5 UX Goals every UX Designer should set??

Every day we make hundreds or maybe even thousands of decisions - both conscious and unconscious that have small to great impact on our lives. That presents a very consumable window for each designer to design a service or a product that considers not only the rationality but also the irrationality of human decision making behaviours. While each product is often analysed against metrics like being a great market fit, being profitable or useful and so on, there are some metrics every user experience designer must also keep in mind to constantly?quantify the quality of user experience?(more on that later, I promise!)?We are all big on the advocacy of user experience design for every product or service but what on earth is a good experience anyway? Is there any success metric that each designer must aim for? And how must be condense and quantify all those hours we spend infant of our laptops and on sticky notes on the wall??For me, it is truly important to have answers to the most important 5 questions and I will be jotting them down below.?

Goal 1: I did what I came here to do!

Before the fancy interface, the swiftness of micro-gestures and animations, one thing trumps almost everything else - I did what I came here to do. The user came across your product, interacted with it and completed a task successfully (with hopefully no one dying!)

It is very likely that most of your users while looking at your product are thinking ‘Will this product solve my problem or be of any actual use?’ So a product must always fulfil it’s core offering and that too with as less hiccups as possible.?

For example, a simple click on?www.google.com?despite of it’s $300 billion networth would still redirect you to it’s humble search bar as it did in 1996. Why? Because that’s what it does best. Do not oversell, overcompensate for anything through design.?

Goal 2: Don’t make users think!

Handholding that has never been paralleled! You’d often see me chanting this like a mantra to pretty much everyone I know.?

A simple experiment on Google will resolve the doubts you have about the human race. We are inherently and gloriously lazy and want to do as less as possible without any fear of judgement whatsoever. The evidence? There are literally searches on Google with the keywords ‘how to slap someone through the internet’.?

So how to make users think as less as possible? You must think of each and every possible scenario through?Customer Journey mapping, Empathy Mapping and creating User Flows?and thinking about what unnecessary steps can be avoided? what words in the ux copy could possibly confuse the reader? what interface style can be direct and simpler to user?

Goal 3: Create habits along the way

Products work best not only because of the experience we design but the psychology we learn to counter with it. Any product that can form a new habit has immeasurable potential.

Now, instead of standing on a rainy corner watching cab after cab pass you by or listening to a mumbled overhead announcement of train delays, services like Uber, Lyft, Careem let you stay comfortable as you track your driver while he or she heads your way, with an ETA of when they’ll pull up. Also, there’s no tipping to worry about.?

Similarly, other apps like WhatsApp has entirely taken over traditional SMS and Calls. Google Maps, Foodora, Uber Eats, Tinder have all rewired our social norms, habits and ways we interact with the world.

Goal 4: Make users your promoters?

One of the key goals that can land you the most favourable outcomes is?when the user decides to engage with you, share and promote your content, subscribe to your newsletter, fills your survey and checks back! This is the nirvana every designer dreams of. Creating a relationship with your user.?

As a designer, this is why?Empathy?is a concept so strongly stressed upon. When you go an extra mile to understand your end user’s behaviour patterns, you automatically become better designers that can provide effective design solutions to the problems at hand.

Goal 5: Make someone fall in love

This is one goal every user experience design is directly responsible for. Every service or product would always have a competitor or a rival that has the same product offering as you do and chances are, all of them would be covering goal number 1 that I mentioned earlier.?But only few of them are favoured or at least have least number of hateful comments on social media.?

Why is that the case? People generally enjoy when their experiences are smooth and do not spike up or down too much. It takes away the sense of reliability from them. Remember season 8 of Game of Thrones? Yes, exactly. The sheer brilliance of the plot, diversity of characters, unrivalled cinematic effects did not mean a thing when someone feasted on a hearty McChicken Burger in a medieval setting or drank smart water when most people had only one good bath in the entire course of their lives.

User experience designers must always understand the rhythm of the product that guides the user through the different steps of the process. You should use the principles to engage and amaze the users and get them to complete the desired task and get the desired result.