UX is good, good business: How to get the greatest benefit of it
User experience design (UX) focuses on improving user satisfaction by improving the way they interact with websites, applications and devices in our lives. In other words, UX makes complicated things easy to use.
While the term "UX" is relatively new, the concept of user-friendly design has existed for several generations. "Good design is good business," IBM's second president, Thomas J. Watson, said that famous phrase to students in 1973. "We believe that good design can help make for a good product to reach its full potential ".
Watson has just left IBM's CEO position to retire, after helping develop the company tenfold. He predicted the trend of making companies like Apple, Facebook and Google succeed as they are today. Apple does not invent smartphones, but they make phones easy to use. Facebook is not the first social network, but simplicity has helped it grow. And there are many other search engines before Google appears, but at that time there was no tool to make finding relevant information easy. All three companies have succeeded by improving the user experience for existing products.
User experience contributes to many other success stories. Jeff Bezos has invested 100 times more in the user experience than in the first year of Amazon. Airbnb's Mike Gebbia trusted UX in bringing this company to $ 10 billion dollars. Tom Proulx, co-founder of Intuit, is one of the pioneers in usability testing, focusing on ease of use in its products.
Good user experience is obviously good for business. Studies show that companies investing in UX will need less cost in acquiring customers, lower support costs, increase customer interest and increase market share, according to a Research done by Forrester. When compared to their competitors, the Top 10 companies in the user experience outperformed the S&P index with nearly three times the return value. Forester's research shows that, on average, every dollar invested in UX brings in $ 100 in revenue. It is a huge ROI, namely up to 9,900%.
To improve the user experience, start by observing customers interacting with your products
The first step to improving your own UX (and reaping business benefits) is to conduct an assessment of the usability of your product, application or website. This process often discovers the most common problems. Typically, these analyzes show UX issues in your product. Usability testing (usability testing) will explain these issues.
In my company, we often find websites that are less attractive because they are designed without user orientation. In these situations, people implement products in a subjective way. As a result, websites are designed for employees themselves, not for customers.
Proper UX design requires understanding the needs of users and creating a solution that can solve their problems and help complete their tasks as easily and quickly as possible. To do this correctly, you need to know the needs of users by interviewing them and observing while they interact with the product. Results can then be developed outlining user behavior patterns. In return, they can be applied to creating product prototypes to better serve users' needs. With continuous testing and adjustment, you can improve ease of use, minimize errors and increase customer satisfaction overall.
Despite popular belief, usability testing does not need to follow the mirror with hundreds of participants. According to Norman Nielsen Group , the world leader in UX, observations and interviews with only five users often reveal about 85% of all usability issues. Simply recruit 5 participants representing the actual users and encourage them to use your product in an observed environment. Give them the real mission to complete. Ask them to think for themselves, but do not help or guide them. Observe their behavior and listen to their feedback to detect potential problems.
Creating good UX is part of your internal process
After fixing the usability issues, think about how you can incorporate UX design into your process to avoid making the same mistakes again in the future. One way to do that is to integrate pattern libraries. A sample library is a collection of previous user interface tests to solve common design problems. Organizations based on sample libraries, different from reinventing the wheel each time, found an increase of 50% in product development efficiency. You can develop your own sample library or use public libraries like UI Patterns or Yahoo Design Pattern Library.
In business, speed and efficiency are paramount. I recommend starting with the low precision wireframe. At Intechnic, we outline the original ideas on paper and focus only on the most important factors first. We use Sharpies – forced to limit the details so you can fit on a piece of paper. Finally, we moved those designs onto a board, where we could fill in more details and create variations. When the designs have passed the internal audit round, we convert them into interactive prototypes with high accuracy, simulating real-life situations and can be tested with real users. There are several tools to do that: Axure, Uxpin, Balsamiq and iRise, etc.
User acceptance is very important for any product, project or service. A good experience: experiment early (with actual users) and experiment regularly. Businesses will fail if not satisfy customers. Make them happy with the best UX.
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