Introduction to UX

The following are some of the key factors we need to consider from the end-user perspective in designing for good experiences. Is your product …

• Useful
• Usable
• Findable
• Credible
• Desirable
• Accessible
• Valuable

There are a number of reasons why we should be designing our products and services for optimal customer experience. Some are pretty self-evident and one, in particular, not so much.

• Happy customers are good for business
  Whether it’s a web site that loads slowly, an unintuitive application, instructions that are difficult to read, missed delivery times or countless other problems we all experience, the common thread is that they all leave us frustrated or unhappy. As such, we aren’t likely to repeat these experiences, and we often tell our friends about it and write bad online reviews.
• Good UX makes money
  A badly designed product, or one that actually malfunctions, causes problems for customers. Support calls, refund requests, unexpected code patches, workarounds, lost business, bad word-of-mouth all cost businesses time and money. Additionally, money spent on UX work has a very high return on investment, some estimates are as high as $100 return on every dollar invested.
• Someone else has it
  It’s not just that bad UX makes for unhappy customers and costs money, but in any competitive industry, if you aren’t delivering a good experience for your customers, there’s always someone else who is. There are no second chances to make a first impression and if interacting with you is painful, your customers will find another option.
• You are not your user
  This is perhaps the most important, but often least understood issue with user-centred design. If you don’t spend time understanding your customers and their problems and centring them in the design process, it can easily be your undoing. Even when we think we know how our customers think, time and again we’re proven wrong.

How do we approach our customers to understand and empathize with them, so we can meet their needs? Design Thinking is an increasingly popular method (that’s been around for decades) for doing so; an iterative process that centres users and allows us to better anticipate their issues and design to avoid them.

• Empathize: Understand your users. Build empathy for the customer.
• Define: Research reveals opportunities for ideation and helps define your problem.
• Ideate (design): Generate and prioritize ideas to solve your design problem(s).
• Prototype: Build testable representations of your best idea(s).
• Test: Evaluate prototypes with real users and record results.
• Iterate: Testing results provide opportunities for continuous improvement.