How UX can benefit your business

Although UX is the talk of the town during the last few years, most companies and teams use UX for any design-related position. This causes a lot of confusion among companies and people just starting as they aren’t sure how to place themselves.

Although there are assumptions that UX is just a fad — this couldn’t be further from the truth.

The most successful products on the market are built with users’ interest as a priority.

Product design, UX, and UI… People often tie these together, and although they overlap quite a lot, you need to clearly understand the differences if you are planning a career in the space.

As a product moves from idea to final release, UX design is an important component of the customer experience. UX research has been one of the rising topics across industries. 54% of consumers say customer experience at most companies needs improvement. A good start to a product lifecycle can mean higher customer retention, higher order value, and loyalty. UX plays an important role in defining the feature set and prioritizing features for inclusion in a release.

What is UX Research

User research helps to identify and understand the needs, goals, and behavior of users. By testing different designs or features, you can determine which ones are most effective at increasing user satisfaction. This can lead to improvements in your product design and ultimately improve customer retention.

User experience is the exchange of information from a person’s interaction with an object or phenomenon to the way that person perceives it. This can be a product or service, an application, an interface, or even a website. User experience is an important aspect for companies because it is the means through which customers can interact with what your company has to offer and this interaction leads to positive perceptions of your product or services.

“The best products don’t focus on features, they focus on clarity.”

Why you should deploy UX Research

User research is a process that puts a project into context. By humanizing the data collected about users, designers and researchers can identify the problems they face during an interaction and turn them into actionable insights. By putting the user front and center and evaluating every design decision from their perspective, designers can create a more user-focused experience that can lead to your business success.

1. McKinsey’s study reported that top-quartile companies with the best designs and user experience recorded 10% annual growth, compared to 3–6% of the industry. And this was true in all the industries considered for the study. Also, top-quartile companies had an unfair edge, as the difference between the 4th, 3rd, and 2nd quartiles was marginal.
2. The main objectives of a customer using the product, and an employee working on the product is different. Customers are looking to aid their aim of research and buying. Internal employees are eyeing better features, competing with industry players, and imitating the best experience. This creates an environment where internal employees can easily get fooled by what they build without helping them meet their objectives quickly. If you want to improve your usability testing strategy as well as increase your user satisfaction with your products, you need to select users who are unbiased and have a fresh perspective on your product.
3. Your intuition-based UI may conflict with customers’ conditioned expectations. The truth is, a web experience provided by the top players in the world (the likes of Amazon) has conditioned consumers to use certain UI elements in certain ways. Even if an experience could’ve been better designed, consumers are looking for certain information only in that particular way. For example, iPhone users navigate one page back differently from android users; or the save button still has a floppy disk icon even though that’s an outdated design. So logically we should design top-notch experiences but intuitively consumers expect something that they’ve already seen and used, which results in friction as well.
4. A usability test is a research method that is used to evaluate the user experience of a product. It is an essential part of the design process. It will help you understand how users think and behave when interacting with your product. It can be done in-person or remotely, but it should always be done before launching a product. Usability testing can help you see what users do, how they feel about the design, and whether they can complete tasks successfully. You can use this information to improve your design and make it more intuitive for your users.

“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”

How to start with UX Research

Run a small-scale experiment to test the effectiveness of your website or web journey. The person who will conduct this experiment will be involved in developing relevant testing methodologies, templating test formats for efficient turnaround times, and then running tests starting with small impact areas initially — say understanding a part of your webpage/web journey resulting in high exit rates.

It is important to understand how the intended user thinks, how he perceives a certain experience, what challenges he’s facing, and what things he would like to avoid. Using research insights, you can track what users are liking and what they are not and thus, try on making the two ends meet.

Top UX Research methods

1. Surveys: The market survey is a great way to learn the opinion of your potential customers on your potential products and services. It ensures that you are getting a better understanding of the product with a variety of opinions. Surveys are very target specific and ensure that every perspective of the user chain is being taken into account. You can conduct surveys through emails, live questioning, text messages, ad surveys, and much more.
2. Contextual Inquiry: User Context is an important part of creating an app that can be used by real users. To develop an app for a niche audience, you need to understand the context in which your users live and work. The main step in this process is to get insight into how your users would like to use your product — their problems, expectations, and challenges. Simulating real-world usage scenarios helps you identify potential issues with the product and assess the usability risk.
3. Active Listening: User experience research is another way of UX Research. This is done by listening to users and gathering feedback that they want. You can speak with them on various social media sites and collect their thoughts on your product. However, this method is preferred to UX research because it allows you to get instant responses from your audience and also allows you to counter their questions with quick action.
4. Stakeholder’s opinions: All stakeholders must be considered during your UX Research so that there is a mutual understanding when putting together the product. Each person’s opinion matters, so including all stakeholders in your research will help at the outset of going through their feedback and seeing what can be useful for improving key elements of the product.
5. Clickstream Analysis: Clickstream analysis is an analytics technique used to highlight what users are doing after they visit your website. The most important part of clickstream analysis is to figure out where a user is clicking, what page they clicked on, and if the subsequent pages received any clicks.

Does it better’ will always beat ‘did it first

More blogs will be published about insights on what UX is, what it means to have a great UX, and some of the latest trends in design, and more blogs related to UX will be published here.😊