User Experience: What Is It And Why We Should Care About it?

What is User Experience

User Experience -tagged as UX which is the trending topic in the industry. In a broader sense, it can be defined as the general experience we have when we are using or interacting with an entity — and that ‘entity’ could literally be almost anything in the world! For many people, user experience comes to mind in the context of ‘technical’ applications like smartphones, computers, software, and websites. But all of us have tens, even hundreds of daily ‘user experiences’ when we make coffee early in the morning, cook a meal in an oven, open the door, drive a car, stop at a red light, go through the checkout line at the grocery store, … the list goes on and on and on.

User Experience: The Good, the Bad, and the Worst

Let’s get a practical Visualization of this.

Think of a recent interaction you have had that would qualify as ‘great user experience’. This could be in the form of astonishing customer service, a product that was incredibly easy to use and did the work you wanted to perform, or a website that gave you the exact information you needed, in just the right format, at just the right time. How wonderful that must have been!

User experience is something that is criticized when it’s bad but isn’t eulogized when it’s good. A great user interface is so seamless that we don’t even think about it — we just use it, get what we need, and move on. But a poor user experience tends to make us frustrated, impatient, even angry — and we inherently remember that negative experience for a longer time. Think about the last time you had to wait too long at a restaurant because they messed up your order. Or the last time you called the toll-free customer service number for some big company and tried to navigate the automated system of menus to get the information you needed or (gasp) maybe even when talking to a real live person.

User Experience in the Tech Industry

In the Tech industry, software developers, designers, and the product managers will sometimes talk about user experience using these related terms:

• UX Research
• Empathizing the User
• Usability
• Human Factors and Ergonomics
• Story Boarding and User Personas
• User-Centric Designs
• Information Architecture
• Content Strategy
• Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)
• Wireframing
• Visual Design
• Interaction Design
• User Interface or Graphical User Interface
• UI Testing
• Development
• Branding Strategy
• After Market Strategy

It is erroneous to think that user experience is just one of the above list items. In fact, the definition for user experience states that user experience is “concerned with all aspects of the product Development, from interacting with the product, service, environment or facility till the end product ”. Therefore, user experience incorporates all of the above. This also means that user experience is not the same thing as usability.

Why Should We Care About User Experience?

If you’re running a business, someone’s overall experience with your product or service could very well make the difference between whether they will buy, or more importantly, whether they will come back to buy again or look somewhere else the next time.

If your business includes or depends on a website — and most businesses must at least have a web presence to stay competitive — then the user experience for your website will play a critical role in attracting and maintaining your customer base. And for most potential customers, you only get one chance to ‘get it right’. Most visitors decide within the matter of the first 10–20 seconds whether to stay on your site or hit the ‘back’ button to look for something better. So the stakes are incredibly high.

So we know that user experience is important. Why, then, is it so difficult for many of us to define and create a successful user experience for our end users?

“That’s gonna be a LOT of work…”

I know I know .. there is a lot of work but the return which you get from it is amazing, you feel satisfied when your work helps someone out and makes someone’s day and Well, the short answer I would give is, as it takes a lot of work to design something — anything — that works well, for a large base of potential users, who may or may not think like we do, no matter what the circumstances. Anyone who develops software or web-based services knows that it takes a huge amount of planning, design, production, and testing to develop an end product that achieves the desired function. But to actually design and create something that not only works, but works well and in a way that actually makes sense to your end-users, follows their thought processes, anticipates every need they might ever have at exactly the right time, and helps them get the job done in the most efficient way possible no matter what? That’s something altogether and entirely different.

The Power of Empathy

It is a monumental task, one that requires, more than anything else, that we develop a keen sense of empathy for our end users. It requires stepping out of our own shoes; putting our own thoughts, priorities, and goals on the back burner for a moment; and really trying to get inside the minds of our users. Which just is not comfortable, convenient, or easy for some of us. The moral of this story? It may not take a ‘village’ to build great software, but it most certainly does take a well-rounded team. Just make sure that whoever is working on your software or building your website has somebody on the team who is thinking about how things will function from the user’s perspective.

Find the “Easy” Button!

The best road to user experience success is to completely transform ourselves into the user/ inquirer/ Googler/ purchaser/ person. Getting involved with our users and gathering the essential requirements

It is then that you will hear a voice in your head that says … ‘As an end-user, I’m here because I need something, and I either want to get it from you or find out if you can provide it. In some cases, I really may not even know what I need, so it would be great if you could help me figure that out, too. I just want to get what I need from you and move on with the rest of my day. So if you could please, please read my mind, anticipate my needs, and (above all else) just make it EASY for me to get what I’m looking for, without making me jump through hoops or wade through “junk” I don’t care about, I will be your loyal follower for life. Or at least, until someone who does all these things better than you do comes along…’

Thank you for reading it till here, Hope you liked it Drop a clap and more content would be available soon!