Why You Should Invest Time in Your Product’s UX and How to do it?

Poor User Experience can mask the most advanced technologies and limit the potential of the best ideas. In this article, James Greenhalgh, Head of Business Development at 4xxi explains why you should be investing time in your product’s UX and how to do it.

To help answer the question we need to first look at what happens if we don’t create great User Experience. What will it mean for customer acquisition, engagement, retention, revenue, profit, company existence? The list goes on. So, if it is so critical to the success or failure of a product in the market let’s explore what we mean by UX?

There are a number of pillars that form the foundations for great UX but research is the first place to start to begin understanding your user group and product market fit. Who are your target audience? Remember you may not represent the vision or the views of your main user base so even though it’s your product try as much as possible to remove any bias.

Research could also impact your company mission statement. In my view Amazon perfectly serves its user base with great UX with a mission statement: “We strive to offer our customers the lowest possible prices, the best available selection, and the utmost convenience.” When you go to Amazon’s platform that is exactly the experience you get, even though it may not look the prettiest.

It is often useful to create user personas or profiles for your target market. These can evolve and change as you grow — but repeat the process to help maintain the user experience as you progress through your product roadmap.

UX is not to be confused with usability which describes to some extent how easy a product is to use but is certainly an important factor. Usability is concerned with enabling users to effectively and efficiently achieve their end objective with a product. Listening to music could explain the difference quite well. If you released a new album on CD, sure it would be usable and the individual could listen to the music, but the user may need to buy a CD player (if they still exist!), go to a store and buy the CD. Ultimately the User Experience of that new album makes it very unlikely to succeed.

The same applies to digital products, if the product or service you offer is clunky, involves multiple clicks, new windows opening, visually complex and not representing the users objectives for the service then again it may suffer the same fate as the CD.

Whether web, mobile, tablet or smart watch the product needs to be desirable to use. This is where the User Interface meets the User Experience — the image, the colour, the brand, the information users are looking for needs to be presented in a clean and simple way. If any element of the page doesn’t need to be there, get rid of it. Communicating with your users and the content you are sharing should be in as few words as possible. “Less is more” has never been more true. Consistency is also key — keep the design consistent throughout, the ultimate aim is to make every user feel like this was built for them.

Now let’s consider accessibility, or providing an experience which can be accessed by users across a full range of abilities — this includes those who are disabled in some respect such as hearing loss, impaired vision, motion impaired or learning impaired. Accessible design is now a legal obligation in many jurisdictions including the EU, and failure to deliver it may result in fines.

In summary, it’s essential to research well, have a vision, a well-defined product strategy and invest time in your Users’ Experience. The best UX is intuitive to the point of being addictive even. It limits user’s autonomy but at the same time creates a process that they might not have even known they wanted. Scott Belsky Chief Product Officer for Adobe once quoted “Rule of thumb for UX: More options, more problems.”

Let’s not forget that utility is also a significant factor for the success of a product and technology places a huge role in creating amazing solutions but remember “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards towards the technology — not the other way round” — Steve Jobs.