What is a user experience
A user experience (UX) is a broad term that refers to any tactile or emotional interaction an individual has with a product.
This could be the ease with which an app is used, the ease with which a website is explored, the intuitiveness and ergonomics with which a device is handled, or the overall feeling that the user gets from these experiences.
Overall, the term “user experience” can describe the whole experience of every touchpoint a user interacts with throughout a transaction.
Who is in charge of the User Experience?
To keep up with the rising discipline of improving user experience, numerous new job roles have been formed to handle the duty of user experience. Most frequently, a user experience designer is entrusted with understanding what people want and need from a product and turning this vision into a reality through design.
User research is usually the first step in improving the user experience or creating a new user experience. UX designers can only understand what is essential to potential end-users by seeing and speaking with them without allowing personal bias to seep into the process.
Afterward, your sass company could hire a user interface designer to restructure the app’s (or website) overall look and feel. He can start by emphasizing the search feature, perhaps by centering it, putting it right at the top of the screen, or designing a bright, color-contrasting button to draw the user’s attention to the search box.
This procedure will almost certainly be carried out in combination with the involvement of the UX designers.
Once the UX designer has gathered sufficient information, they can begin to develop the “visual grammar” for the product under consideration.
The process could include collaborating with a user interface designer to establish symbols, shapes, and frameworks semiotically relevant to the activity; for example, a shopping trolley icon now implicitly means “check out.” Alternatively, in the case of genuinely novel digital solutions, the UX designer may have felt the need to develop an entirely new visual language, which consumers will gradually come to comprehend.
Throughout the product design and development process, the job of the user experience designer and user interface designer becomes less noticeable. These job roles are mistakenly interchangeable or even filled by a single worker in some businesses, which is a red flag.
The Importance of User Experience
A pleasant user experience will inspire a customer to interact with your product regularly and multiple ways.
A negative user experience, on the other hand, can be annoying, perplexing, and even lead to mistakes being committed. A user dissatisfied with your user experience will simply switch to a competitor’s product due to your poor user experience.
User Experience compared to other fields
User Experience VS User interface
User experience (UX) and user interface (UI) are two completely different techniques.
User experience is a broad term that encompasses the entire process of utilizing a product, from the moment of purchase to the moment of purchase completion and everything in between.
When it comes to UX, you’ll find user interface, which is a phrase that refers to the appearance and feel of a product, as well as what that communicates to the end-user.
UX designer vs. Product manager
UX designers and product managers will have a lot of the same goals, which is excellent news. Both of them increase the odds of a brand’s success by creating from the user’s point of view.
Product managers may champion what a product has to achieve and why it needs to do it to operate collaboratively. To achieve said goal, it is necessary to have a thorough grasp of the target audience, empathize with their wants and requirements, and develop a business model and product solutions to address current problems.
Consider the following example: a UX designer may discover through user research that customers have difficulty navigating piece music streaming apps because they lack visual signals to assist their search for new music and save it for offline listening.
This is how this all comes together: Following the receipt of this information, the UX designer may advocate prioritizing this issue’s resolution in the next round of app updates. In different words – A user-experience designer may take that and figure out how to make it a reality for the user.
Bringing the two together would aid in the development of better products, improve standard procedures, and eliminate duplication of activities within departments.
How To Improve the User Experience of your product
Bottom line: If you want to create a website that attracts the proper type of visitors and encourages them to accomplish what you want, it must be tailored to their needs.
For example, in booking a flight with a low-cost airline, you’ll most certainly have experienced the hair-pulling nature of lax user interface design first-hand. Keep in mind – once you click through to pay, not only are the prices that are displayed on the browsing screen significantly inflated — withholding taxes, fees, and surcharges is an unscrupulous UX trick.
However, you will be presented with several pages of ‘optional’ add-ons such as cabin baggage and carry-on baggage; in-flight entertainment; meals; car rental; and travel insurance. The pages continue until you’re blue in the face, and then they stop.
For the most part, digital solutions are concerned with removing friction and reducing the number of steps required to complete a task, such as booking a flight. When it comes to poor user experience design, the steps necessary are quantifiable and often result in a less-than-satisfying experience for the customer.
Although satisfaction ratings are important, the way a product feels engaged has a significant impact on the likelihood of making a purchase.
If a website is not mobile-friendly, mobile users are five times more likely to quit a task than desktop users. Furthermore, bad user experience contributes to the failure of 70% of online enterprises, and poor performance contributes to 90% of users abandoning an app.
In other words, if you invest in creating a great user experience, your product will not only be more engaging and pleasurable for people to interact with, but it will also be more commercially successful as a result of your efforts.
Conclusion
The user experience is not concerned with a single stage of a user’s trip; instead, it is concerned with the entire journey. The experience is viewed as a whole, consisting of an integrated blend of usability, the emotional value supplied, pain points, frustrations, rewards, and task completion, among other factors.
Of course, your product must accomplish the brand’s goals as well. Those objectives, however, will never be met if the website is unable to convert visitors. User experience designers are so important in the web design process.
