The majority of people understand how important user experience is to any marketing plan. However, did you know that user experience (UX) is a process that involves placing the customer at the centre of your strategy and basing business decisions on actual user data?
How can excellent UX be achieved? We’ll look at ten strategies in this blog post that will help any UX project succeed, whether it’s done internally or with the assistance of an outside consultant.
UX: What is it?
Is user experience (UX) just about making a beautiful user interface? Or is strategy and planning more important? Actually, it includes all of those things. And then a few more.
The user interface (UI), which is everything you see, touch, and interact with on screen, comes to mind when people think about user experience (UX). It’s the appearance of a webpage or the screen that you’re tapping on your phone. Customer experience (CX) is another thing that people might consider. CX is the feeling of all the loyalty you’ve accumulated, the impression that people have of working with you, and how simple it is to do so.
In the centre of all of this is UX. It’s a method of figuring out the kind of CX you want to build, the experience you’re aiming for, and then matching that to a user interface that works.
What benefits does UX offer?
UX strives to provide digital assets that both support business objectives and customer needs. Indeed, it can be conceptualized as the area where digital resources, user requirements, and business objectives converge.
The digital resources
The most tangible deliverables from a UX project are the digital assets, like a web page or an app interface. User research should be the foundation for developing these. Prototypes and user group tests can only be conducted after that.
The user
Making the user’s life as simple as possible is one of UX’s main objectives. For this reason, it is important to listen to what the customers have to say. Verify that you comprehend their desires. Include them in the process of developing and making decisions.
The Business Goal
Any UX project must prioritize the user, but it also needs to consider the objectives of the business. It is just as pointless to develop products that do not satisfy customer needs as it is to do so without taking business needs into account.
A delicate balance must be struck between what the client claims they require and what the company is trying to sell them. You might pass up chances to sell clients goods or services they hadn’t even considered if you just pay attention to what they say they want.
When you should consider UX?
When you’re launching a new product or going through a period of change, you and your brand may need to concentrate on user experience.
UX is typically a top priority for businesses when introducing new products or updating old ones. It’s possible that they are observing what their rivals are doing in an effort to provide their own clients with an improved user experience. The majority of businesses now see the benefits of devoting time and resources to user experience early in the development process.
A company may experience panic if it is going through a transitional period, such as when it appears the market is moving without them or when their rivals are passing them by. Just like when they call a plumber to fix a leak, they see something is broken and they get UX consultants to fix it. But perhaps they should reconsider their entire plumbing system in addition to just fixing the leak!
UX research can offer insightful information about what customers actually want and how the business needs to change to adapt to their shifting expectations.
Ten steps to a successful UX plan
These ten steps will assist you in implementing a successful UX strategy
Identify the problem
Having a clearly defined goal
Every effective project and strategy begins with a well defined objective. This ensures that no time is wasted on unimportant tasks and provides focus to all efforts.
Set your goal at the outset of your UX journey. Put differently, what actions are necessary to tackle the issue that you have recognized?
Developing better digital products that will engage customers is probably your UX goal in digital marketing (and, ultimately, drive sales). You need to know as much as you can about your users in order to accomplish this. You can create goals that are in line with the needs of users once you have solid user centered data.
Analyze your competitors
Spend some time carefully examining the actions of rivals in your industry. Examine the customer journey that your website or app offers, and then compare it to those of your rivals. Evaluate your performance in relation to your rivals.
Pay attention to five or six of your rivals. Next, establish benchmarks so you can assess how you and your rivals are doing at various customer journey touchpoints, like social media channels. Does your interface need to be changed? Does your customer journey need to be made simpler?
Consider yourself a customer browsing through these various apps and websites. Which one would you pick?
Analyze user interface
Often, when people think of user experience (UX), they think of the user interface (UI). It’s not a bad idea to start there.
Good UX is probably going to come from a well designed UI. Thus, consider how your interface is laid out. To what extent is it intuitive? To what extent is it user friendly? Does it meet the needs of the clients? (And, how does it compare to the user interfaces of your rivals?)
Remember to consider your interface from your customers’ point of view when creating or altering it.
Understand the customer experience
Nevertheless, UX encompasses more than just a well designed user interface. Consideration must be given to the entire customer experience (CX). What emotions do clients have when they transact with you? Why is that the way they feel?
