Are you implementing a new product, or maybe you want to improve the existing one, make the customer choose your service? UX – User Experience, or literally “user experience” (which one experiences while browsing an application, website or using a product), is a field that creates user experience based on research. Experiences related to a given product or service, experiences that translate into brand perception. The positive ones enhance the company’s interaction with the user, gaining their trust. The concept of UX design is closely related here – what does it mean? It is just designing these positive experiences. The effect of UX is to see exactly what the customer was looking for in your product. This is the simplest answer to the question of what is UX, because the entire process related to it is complex and includes many stages on the path from the product’s appearance in the customer’s mind to after-sales service. Learn about User Experience – what is it exactly, what is it based on and why it is worth using this technique in your company.
What UX is for the company
The high degree of product similarity, which affects the high competition of companies on the market, means that in order to gain the user’s interest, you need to stand out with something more. Since the parameters of the products are similar, their prices probably are too. So what to attract the attention of a potential customer? This is where UX design comes in handy:
- skilful designing of user experiences affects the creation of exactly the product that a potential customer is looking for, which results in gaining an advantage over the competition
- User Experience allows you to design the interface of an application or website in such a way that it is optimally user-friendly and guides it smoothly from getting to know the product or service through the purchase, ending with ensuring the satisfaction of using
- UX design allows you to bring out, at each of the aforementioned stages, the functionality and usability of a product or service – so important from the end user’s point of view.
Where do positive experiences come from?
What is UX design we already mentioned, but what exactly does the whole process look like? You could say that UX is an activity aimed at learning about the consumer’s needs and behavior, on the basis of which the product is created, developed and implemented, taking care of the positive end-user experience resulting from its use. And it would be true, but also a huge simplification, which makes it impossible to express the specificity of the entire process. So, what is User Experience in terms of the stages on which experience design is based?
1. Discovery of needs and verification of errors
The starting point of the process preceding UX design is to learn about the user’s needs, which the product is to meet, as well as to verify the application or website in terms of attractiveness and errors, hindering smooth navigation in their area, and also hindering purchasing decisions. For verification at a level appropriately adapted to the needs of a given company, the following are used:
- UX audit – a usability audit, allows you to evaluate the functionality of the application or website,
- UX research – i.e. task usability tests that enable the collection of detailed knowledge about users, and also allow to detect errors that disrupt the smooth navigation of the application or website.
2. Meeting them
It’s time to get to know the details and explain exactly what UX design is, i.e. UX design. Based on the collected information, UX designers deal with:
- creating a product that will respond to the needs of consumers,
- adapting the interface to their behavior – designers work out a path along which the end user will be able to intuitively navigate through the application or website.
This is how positive experiences are created. Thus, UX design is based, e.g. on:
- designing a functional and useful product – i.e. a product that works exactly as it should, enabling the use of its basic functions in an easy way,
- using solutions that users know – then the application or website is pleasant for them to perceive, the user knows how it works, and while navigating within it, he / she feels confident, thanks to which his trust in the brand grows,
- ensuring positive User Experience by adjusting the interface functions strictly to the specificity of the application or website, giving the user the feeling that he will find exactly what he is looking for and what he needs in a given place – e.g. when designing the store interface, the “add to cart” button should be located in a typical place for him, while dealing with the interface of the notebook application, emphasize the icon for adding a new note so that the user does not have to search for it.
Summarizing what UX design is, we can say that it is designing a product that will be a pleasure for the user to use.
6 factors for a positive User Experience
When designing UX, you should focus on the factors that must be met by the product in order to be able to call it a full-fledged and positive user experience:
- findability
- desirability
- credibility
- accessibility
- usability
- usefulness
Taking into account the user’s needs already at the product design stage and the elimination of errors that appear in the application or on the website will allow to create a solution that will describe the above factors. Therefore, when looking for an optimal answer to the question of what is UX, you should focus primarily on the user’s needs and the functionality of the application or website – then User Experience can be defined as preparing an ideal product – for the benefit of the user and for the benefit of the company.
