What is User Experience?
In the business world, almost everyone has heard of the user experience term. Though many are not aware of the exact meaning and impact of UX design. This is a good time to clear any misconceptions about User Experience of a website and its effects on the business returns.
Before we dive into the good and the bad side of the website experience, let us revisit what is user experience. Experiences are those that usually revolve around what we expect from the environment that we’re in. When one visits a website, the user will have a set of needs and expectations from the website.
The viewers will want the website to answer some of the chief questions for them, such as - gain information about the company, their work, or take a look at the available options to buy from among many other options.
Websites as Communication Platforms
Websites are a platform for brands to communicate with their customers, potential audiences, and the rest of the world. Websites can be of different nature, and style according to the industries those are communicating for. E-commerce, corporate websites, websites for services, and for a series of products, personal branding, etc.
Websites as an Ecosystem
Designing user experience for these websites means designing UX for these respective ecosystems. Starting with understanding the users’ expectations and needs in that environment is important. If the businesses communicate and promote their offerings to the end-users in the language they understand, it is called good UX design.
If and when there’s a gap in the alignment of the design decisions to the business goals, that leads to bad UX. Bad UX design fails to deliver on the users’ requirements and expectations from the business website. Further on, the bad UX design may repel audiences from exploring the offerings resulting in a loss of business.
88% of the users say they do not re-visit the websites with a bad UX design
Statistics like these may give a boost to businesses to pursue the best UX design practices. Businesses need to prevent their companies from taking a hit due to bad UX, as the cost of bad UX may prove to be detrimental to the business.
How to identify or measure the bad UX website?
There are mixed approaches that one can opt for. To name a few - quantitative approach, qualitative approach, and data analytics. This combination gives you sound information about the number of people visiting your website, how many pages, and for how long they are visiting.
This also provides deeper information into their journey, their expectations, and whether those are being met with the data on the website. The data proves to be helpful in deriving the right insights.
The Quantitative Approach + Data Analytics:
This approach can answer questions like which are the pages that people visit often? And spend more time on it? Which functions are being used more? What is the bounce rate? And quantitative research that provides information about traffic sources, website visitors’ demographics, etc.
Qualitative Research:
Through this approach, it becomes easier to understand the mental model of the user. This method helps us understand the psychodynamics of the end-users. Their expectations, needs, preferences, likes, dislikes, and their frustration points. The data gathered through this approach, helps us pre-empt the behavior of the user and design experience in a more relevant way.
These research methodologies together can help you in determining whether the UX of your website is Good or Bad. An amalgamation of both research styles is important to build a strong design strategy to bring good UX to the end-users and most importantly fix bad UX.
Good UX in turn means good ROI for the business. Needless to say, bad UX has a negative effect on business growth. This research should be done periodically, at least quarterly, to stay relevant to the changing markets.
How to fix bad UX
- 1. Understand the reasons behind bad UX
- 2. Employ a user-centric design methodology to understand the stakeholders’ vision. Derive design goals from the above data.
- 3. Help the customers understand the concept of users possessing a specific mental model. e.g.- A hospital as per their goals and ambitions will have a different set of users on their website.
- 4. Understand user goals. Their expectations from a website like this. Become mediators between business needs and user needs.
- 5. Test the designs. Make formative corrections.
Make the most of this process, periodically. As it happens, many times the vision of the business stays the same but the market conditions change. This approach is important in keeping up with the changing factors and still deliver a good user experience.
Here are some of the bad UX design examples, companies need to steer away from when aiming to design a company website -
- 1. Designs that do not reflect the business vision
- 2. Not establishing a process and science behind the design efforts
- 3. To fail to provide the information users are looking for
- 4. User-hostile messages that take over users’ screens
- 5. Lack of consistency in terms of design language
- 6. Lack of ease of use
These are some of the most common mistakes. It is highly important to understand that the fundamental goal of UX design is to help manifest the business goals.
The user experiences can make or break the user’s perception of one’s brand.
In a nutshell
- 1. If your website has not been looked at for the last 2/3 years, redesign everything. Put the whole process in place. Build the foundation.
- 2. If you have just designed your website and it is still not functioning properly, find out the WHY and work from the ground up.
We believe considering and improving just the website should be discouraged. Instead, one should consider the overall customer experience and design it in a synthesized way. This approach has a much larger reach in terms of benefits.
If you are willing to inculcate this approach in your business, we offer similar services that you can go through: https://www.yujdesigns.com/ux-design-development
Amplify your brand presence with the best UX design studio that truly aligns your needs with those of your consumers! Get in touch with us at YUJ Designs, today!