Consider what sets your company apart that one extra element that wows clients. For instance, you might have implemented one click purchasing on your website or app to make it incredibly simple for customers to finish their purchases. Although the button is a component of the interface, the customer experience is primarily determined by how easy the interaction is to use.
Create a Prototype
A necessary first step in any UX project is prototyping. Here’s where you draft a preliminary version of the product or user interface for user testing. Frequently referred to as the minimum viable product (MVP), it is not required to be flawless. In actuality, “fail fast, fail often” is a common methodology used in prototyping. Put another way, get better fast by learning from your early mistakes.
Prototyping’s main benefit is that it allows you to “test the market” before making a large scale production investment. Early MVP feedback will assist you in creating a much better, more user focused final product.
Rather than fully functional interfaces, you are frequently forced to use clickable mockups (made with InVision or Figma, for example) for prototypes. After that, you can iteratively alter these designs until you have a functioning prototype by utilizing the input you receive from your qualitative and quantitative research.
When conducting research on your prototype, take note of additional numbers and the following words:
Numbers: This is the unprocessed, uninterpreted information you collect about the prototype. Simple surveys and feedback forms are a good way to collect this data.
Words: This is the quantitative, attitude based information you collect about the prototype. This can be gathered through longer form questionnaires and surveys, interviews, or by observing users of your product.
Run user test
An integral component of any UX program is user testing. As much objective qualitative and quantitative data as you can should be obtained. Pose relevant queries to your users. Watch them as they use your merchandise. Ask them to describe their initial experiences utilizing the product.
Make sure you have users whose opinions and insights you can rely on. Try not to steer or interrupt their discussion. Just give them the freedom to freely express their ideas to you.
Once your prototype is refined, you may feel more comfortable introducing it to larger test user groups. It is best to take an incremental approach. There’s no point having a large group of users test a prototype that is nowhere near finalized yet. Prior to proceeding with the more costly large scale tests, start with the smaller, less expensive tests. Thus, take as many and as early tests as you can.
Your final product should start to take shape as you run a number of small scale tests; it should become more refined and targeted. Most significantly, though, it starts to match users’ intended uses more closely.
Analyze the data
Obtaining as much valuable information as possible prior to releasing the finished product is the goal of testing and prototyping.
You can get the hard data, such as statistics about levels of satisfaction or frustration through quantitative feedback.
Qualitative data, however, might provide you with more insightful criticism. Having said that, users may occasionally provide you with feedback that you want to hear rather than being truthful, which makes qualitative feedback prone to errors. For this reason, gathering both qualitative and quantitative data is crucial. Do the observations you made correspond with the feedback you received regarding the product’s usability?
Deploy Artificial intelligence
User Experience (UX) is being profoundly impacted by artificial intelligence (AI).
AI programs like Jasper, Kroma, and Stable Diffusion can be used to accomplish a variety of user experience (UX) tasks, including UI design. It is especially helpful for repetitive, mundane tasks like mirroring changes across several screens.
Many UX related issues, like how to streamline a user interface or handle massive volumes of user data analysis, can also be resolved with AI. To solve problems that can be solved by humans, however, a significant amount of human input and creative intelligence will still be required.
Develop a UX mindset
It ought to be obvious by now that UX is a continuous process. It entails cultivating a UX perspective. What sort of experience do you hope to provide for your customers? And how can you use other digital assets and a clear user interface to deliver that experience?
Pay attention to your clients. Compile accurate information about them. and after that make business decisions based on this data.
Following their identification and analysis of the issue, the UX consultant will probably suggest a few quick fixes. These are usually the ‘low hanging fruit’ that deliver quick wins for the company. There is rarely a single “silver bullet” that can address every UX issue facing the business.
Rather, in order to assist the organization in adopting a UX mindset, the UX consultant is probably going to delve further and begin suggesting some systemic adjustments. This is an attempt to stop similar UX problems from happening again.
Implementing these kinds of solutions can be challenging, and the UX consultant may need to cultivate a longer term collaborative relationship with the business. These ten steps will help you integrate the UX mindset into your brand culture, along with consulting outside experts when needed. Consequently, this can aid in guaranteeing that business choices are consistently made with the client in mind.
