What is UX and what is its role in enhancing your customer’s experience? UX design has become an important part of developing successful products and services. Whether your company is working on a mobile app, digital product, or website, the way your client interacts with your product can dictate its success. When properly implementing best practices, UX designers can boost engagement, enhance satisfaction, and lead to measurable growth for your business.
The Definition of User Experience Design
As explained by American Researcher and professor, Don Norman, UX includes every aspect of your end user’s interaction with your app, website, product, or services.
Based on this definition, there are several best practices for achieving an exceptional user experience:
- Meet your user’s exact needs without any hassles.
Don’t create barriers for your clients when using your products or services. Create an enjoyable and seamless experience to incentivize them to keep using your products with minimal effort. - Keep things simple and elegant.
Make your products a joy to own and use. It’s about the full experience so don’t just focus on your feature checklist. - Make your product usable.
Usability goes beyond design and is an important trait of your UI. Ensure your app, website, or product is intuitive and easy to learn.
The Role of UX Designers in User Experience
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) defines UX as a person's perceptions and responses resulting from using or anticipating a product, system, or service. It’s about understanding your client’s pain points, motivations, and needs. But what does a user experience designer do? UX designers can influence users towards a specific action, manipulating conversion rates and engagement.
This definition can be split into two parts:
- A person’s perceptions and responses.
- The experience of using a product, system, or service.
UX designers should understand the end-user’s preferences. Only then can they design experiences that line up with expectations. This will lead to more frequent users for your digital product.
The Impact of UX Design on User Satisfaction
Research by Vipin Kumar & Shivam Singh used mixed-methods research involving a survey of 500 shoppers and semi-structured interviews with 10 e-commerce website designers. Findings showed that user experience design best practices have a significant positive effect on customer satisfaction, with the most important factors being ease of navigation, clarity of product information, and visual design. However, page loading speed proved to be the most influential factor, as 50% of visitors won’t revisit a website if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.
How UX Research Leads to Higher Conversion and Engagement
A good user experience can only be possible after a solid research phase. Designers need to make data-driven decisions when making changes to a product based on UX design best practices. This is where UX research plays a significant role.
UX research can be broken down into two subsets:
- Qualitative research: JTBD interviews, ICP discovery, value proposition design, etc.
- Quantitative research: Usability testing, surveys, etc.
An example we could use is imaga’s website and app redesign for Mothercare. Thorough research was conducted before redesigning the client’s website and mobile application. Our findings identified Mothercare’s users’ pain points, desires, and ideal shopping experience. As a result, our designers developed a stylish, light, and modern design that is a joy to use, with features that contribute to increased sales for the client. Some of our work includes product groups, personalized product recommendations within blog articles, product reviews for a transparent shopping experience, and a clean product card design showcasing only necessary information. This confirms that your UX design should always begin with UX research for the most effective results.
If you have any inquiries about UX design or wish to explore ways to enhance your company's website or app user experience, contact us here. We can discuss how your business can achieve its objectives.