What is User Experience Design?
User Experience (UX) applies to every interaction a person has with your company. This includes branding, marketing, phone calls, or directly interacting with your product or service itself. Because UX is so important, it is a pivotal part of the development process at Vehikl. User Experience professionals take the time to familiarize themselves with the brand image, messaging and target users to ensure that they’re designing the right product for who will be using it.
Usability initiatives deliver a major return on investment: it’s not unusual for usability projects to return benefits of 5–10 times their cost in the first year alone. — David Travis
Each element of the product from the colours, typefaces, and images right down to what happens when someone runs a search on the application or the way pages are displayed on different devices are all strategically planned and implemented with great care. The reason they strategize each experience is to ensure that each moment of the customer lifecycle, from attention to interaction to abandonment and beyond are all accounted for. This way, they know how each phase of the experience plays out, and how they’d like customers to react.
Increased Revenue
Making it easier for customers to achieve their goals on the application they’re using will mean return sales as well as better word-of-mouth recommendations.
Forrester determined that 42% of US web buying consumers made their most recent online purchase after a previous good experience with the retailer.
Happier, more Efficient Users
We use websites and applications to get something out of it (information, a service, a product, etc.) then we move on with our lives. It’s rare that you’ll find people who want to spend extra time on your application looking for a way to make an account, or trying to figure out how your shopping cart works. Well-thought usability will require less explanation (tooltips are handy — but what does it say about your product if you have to explain all your jargon?), fewer barriers, and will result in happier users when they see that Thank You page!
Lower Development Costs
Development can quickly become one of the biggest expenses when building your application. One of the key benefits of User Experience is minimizing those costs as much as possible. By investing time in user research, taking the time to plan, and utilizing user testing, the team can ensure that solid needs are being met by the design decisions being made.
Being able to identify design flaws with solid data early on in development helps alleviate the risk of expensive overhauls after launch.
Lower Support Costs
There is little scarier when being handed the keys to your sparkly new application than tons of documentation. An application that has been designed intuitively needs little to no explanation, and will mean that set up and usage is easy and will require fewer bug fixes and revisions later on. User testing long before deployment ensures that you aren’t likely to be forwarding frantic emails at 2am telling your developers that users have suddenly found a major roadblock in your application.
An application that has been designed intuitively needs little to no explanation
Read more about the Benefits of Usability by David Travis over at Userfocus.
It may look pretty — but is it valuable?
Once the user story (the purpose and goal) has been defined for a particular feature, immediately planning begins for designing how the user should interact with the feature.
Before even a line of code is written or aesthetic designs for the elements have begun, time is spent on pure strategy. While hammering out the usability, the core Heuristics of Usability are applied.
Keeping these tenets in mind ensures that even small design decisions are made with these goals in mind. Failing to adhere to these can lead to design and development decisions easily slipping into fun or neat looking, but not necessarily useful for the user.
Originally published at transmission.vehikl.com on January 31, 2014.
