Why should you care about improving the user experience?

With the massive spread of digital products and businesses, the competition between companies to attract and retain customers has intensified. Where the product itself or the price are no longer the only factors that make the difference, with the emergence of the concept of improving the user experience and caring for it as a direct expression of the extent of customer satisfaction with services and products.

Today, for example, there are thousands or even tens of thousands of mobile applications that specialize in one field, but users have a different opinion, because you can hardly find only a few dozen of them at the forefront of the scene and enjoy greater interaction, and the rest are the opposite! Herein lies the impact of a successful user experience. So let's learn about the user experience, then its importance and principles, and everything related to it as you have not read about it before.

table of contents:


What is the user experience?

It is the total interactions and final perceptions of the “customer” user towards the products and services provided to him, in addition to his aspirations and desires. The user's UX experience is measured in several ways, the most famous of which are digital methods, such as: click rates and response to action calls, conversion rate, landing page access rate, explicit expression from the user by leaving a written, visual, or symbolic evaluation that tells whether or not he likes it...etc.

User experience design is not only related to digital products. The concept appeared a long time ago, but it began to focus on it in the middle of the last century with the revival of industries, then it crystallized and gained its reputation and importance in the late nineties, after the first appearance of the term user experience in the words of “Donald Norman” one of the Members of the Apple team, who wanted to create a term that captures and expresses customers' desires, opinions, interactions, and aspirations, with the interests of the company in mind. So that improving the user experience becomes one of the most important concerns of companies and businesses.

User experience design

A sensory mental process that depends on the user experience designer going deep into the customer’s mind to understand what exactly he wants and what he does not want, that is, it has an analytical part that depends on observation and analysis of data that expresses the user’s satisfaction, suggestions and aspirations, and then eventually translates it into a new design or modification, and this It is the technical side of the process.

What is the difference between user experience and user interface?

Although they are interrelated and share the importance of the product, there are differences between them, the most important of which are:

First: User Experience Design

It depends on the side of observation and analysis, and it is a step that precedes the design of the user interface, as the latter is dependent on it, and first, after it is completed, the owner of the product must think of other solutions to attract customers and fix the defect that may bother them … Therefore, the graphic designer here is not the only one responsible for Suggest ideas and fix bugs, but the practical application is his or her original competence using user experience design tools.

Second: User Interaction Design

A purely technical process, it falls within the field of graphic design and has nothing to do with taking into account the user’s satisfaction and desires, because it derives the final idea of ​​design or modification from the user experience designer who we said may be an employee of the company who specializes in his field, so designing the user interface is the last stage in designing User experience, through which the user experience becomes a reality.

Good! We have focused on the three terms because there is a difference between them, although they are integrated and overlapping, so many confuse them. Add to it the concept of UX Writing, which is the user experience in its blogging aspect.

The most important goals of the ideal user experience

Companies seek to provide a good user experience to know the user's motives and reasons for his attachment to the product or service several reasons:

  • Maintaining the strengths of the product and fixing the defects, to reach a stage where the company can meet the needs of customers and keep pace with their aspirations and expectations.
  • Make a difference and influence the user. A large part of the reasons why a user prefers one product over another is psychological research. Evidence for this is the user's inability to answer all the reasons that prompted him to do so, but even enumerate only some of them!
  • Increasing customer loyalty and interaction with the product, as it is the most important pillar of the business, assuming that he is always right.

The main principles for a perfect user experience

According to Peter Morphil's User Experience Honeycomb model, any service or product must have these qualities for it to be considered valuable and an optimal user experience:

1. Useful

That is, it has a benefit and a role for the customer, so no one will buy or use a product to use it without a goal, and this says the former head of Apple “Steve Jobs”:

The way a design works is more important than its aesthetics and how people feel about it

2. Provides added value to users (Valuable)

The added value differs from the benefit because it is broader than it, as it expresses the product providing a specific solution that users needed or a benefit that they did not find with other competitors.

3. Useable

It should be easy to use, not complicated or unclear, and this includes the interfaces and interactions accompanying them. For example, if someone browses an online store and the store is very good, then the customer decides to buy but finds it difficult to complete the purchase stages due to a large number of long steps or the unclear purchase button, etc.

Or the availability of a product that achieved the element of utility in it, but the design of the product was down a wall! Here the user experience is very bad because usability was not taken into account, and the customer may never return to the store in the future!

4. Desirable

That is, there are indications that there is a great demand for the product or service because this indicates the satisfaction of users and their acceptance of the product as an explicit expression from them of the success of their experience of use.

5. Comprehensive and suitable for all categories (Accessible)

It is not exclusive to one class, so the user experience designer should take the needs and desires of several groups in the community and put himself in their shoes for a moment. For example, the elderly, children, people with special needs, “people of high determination”, and other categories must be taken into account for the user experience to be complete and better.

You can see here, for example, that the design of the pedestrian lane for people with special needs is complete, but in the middle of it is a strange pavement that makes it difficult for a disabled person to pass; Accordingly, it did not provide the principle of “availability or access” as required.

6. Credible

So that the customer may buy it without even looking at it, trusting the brand. Like the iPhone, whose customers line up for days before the release of the latest version, even before they try it! Because they simply trust Apple. This means that the principle of reliability is fully embodied in the company's products.

User experience design steps

When designing or improving user experience, the focus should be placed on the principles of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), which include:

First: Project Management

This stage focuses on starting the formation of the work team and directing it efficiently until the end of the work on designing the user experience. This includes planning, organizing, resource processing, and work management.

