If you are involved in any type of business online, you will have seen the term ‘UX design’ mentioned fairly frequently over the past couple of years. You’ve probably heard people try and explain what it is, but fail to explain its value and how the experience ultimately serves the user on their digital journey.
It is important to remember that the business owner’s primary goal is to sell, be that their brand, message or product, and the designer should find a way of clarifying the benefits of bulletproof UX design to all concerned. The last thing a credible designer wants is to have a service that they offer undervalued because the client doesn’t understand it. At Connect, we believe the user should be at the fore of every design.
It’s simple, really; all relationships, both online and off, are grounded in value. In a professional relationship it’s about what you can bring to the table and what you expect in return. Though each relationship is different, they all depend on core values to prosper. If there’s a lack of balance, one side or the other will suffer in the long term.
It is important for organisations to foresee and manage expectations. You don’t want the end user to expect too much and end up disappointed with a site’s UX. On the flipside, presenting the user with too much content or too many features can be confusing, unsettling and damaging over time. This is why aligning values and expectations during the early stages of the design phase is crucial for the user experience.
We recommend that you take a look at the experience you’re crafting – an app, a responsive redesign or a completely blank slate, and focus on the required processes and thoughts of the user.
Analytics can provide valuable insight into a site’s performance, but these numbers can’t offer guaranteed advice on the UX. At present, many business owners rely upon the ‘Time spent on site’ metric tucked away inside Google Analytics to inform them of how engaging their platform is, but does this metric really tell us that much about the user experience?
Is longer necessarily better? Is a 5-minute session conclusive proof that users are enjoying their time spent on-site? Or could they actually be spending much of their time sifting through the noise to find whatever it is they clicked through for in the first place?
Designing a knockout UX is considerably more layered than we often assume. It’s far more than just understanding how button placement can affect a user’s decision making process. It’s understanding how, or if, your user values the experience you are presenting to them.
The experience crafted for the user should be respectful, not overly demanding and it absolutely must serve a purpose. When we think of the user experience here at Connect, we like to refer back to the tried and tested tale of Goldilocks – identifying the client and user’s personal measure of “just right”.
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