Have you ever wondered how we get hooked to some websites and spend hours browsing the content on them? Or how is it so easy to navigate between certain websites while with others, it is even annoying to identify the main action items?
What makes some websites impressive is a stellar user experience design. UX is a significant factor that can make or break your website.
In this article, let's understand why UX is important and how and where businesses can use UX to make their products stand out, focusing on Users as the primary source of inspiration.
Let's get started.
Table of Contents
What is UX & Why is it Important?
UX stands for “User Experience.” As the name suggests, the entire process revolves around the user. One can define User Experience differently from the varying perspectives of a designer and a consumer.
For a designer, UX design creates products that provide users with meaningful, flexible, and relevant experiences. The process involves collecting and uniting the product, including design, branding, accessibility, functionality, and usability.
From the consumer's viewpoint, User Experience or UX is how a person feels while interacting with a system, which could be a website, desktop software, or a web application.
Alongside, UX has several other dimensions like information architecture, interaction design, visual design, usability, accessibility design, etc.
Top 5 Reasons Behind the Importance of User Experience for Businesses
Let us now establish the fundamental importance of UX design with the following benefits:
Improves Brand Reputation
Most first impressions are design-related. While User Interface (UI) establishes the first impression, UX decides whether your website can sustain the first impression.
When visitors come for more, it implies that you have been able to capture and accommodate their needs by mimicking their behavior. Visitors will spend more time using the application, focusing on what they need to do. And when this happens, your brand's reputation improves.
It would help if you started with a great logo to ensure your UX attracts new target customers. The next step is to define customer journeys by creating intuitive navigation and providing an error-free user experience.
Interaction design and site structure are equally crucial factors for a flawless user experience. Likewise, social media integration is an effective tool for gaining insights.
Enable End-Users to be More Efficient
Excellent application UX designs facilitate user flow through your software product. Your end-users intuitively navigate from one section to the other without wasting time figuring out how to complete a task or go back to the main dashboard.
This is the outcome of a UX design that combines a well-thought process, UX research methods, and sufficient effort in creating wireframes and a skeletal framework.
An ideal UX design mimics the natural behavior of the user persona and eliminates unnecessary steps in the process. An indicator of a good user experience is a hassle-free, smooth and positive user journey.
Increase in Customer Loyalty
User Experience has much to do with the user's feelings and emotions. Therefore, it has a long-term impact on user behavior. Users will return when they find a product helpful, easy to use, and pleasant.
Loyalty is not a quantifiable factor but a critical element of evaluating the user experience. It is in an organization's best interest to maximize the user's QoE.
Fosters ROI and Conversions
Impressive UX design is often a battle between visual design, rich functionality, and ease of use. Customer interactions happen in very few steps, resulting in people loving to use the product.
When you manage to make your user happy, they will stick with your product longer and will end up completing the conversion tasks.
Reduces Ongoing Costs
Investing in usability testing by finding a professional UX designer with a profound background results in cost reduction later.
Impressive UX design comes from research, analysis, and testing, so, with one, businesses put the end-user first when developing a product or service almost immediately.
Organizations that use a testing approach in the UX design process will avoid possible usability issues right from the beginning. When the estimates are accurate, it results in lesser costs than the more expensive fixings later with product redesigns.
After all, with a good UX design, the final product functions much better than others while also saving costs.
What Are the Stages of Designing User Experience?
There are four broad stages in designing a user experience. These are:
Step 1: Gathering Requirements
Requirement gathering is about understanding the user and their goals and current practices. This step is also called understanding the 'problem space,' that is, what hinders task completion and what can be done for task improvement.
Several techniques allow the designer to collect data about users and their behavior.
Step 2: Designing Alternatives
Once the users are identified and understood, designers can take this data and develop multiple design options that improve the user experience.
Step 3: Prototyping
Prototyping is a technical process of modeling the created design alternatives before producing the final version.
Step 4: Evaluating
Evaluation is done using techniques for ascertaining that the designers meet the users' needs.
Roles and Responsibilities of a UX Designer
A UX designer has a critical role in creating a robust user experience. The primary responsibilities include:
User Research
For UX designers to create a strong product, they must understand the user's unique wants and needs. The foundation of the design is empathy with the user. The designer identifies the user's needs, pain points, goals, and behavior in the user research stage.
At this stage, the designer also examines the broader industry and its direct competitors to understand how others meet their needs. He will identify other opportunities and the standards for products and services and explore possible technical barriers.
Design
It is a misconception that the UX design process is entirely based on aesthetics. In reality, much of the design aspect comes to solving problems and connecting users to improve accessibility and usability and creating an overall pleasing experience for the end user.
The UX designer is the voice of the end-user and ensures that the users get the best experience from the delivered product. A UX designer searches for answers that satisfy the audience's needs in the best possible way.
Designers aim for aesthetics, but the aesthetics must coordinate with the user to have a highly usable product. The design has to do more with the facility of using the product and having a seamless user experience than just creating something for the eye.
Writing UX Copy
To create a customized user experience, the product and software must have content that allows users to navigate the product. The users must know what they can do when taking specific actions corresponding to the steps. UX designers and copywriters create crisp, concise content directly matching the steps.
Validating and Testing with Users
This helps the UX designer identify problems or complications by seeing where users struggle when interacting with the prototype. User testing is usually done in person so the UX designer can observe where the user is hesitant or has trouble.
The user should give feedback but watching their natural reaction already provides the UX with designer many signals as to what needs further work.
Presenting the Design to the Business
For the most significant part - UX designers must get their ideas seen, heard, and through the approval process. They must present and interact with the decision-maker to push their ideas forward - make or break time.
Why is UX Important: Takeaways
UX is crucial for businesses across domains.
With a good UX design, you can not only make your users complete the conversions tasks but also change lives. When the interactions are as simple and intuitive as possible, your end users' lives become more effortless.
Also, with a great UX, you leave a lasting impression that your users will happily talk about with friends and family.
Professional UX design agencies can also help you with this process, so we advise looking for the right agency to partner with for your project.
