user needs in a better way.
Keep UX Design Simple
With plenty of design options out there, it’s easy to get tempted by opportunities that end up making your site/app overloaded with unnecessary bloat – like providing many choices to users. Of course, presenting your target users with choices is not bad, but too many options can increase confusion and frustrate the users.
Besides, it’s a proven fact that the majority of users (new generation users) prefer purchasing the products that do not ask them to fill in too many choices. Rather, users favor using simple to use products, which ultimately results in greater user satisfaction. In contrary, making your interface cluttered with more than required features will increase the risk of abandonment.
Make sure to avoid adding unwanted features, just for the sake of making UX design more interactive, and keep the UX design simple.
Usability Testing is a Vital Element of UX
Many people presume that hiring experts for their UX design project won’t necessarily require conducting usability testing. But that’s a wrong notion! While a professional can help in creating an exceptional UX design, but it still might fail to impress your target users. In short, despite having confidence in your design established by a recognized UX designer, it might not get the user acceptance until it is tested on the basis of usability.
Wondering why?
Well, you’re not the user. Moreover, each and every user has different requirements, and so regardless of how good your design may be, it might receive great acclaim. To overcome such a situation, you’ll have to understand your user’s mind first. This is where usability testing comes in handy. Usability testing helps in understanding user behavior, which enables you to create a product that you know your users will love.
You May Need to Hire a UX Designer
Many people believe that hiring the services of a UX specialist is enough to deploy the complete UX project successfully. But, in reality, UX encompasses several disciplines and so only one person cannot possibly become proficient at creating a winning UX campaign. Therefore, it is recommended that you should consider employing UX specialists having knowledge of all (at least most relevant) UX best practices.
Also, despite being a designer yourself, you may still need the assistance of a veteran in the successful completion of your UX design project.
Summing Up
To build a winning product (be it a website or an application) it’s essential that the product helps in delivering the best possible experience for users. For this purpose, you will have to create a good UX design. But, the harsh reality is that many designers fail in building an excellent user experience design because of a few misconceptions and beliefs. But, reading this post will make you learn five important considerations that could help you improve your UX design.