Have you ever used an application for the first time and were instantly able to navigate it even without a guide? You may not even realise it, but countless websites today are designed in a way that feels more friendly and accessible to the user. As soon as a user lands on a website, they are designed in a way to keep the user engaged when the pages are loading instead of making them feel like they are wasting their time.
You can thank good User Experience or UX for that. On the other hand, bad UX is when you spend minutes doing something that would take you only mere seconds on an application with good UX. You keep trying and exponentially get more and more frustrated as you wrestle with the app, resulting in an overwhelmed you who skims over the information they were looking for.
So what exactly is User Experience?
User Experience or UX is the part of design or design research that is created to be meaningful and intuitive for users. It adopts the user’s
perspective and aims to answer the question of ‘how would a first-time user approach this product?’ It encompasses the part of the design right from the search icon down to the animations that occur when a user makes a click. The most important part of the design team’s job is to make things easier for the user. UX designers and researchers in Future Factory help make products easier to understand and more enjoyable to use.
To further explain this, the user experience honeycomb designed by Peter Morville perfectly encapsulates the different components of UX that inform a particular design on how to enhance its user experience. The honeycomb he developed identifies how each element is significant in answering the users’ needs given the product’s technical limits and abilities while also driving business value. It helps outline and build priorities, for example, in the first iteration, should the product prioritise usefulness over usability?
Keys to designing a positive a User Experience
Innovation in product design lives at the intersection of business, policy, and technology. However, delivering innovation that can advance each of these areas appropriately is not only challenging but also frustrating. Product design companies need a combination of patience and determination from their product teams to deliver the right solution rather than the ideal solution. It is a long-run game that can only be successful when a few important things are kept in mind for the design research for your product or platform.
- Knowing your user better than they know themselves: Empathy is fundamental in creating a better user experience and in order to make empathy-based decisions, understanding the full context of how your product will be used by the user is vital. Embrace making persona-based decisions. When you bring personas into your strategic planning, you start to better determine your priorities and needs at the human level, rather than being driven by just technology and your objectives.
- Increasing the confidence of your users with every interaction they have with your product: Users are not meant to be trained, the goal is to make your solution intuitive enough for users to do the basics right from day one. That means sometimes leveraging visualizations to simplify the complex issues.
- Making every pixel count: Sometimes design teams tend to over-design not realising that simplicity is almost every time the correct answer.
Conclusion
Product Design Companies like Future Factory are always on their feet keeping up with the latest trends while delivering world-class solutions that are created and built just to provide a positive user experience to all their consumers. To know how Future Factory, a leading Industrial design studio is creating transformation change, click here.
