This is part 2 in a series of 3 articles, discussing user experience. In this part, we talk about why user experience is hot and why you should care. Click here to read the 1st article about what UX is first.
As you know, the digital world is evolving ever faster. Your customers have become used to fantastically designed applications and anything that looks 2014 is today a giant turn off. That’s why today it’s simply not enough anymore to just build functional digital solutions. The end user and his (psychological) needs should therefore be centralized.
But that does not mean good UX design is easy to do. Because a good UX requires a lot of time, analyses and effort to realize, it simply costs a lot of money. The key for UX service providers is therefore to use tested and proven frameworks when conceptualizing UX designs. This in order to reduce the time it takes.
And why should I care?
Because sub optimal application and web design sucks. Your company is missing out on opportunities via your digital (sales) channels. Companies that are providing the customer journeys with the least resistance, meaning the least cognitive load for the users, are the ones that are succeeding. And because good UX is not easy to pull of and therefore costs extra money, it tends to get put aside.
But you probably already knew this
Luckily, today the large half of the companies with digital activities are well aware of this fact, as appears from some data.
- The term UX is discussed on the internet more and more
- UX is one of the most searched keyword on the internet by businesses
Many communication agencies already realize that the user experience is tightly intertwined with the visual identity. It does not matter how beautiful your pages look like if people do not know how to use them in a way that adds value to their lives. Providing functional interaction is not enough, users should enjoy the interaction. How more complex the platform is, the more important the UX is. This is important, because as a company, one of your obvious goals is engaging customers to make them come back after their initial purchase.
Start-ups knew this too
We all know UX is important, but still, today offering a well designed app with the person who uses it in mind can be an important differentiator. It’s all about momentum because returning customers equal money. So it’s obvious companies that build new solutions are making a user centric design a core value. This is a lot easier and more cost efficient to do when creating a digital tool from scratch, than it is to adjust existing feature-rich solutions.
Visitors of your platform decide on average in only 5 seconds if it is worth their time
The last thing you want to do is to allow your customers to create a negative emotional connection with your brand. That is why analysis of user behavior data on your pages is so important. Continuous data driven UX improvement is key.
It’s about the whole package
UX design is of course tightly related to UI design and graphical design, but it’s important to realize that it’s about the whole package. Page load times, application flow and server up-time are all influencing the emotional state of visitors. That’s why it is important to keep on load-testing and user-testing on platforms that are running in production. You can never 100% assume how your application will be perceived. Rather, you need to analyze and simple ask them.
It’s all about communication with your customers
So, in short
A good UX design hot because it has become the standard. End users (humans) have become used to having their needs centralized when interacting with digital products or services. The ROI that is brings is gigantic, but that’s something we talked about in our previous article: About The ROI of Good UX Design.