Picture: Alvaro Reyes / Unsplash
According to user experience (UX) statistics, 88% of online shoppers wouldn’t return to a website after a poor user experience. Even if the products and services you provide are cost-effective and desirable, the stress associated with accessing them and figuring out your intention with them can lead people to shop with your competition instead of you.
It goes to show just how necessary prioritizing the user experience can be. If you’re unsure what’s involved in creating a good user experience, you might like to begin with some of the following central elements.
Useful
As any UX design agency will tell you, a product, app, or website needs to be useful for it to be desirable to your target market. It needs to solve a problem, make an everyday task more manageable, or be something so unique that people can’t help but want to buy what you have to offer out of sheer curiosity.
If your product or website serves no noticeable purpose, you might not get the engagement you were expecting, and your business might not succeed as you had hoped.
Effective
Most businesses create products to be effective and suitable for a specific purpose such as a conversational chatbot, but it’s easy to let this essential point fall by the wayside when you’re busy focusing on marketing and ensuring your website is aesthetically pleasing.
Test your website, app, or product throughout each stage of production to ensure it’s still adequate for users’ needs. Often, the best way to do this is by interviewing users or conducting surveys.
Accessible
At least 61 million Americans live with a disability, which equates to 26% or one in four adults. Is your product, app, or website accessible to all? Throughout every stage of the product creation process, consider whether you’ve made allowances for those with sight, hearing, motion, touch, or learning impairments.
For example, you can ensure a website is accessible for the blind and visually impaired by using sufficient color and texture contrasts, prioritizing interface colors, allowing manual font adjustments, and granting keyboard accessibility.
Desirable
Desirability is a significant part of the user experience. Is the product you’re making something people will buy? Desirability is challenging to measure, but some companies prioritize this part of the user experience by ramping up their marketing efforts as soon as their product launches. While it might be similar to other products in its class, how you market it can make all the difference to how well-received it is by everyday consumers.
Learnable
Some products, websites, and apps can be so complex that customers spend countless hours learning how to use them but still end up confused. Simplicity is crucial for a straightforward and memorable user experience.
While you might want to buck the trend and offer something no one else does, there can be value in sticking with tried and true methods. For example, internet users expect to find business logos in the top left-hand corner of a website and the menu in the top right-hand corner. Changing these elements for no good reason could lead to unnecessary confusion and frustration.
It can be easy to get so caught up in the excitement and overwhelm of creating a new product, website, or app, that you forget to consider the people who will ultimately use it. Prioritize the user experience with help from UX design agencies, and you might be surprised by how well-received your products are when the time comes to introduce them to the market.