Second: user psychology

Understanding users' behavior patterns, how they think about the product, and their psychological interactions with the product are among the most important principles of user experience design. What will enhance the information we have about user psychology and behavior is the next step, “user research”.

Third: User Research

Here, an attempt should be made to understand the user's behavior and what exactly he wants, his motives, and his needs, by observing, analyzing, delving into his psyche, and relying on existing statistics resulting from feedback, if any.

Fourth: Usability Evaluation

It is concerned with measuring the user's satisfaction with the product or service and understanding how he uses it.

Fifth: Information Architecture

Here the focus is on how the information is organized, structured, presented, and presented to the user.

Sixth: User Interaction Design

A purely technical process, based on a graphic design effort, by ensuring that all necessary elements that provide ease of use are present in the design.

Seventh: Interaction Design

It is abbreviated as IXD, and its idea is based on finding and creating a kind of interaction between the user and the product, according to well-studied behaviors, let's take chatbots as an example of achieving interactive design because it provides a kind of real-time interaction with the user according to artificial intelligence techniques.

Eighth: Visual Design

Specific to the aesthetic aspect that should attract the user and give them a kind of emotional attachment and fascination… without contradicting the whole message of the brand.

Ninth: Content Strategy

This strategy is based on the idea of ​​creating useful and structured content.

Tenth: Web Analytics

It specializes in data collection, classification, preparation of reports, and analysis.

With a simplified and brief explanation, the previous stages fall under the following five stages:

1. Understanding the user

The user is analyzed from all psychological and technical aspects, so interviews are conducted with users collectively or individually if possible, or surveys are conducted on the ground or electronically or rely on their electronic assessments. And other ways that allow you to know their opinions, requirements, and obstacles they face, to understand what they want or what should be fixed and improved? After understanding the user, the design team and members of the product creation team can decide who exactly to work with.

2. Study competitors

An ideal user experience will not be achieved if its producers do not know anything about products similar to it or directly compete with it. Analyzing their products includes observing the nature of the product design and its interface and evaluating the experience of its users. Thus, you will not only ensure the best user experience, but you will get inspiration and new ideas And correct the mistakes they have and avoid them.

3. Preparing a prototype

Starting to convert data into reality by preparing a prototype, which will be based on the previously obtained outputs, which represent the initial precursors for determining the ideal user experience. Here, the designers and the team start working on preliminary designs for the product and its interface, taking into account the desired user experience. This stage should be repeated until the ideal user experience and the optimal product are reached.

4. Design

Now you have reached the final stage that deals with implementation, and you will have to consider the principles of graphic design (contrast, balance, alignment, proximity, repetition, colors...) or whatever you seek to design. As we said, user experience design is not limited to graphics or digital products.

But in general today, everyone who talks about improving the user experience often means digital products such as websites, smartphone applications, and corporate visual identity, because these areas have become the most popular and concerned with the user experience.

5. Evaluation

The stage that comes after the last stage, which can become the first stage, is what is called the “product life cycle”, that is, the product remains in a closed cycle (planning and research, implementation, evaluation, then development, correction or preservation of the gains). Here, users' reactions are extrapolated, surveys or personal interviews are re-conducted, questions are asked to users if necessary, and reliance is also on the conversion rate and access rates to the landing page, in the case of online stores, for example.

It is also recommended to do A/B testing, which is based on the idea of ​​comparing two variables to determine the best. Example: We have a website that has a call-to-action button “Subscribe to the site” and we want to know which word will be more acceptable and influential to the user and achieve the greatest interaction, is it “Subscribe to the site” we symbolize with the variable (A) or the word “Register with us” and symbolize it with variable (B)?

Of course, according to A / B tests, we will not compare ourselves in the case of this example, which expresses a digital product related to the field of search engine optimization. Rather, we will use the free Google Optimize tool or the paid Crazyegg tool, to give us an idea of ​​the most variable that has the greatest conversion rate.

As we said, every product or service produces a positive or negative user experience, so it is our role to improve it and not create it from the ground up, except in rare cases. On this basis and as a summary of the above, it can be said that the user experience has two main pillars:

  • Project objectives: these may be increasing profits or positioning in the market, or other objectives depending on the size of the company and the recent establishment. The user's goal must not take precedence over the company's ultimate goal, otherwise, the product becomes meaningless.

For example, a website in an advanced stage of its establishment may search for approval of SEO rules and increase visibility in search engine results, to raise the reliability and archiving of the site with search algorithms, so advertising for it is a priority, in the beginning, more than calling for activities such as buying, for example.

  • The user's desires: Whether they are purposeful or not, in the end, a lot of what the customer wants and aspires to should be taken into account, and his opinions, comments, and evaluations are taken into account, otherwise the project's goal will inevitably become incomplete.

Example: YouTube relies on ads as the most important source of its income, so if those ads are permanently canceled at the users' desire, YouTube will not become a source of income and go bankrupt. And here the genius of the YouTube platform officials appears, as they reduced the time and number of times ads appear in the video clips, so that the advertisement is commensurate with the length of the video and is repeated only once or twice at most, so that the viewer does not get bored or feel inconvenienced, and thus there is a “negative user experience.”. This alignment between the user's desire and the company's goals is what guarantees a successful and excellent user experience.

Conclusion

In conclusion, remember very well that user experience does not necessarily mean ease of use of the product, otherwise it is only related to the aesthetic and visual aspects, but rather the concept here is much broader as the product must meet the conditions that we mentioned above, the most important of which is that it is a solution to a problem and useful. And if you want to expand more on the technical details of the subject of user experience.