Why should you care about user experience?

Hi Everyone,?I’m Mohamed Ibrahim

Engineer UX / UI & UI Developer At Digital Banking Channel Al Rajhi Bank

Behance:?https://www.behance.net/mibrahim-designer

With the massive proliferation of digital products and businesses, the competition between companies to attract and retain customers has intensified. The product itself or the price are no longer the only factors that make the difference, with the concept of improving the user experience emerging and paying attention to it as a direct expression of the customer's 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 another opinion, because you can hardly find only a few dozen of them that lead the scene and have greater interaction, and the rest is the opposite! Herein lies the impact of a successful user experience. So, let's get to know the user experience, then its importance and principles, and everything related to it as you has not read about it before.

What is User Experience?

It is the sum of the final interactions and perceptions of the user “customer” towards the products and services provided to him, in addition to his aspirations and desires. The user experience UX is measured in several ways, the most famous of which are digital methods such as click rates, response to calls to action, conversion rate, landing page percentage, and the explicit expression of the user by leaving a written, visual or symbolic evaluation that predicts his liking or not…etc.

User experience design is not only related to digital products, the concept appeared a long time ago, but the focus began on it in the middle of the last century with the recovery of industries, then it crystallized and gained its reputation and importance in the late nineties, after the term “User Experience” first appeared 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, taking into account the company's interests. Improving the user experience has become one of the most important concerns of companies and businesses.

User Experience Design

A sensory mental process that depends on the depth of the user experience designer in the mind of the customer to understand what exactly he wants and what he does not want. It is the technical aspect 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 aspect of observation and analysis, and it is a step that precedes the design of the user interface, as the latter is affiliated with it, and after the first is done, the product owner must think of other solutions to attract customers and fix the bug that may bother them... Therefore, the graphic designer here is not the only one responsible for Suggesting ideas and fixing bugs, but practicality is his original prerogative using UX design tools.

Second: User Interaction Design

A purely technical process, which falls within the field of graphic design, and has nothing to do with the user’s satisfaction and desires, because it derives the final idea of the design or modification from the user experience designer who we said may be a company employee specialized in his field, so user interface design 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, many confuse them, add to it the concept of UX Writing, which is the user experience in its blogging part.

Optimal User Experience Objectives

Companies strive 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 defects, to reach a stage where the company can meet the needs of customers and keep pace with their aspirations and expectations.

Making a difference and impacting the user, a large part of the reasons why a user prefers one product over another is psychological research. Proof of this is the user's inability to answer all the reasons that prompted him to do so, even enumerating some of them only!

Increasing customer loyalty and interaction with the product, is the most important pillar of the business, assuming that it is always right.

The main principles of 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 of value and an optimal user experience:

1. Useful

That is, it has a benefit and a role for the customer, as no one will buy or use a product to use it without a purpose, and in this, former Apple president?“Steve Jobs”?says:

The way the 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’s presentation of a specific solution that users needed or a benefit that they did not find in other competitors.

3. Usable

It should be easy to use, not complicated or unclear, and this includes user interfaces and the interactions that come with 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 lack of clarity of the purchase button..etc.

Or the availability of a product that had an element of utility in it, but the product design was under a wall! Here the user experience is very poor because usability is not taken into account and with it the possibility that the customer will 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 users' satisfaction and acceptance of the product as an express expression of the success of their experience of use.

5. Inclusive and suitable for all categories (Accessible)

And it is not limited to one category, so it is better for a UX designer to take the needs and desires of several groups in society, and put himself in their place for a moment. For example, the elderly, children, people with special needs “people of high determination”, and other groups must be taken into account to complete the user experience and be better.

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

6. Credible

So that the customer might buy it without even looking at it, trusting the brand. Like the iPhone, which customers queue up for days before the latest version is released and even before they try it! Simply because they trust Apple. This means that the principle of reliability is fully embodied in the company's products.

User experience design steps

When you want to design or improve the user experience, you should focus on the principles of human-computer interaction (HCI) and which include:

First: Project Management

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

Second: the psychology of the user

Understanding user behavior patterns and how they think about the product, and probing their psychological interactions with the product is one of 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 behaviors and what exactly he wants, motives, and needs, by observation, analysis, and in-depth in his psychology, and relying on the existing statistics resulting from the feedback, if any.

Fourth: Usability Evaluation

It is concerned with measuring the extent of user satisfaction with the product or service and understanding the way it is used.

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 the necessary elements that provide ease of use are present in the design.

Seventh: Interaction Design

It stands for IDX and its idea is based on finding and creating a type 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 they provide 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 him a kind of emotional attachment and fascination… without conflicting with the whole message of the brand.

Ninth: Content Strategy

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

Tenth: Web Analysis

It is concerned with collecting data, classifying it, preparing reports on it, and then analyzing it.

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

1. Understand 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 to let you know their opinions, requirements, and obstacles, 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. Competitor study

The perfect user experience will not be reached if its producers do not know anything about similar or directly competitive products. Analyzing their products includes observing the nature of the product design and its use and evaluating the experience of its users, thus not only guaranteeing a better user experience but also getting inspiration and new ideas And rectifying the errors they have and avoiding them.

3. Prototype preparation

Start by transforming the data into reality by preparing a prototype, which will be based on the previously obtained outputs, which represent the initial indications for determining the ideal user experience. Here the designers and the team start working on initial designs for the product and its interface, taking into account the desired user experience, and this stage should be repeated until reaching the ideal user experience and the optimal product.

4. Design

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

But today, in general, 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 widespread and concerned with user experience.

5. Evaluation

The stage that comes after the last stage, which can become the first stage, which is the so-called “product life cycle”, meaning that the product remains in a closed cycle (planning, research, implementation, evaluation, and then developing, correcting, or preserving the gains). Here, users' reactions are extrapolated, surveys or interviews are repeated, and questions are asked to users if necessary, and also based on the conversion rate and landing page rates 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 most interaction, is it “Sign up with the site”, which we symbolize with the variable (A) or the word “register with us” and symbolize it By the variable (B)?

Of course, according to A/B testing, we won't compare ourselves in the case of this example of a digital product related to SEO, but rather use the free Google Optimize tool or the paid Crazyegg tool, to give us an idea of which variable has the highest conversion rate.

As we said, every product or service produces a positive or negative user experience, so it is our role to improve it, not create it in the first place, 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 its recent establishment. The goal of the user must not be placed before the ultimate goal of the company, or else the product becomes meaningless.

For example, a website at an advanced stage of its construction may search for the approval of the SEO rules and increase its visibility in search engine results, to raise the reliability and archiving of the site to the search algorithms, so that advertising for it is a priority, in the beginning, more than a call to action such as a purchase, for example.

The user desires: whether purposeful or not, in the end, a lot of what the customer wants and aspires to, and take into account his opinions, comments, and evaluations, otherwise, the project goal will inevitably become incomplete.

Example: YouTube relies on ads as its most important source of income, and therefore if those ads were permanently canceled at the users' desire, YouTube would not have any source of income and would go bankrupt. Here, the genius of the YouTube platform officials appears, as they reduced the time and number of times that ads appear in videos, so that the ads are proportional to the length of the video and are only repeated once or twice at most so that the viewer does not get bored or feel disturbed, and thus there becomes a “negative experience of use.”. This reconciling the user's desire with the company's goals is what ensures a successful and excellent user experience.

In conclusion, remember well that the user experience does not necessarily mean the ease of use of the product, otherwise it is only related to the aesthetic and visual aspect, but the concept here is much broader as the product must meet the conditions we mentioned above, the most important of which is that it be a solution to a problem and useful.