UX (User Experience) has become a popular buzzword that gets thrown around a lot about Product Development.
Development companies often devote a lot of resources to User Experience, but what makes it so important?
This article will cover its basics, its differences with UI (User Interface), and why it's essential.
Also, we’ll review some UX FAQs and give you some insights. Let's jump in!
What is User Experience?
Well, the name itself gives us a clue: UX revolves around the experience a user has when using a product.
For example, think of how someone reacts when interacting with a website or mobile app.
Yet, it does not only involve the product itself; other aspects must be considered.
These include customer support, sites related to the product, its community, etc.
There are many facets to UX design, such as usability, visual design, and accessibility.
User Experience vs User Interface
UX and UI, or User Experience and User Interface, are often interchangeable.
While they have connections, they don't refer to the same thing.
UX design focuses on how to meet the users' needs.
It also analyzes how competitors are tackling them by researching the target audience.
Meanwhile, UI design focuses on the visual aspects of a product or its aesthetic.
The User Interface is a website or app's general look and feel.
UI focuses on features, buttons, and functions being intuitive.
A good User Interface allows users to navigate instinctively.
Also, it's about being visually appealing to the user. This appearance includes intuitive elements and a natural design.
User Experience Design aims at retention. and focuses on the user's journey.
Think of the path to achieving a goal within the product while being simple and user-friendly.
UX is about how the user feels about your app and how seamless the user flow is.
Also, it follows up on how easy it is for users to achieve goals within the app.
While UX design focuses on how a website or app works, UI design relies on how it looks.
Further, you may have encounter the question "does UI/UX design require coding?"
Strictly speaking, User Experience design does not need coding.
But, having some coding knowledge may be helpful if you wish to become a UX designer.
Knowing how to code will let you communicate better with developers!
How to Measure User Experience
Measuring UX means you can see what is working and what isn't.
Here, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are key to measure outcomes.
Metrics will shows how users interact with a product and KPIs will measure its success.
The first refers to users' actions while interacting with a website or app.
Contrariwise, the latter focus on feelings about your product and/or your company.
Some relevant metrics to monitor include engagement, usability, retention, adoption and conversions.
Some critical KPIs are success rate, time-on-task, user error rate, System Usability Scale (SUS) and Customer Satisfaction.
There is a vast amount of tools that can help you, depending on the most critical data for your product.
Google Analytics for user and website data and Google Optimize for A/B testing go well together.
How to Design Good User Experiences
Now that we know its relevance, we thought of giving you some pointers on what to do and avoid.
Below, we'll cover UX principles, don'ts, and the latest UX trends.
There are many versions of UX principles. Yet, this article will focus on Peter Morville's UX honeycomb.
- Usefulness. A product should fulfill a purpose with a defined why build the product and whom it will serve.
- Usability. The User Journey should be efficient, intuitive, simple and easy to use with a short learning curve.
- Findability. Users need to be able to easily navigate to find information or do a task when using the product..
- Credibility. Target audiences should trust your product to achieve goals at the end of the user journey.
- Desirability. Products' visual aesthetics must be appealing to the user beyond just fulfilling a need.
- Accessibility Consider users with different disabilities or impairments when designing your product.
- Value. With all previous actions accomplished, you should ask, is your product valuable?
What to avoid in User Experience Design
Like everything in life, there are also some don'ts.
Here are some examples of what you should avoid.
Below, you’ll find two general and two specific examples.
- Great Visuals with No Purpose. You can offer something visually appealing, but it won't make a difference without purpose or function.
- Long Drop-Down Menus. Is your drop-down menu too long for users to find the right option? You might want to rethink your design.
- WhatsApp Delete For Everyone feature. People are prone to send messages to the wrong contact or send them before they're finished. While its reasoning eas on point, In reality, this might make the sender look a bit suspicious.
- Netflix Hover Auto-Play Feature. In 2015, Netflix launched a feature where hovering automatically played content. This became quite unsable as you couldn't access details about a film or TV show without its trailer playing.
5 Great User Experience Trends
User Experience trends are constantly shifting.
Here are some of the UX trends we’ll be seeing in 2022.
- Increased Personalization. Personalization itself may not come as something new, but it will include data-driven recommendations.
- Augmented and Virtual Reality. Augmented and Virtual Reality aim to keep expanding, particularly for B2B Models.
- Data Visualization. Data Visualization improves interactions to show users pleasing and exciting data.
- Micro-Interactions. Micro-Interactions are small visual elements, like an animation, that make the UX more engaging.
- Inclusive Design. There will be more efforts pointing to accessibility in contrasting colors, descriptions and captions.
Why is User Experience Important?
A good User Experience revolves around fulfilling the users’ needs.
So, it leads to better customer satisfaction and higher conversion and retention rates.
The main goal of UX design is to create positive experiences for users.
As a result, this will foster loyalty to your brand or product.
Moreover, a good user experience reduces development, bug-fixing, and marketing costs.
You'll provide a better product if you invest time in advance in researching your target.
In turn, this strategy translates into a higher return on investment.
In short, User Experience affects your brand’s reputation, customer loyalty, and sales.
These are pretty important if you want your product to succeed.
Conclusion
As we’ve seen, User Experience is essential to Product Development.
It saves time and money by ensuring we give users the product that best fits their needs and desires.
We hope this article helped you understand all the UX basics!
Also, we expect to have given you insights into its principles and trends.
