The User Experience (UX) is everything that happens to your users when they interact with your business or organization via your website, application, or online communications. It focuses on having a deep understanding of users, what they need, what they value, their abilities, and also their limitations. It also takes into account the business goals and objectives of the group managing the project. UX best practices promote the quality of the user’s interaction with and perceptions of your product and any related services.
User Experience is not about good industrial design, multi-touch, or fancy interfaces. It is about transcending the material. It is about creating an experience through a device. It involves a person’s emotions about using a particular product, system, or service. It highlights the experiential, affective, meaningful, and valuable aspects of human-computer interaction (HCI) and product ownership.
UX also includes a person’s perceptions of the practical aspects such as utility, ease of use, and efficiency of the system. It is subjective in nature because it is about an individual’s performance, feelings, and thoughts about the system. It is dynamic as it is constantly modified over time due to changing circumstances and new innovations.
Factors that influence UX:
If you are running a business that includes or depends on a website, then the user experience for your website play a critical role in attracting and maintaining your customer base. For a meaningful and valuable user experience, information on your website must be:
- Useful: Your content should be original and should fulfill a need.
- Usable: Site must be easy to use.
- Desirable: Image, identity, brand, and other design elements are used to evoke emotion and appreciation.
- Findable: Content needs to be navigable and locatable onsite and offsite.
- Accessible: Content needs to be accessible to people with disabilities.
- Credible: Users must trust and believe what you tell them.
Areas related to building User Experience:
UX is a growing field that is very much still being defined. Creating a successful user-centered design encompasses the principles of HCI and goes further to include the following disciplines:
- Project Management: It focuses on planning and organizing a project and its resources. This includes identifying and managing the lifecycle to be used, applying it to the user-centered design process, formulating the project team, and efficiently guiding the team through all phases until project completion.
- User Research: It focuses on understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations through observation techniques, task analysis, and other feedback methodologies.
- Usability Evaluation: It focuses on how well users can learn and use a product to achieve their goals. It also refers to how satisfied users are with that process.
- Information Architecture (IA): It focuses on how information is organized, structured, and presented to users.
- User Interface Design: It focuses on anticipating what users might need to do and ensuring that the interface has elements that are easy to access, understand, and use to facilitate those actions.
- Interaction Design (IxD): It focuses on creating engaging interactive systems with well thought out behaviors.
- Visual Design: It focuses on ensuring an aesthetically pleasing interface that is in line with brand goals.
- Content Strategy: It focuses on writing and curating useful content by planning the creation, delivery, and governance behind it.
- Accessibility: It focuses on how a disabled individual accesses or benefits from a site, system, or application.
- Web Analytics: It focuses on the collection, reporting, and analysis of website data.
These are some of the areas that are related to the building a strong user experience. All in all, improved user experience can increase both revenue and customer satisfaction while lowering the costs.
