Over the past few decades, there is a remarkable change in our lifestyle, like our mode of transportation, our means of communication, our trading, etc. Similarly, digital tools and platforms that have become an integral part of human life too, have seen a rapid transformation. Thanks to the revolution in digital solutions through user-friendly interfaces. User Experience (UX) Design is a key factor that determines such an application’s efficiency and usability.  

Why is UX Important in Digital Industry: 

Building a digital presence is very important for any organization. Organizations mainly depend on appealing content, attractive interfaces, and competitive market strategy in promoting their products that are often backed with great user experience design. The benefits of UX design for organizations with the help of key improvement areas are: 

UX Metrics and Key Performance Index (KPI)

UX metrics help determine how the users are interacting with the product, user engagement, satisfaction levels, site traffic, and loyalty. Due to their subjective nature, these metrics are not easily measurable and can be tracked through a campaign. 

An organization’s success can be enhanced by taking the necessary steps to improve the key performance index or KPIs. Some of these include task efficiency, error frequency, task completion rates, learnability, average order per value, and revenue per user.  

Saves Development Cost 

Continuous engagement and frequent customer feedback right from the requirements gathering phase, through the product development life cycle are essential for a project’s success. Statistics prove that fixing issues late in the development cycle of a product is nearly 10 times the cost of fixing them early in the requirements gathering phase. Developers spend 40-50% of their time doing avoidable rework and it can be reduced by 33-50% with early user inputs, according to studies cited by IEEE. 

Product Success 

The key to a product’s success is measured by the ease of understanding the product, usability, and how well it addresses the problems for which it is designed. A prototype with early feedback from the end-user helps make the design of the product accurate. Unfortunately, at times, project leads progress impulsively toward building products without early analysis. Close to 80% of marketing teams say the aim of a customer experience strategy is to improve retention through a good user experience.  

Training and Support Costs  

Every organization needs to have a support system to continue the best customer engagement service. Operational costs are low if we have a high-quality UX design. This in turn saves time for the customer who can spend that quality time more on engaging with the product and getting even more addicted to it. Customer support teams can focus on other important challenges than on these trivial issues.  

How is UX Implemented in Products: 

Creating better products by implementing the best UX Design practices should be the approach of any designer. The organizations should focus on a collaborative and data-driven approach that is Discovery, Design, and Development.  

Discovery 

The product requirements and business challenges are initially communicated by the organization’s leadership team to set the product direction and explore through research. Review the requirement documents by collecting information through conducting interviews of the users to know their habits, historical data, and goals.  The identified opportunities to provide a solution to the problems are documented through this analysis.  

Design  

All the problems identified, and the path set in the initial discovery phase is first brainstormed through drawing workflow charts, making prototypes, reviewing, and modifying them. Once the low-fidelity prototypes are built they are sent for an expert’s review, and the design results of the program are shared. These low-fidelity prototypes that are approved are then used as a model to design the high-fidelity models that are further reviewed and modified. 

The prototypes that are designed are tested by the targeted users to find out usability issues and the interactive results scheme is recorded. The received results of the program according to the user demands enable designers to build a visual interface that includes the style, layout, and key interface design text. The visual interface is reviewed by the designer and the program is determined.  

The designers then enter the code cutting process where they cut pages, generate HTML codes, optimize the visual interface, and then review the UI standards. Feedback is collected from the users, bugs are fixed, and the whole process is optimized. All the prototypes that are tested and addressed for usability issues are now pushed into the final phase of development. 

Development 

Release tracking by collecting the user data and detecting each feedback channel that helps data screening out of the test report from the user and then publish it.  All the final prototypes that are pushed into the final stage are now developed with confidence.  

How can UX Design help any organization: 

UX design clearly improves revenues, customer retention, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty. UX designers introduce positive, quantifiable, and qualitative changes to products and services. 89% of customers prefer to drop the product if it doesn’t have a good customer experience. So, organizations should consider heavy investment in providing the best user experience. 70% of new projects fail for not meeting user acceptance testing. Thorough research can help an organization provide various solutions and keep itself ahead in the marketplace.  

While most of these benefits can be measured and tracked through metrics for future enhancements, there are other tangible benefits like giving opportunities for developers to innovate new designs or solutions. It also provides a deeper understanding of users and their needs. An organization’s success to retain customers through new innovations and great customer experience helps in establishing the brand value which in turn helps add to the ROI (return on investment). Inovar’s user interface methodologies help in bringing ideas to reality by embracing new technologies and building creative user interface designs. Reach out to us to talk more. 

Digital user experience or digital experience (DX) is the reaction of an end-user after an interaction in a digital environment. Earlier, digital user experience was considered as the field of web designers and related to elements like webpage colors, navigability, layout, and performance. But today’s scenario has changed a lot, and DX is about how intuitive a webpage or app is, how effectively users can complete their tasks, and how well integrated the product is with other applications.  

Factors of Digital UX

A strong user experience needs an efficient design team that brings value to an organization by increasing customers, sales, and organization productivity. The scope of DX has broadened as the sophistication of online environments has grown and diversified beyond a webpage to encompass wearables as well as applications incorporate with virtual reality and augmented reality. DX creates customer loyalty with effectiveness, improves conversion rates, as well as creates the appropriate customer-to-company circle. It reduces support costs since your digital user experience design forges your user’s habits.  

As a business owner, you need to analyze how your business is approaching digital user-experience.

4 pillars of digital user experience

 According to a survey result, if a webpage takes 10 seconds to load, 50%* of users give up and leave the page. The poor digital experience of users can create a negative impact on the brand and reduce website traffic. Hence, it is crucial to look at the four main pillars of Digital UX to improve final customer conversion.

Make the design interactive:

Websites, apps, screens almost all digital products need an active response from users who click, open, and scroll.  Web designers should first check whether the elements in the screen such as controls, forms, responses, and workflow are well-defined.  If not then, you need to

Keep attention to the website innovation

Innovation develops a bridge between today’s experience and tomorrow’s experience.  Make sure the value customers get from your website needs to match the amount of effort and resources they have got to invest in the experience. One business should actively measure how users feel about their product/service experience, which will bring opportunities to improve.

Make the presentation intuitive

Your website design should make a user interface as easy, effective, and emotionally resonant as possible for customers to use. The presentation intuitive must include layouts, grid systems, graphical elements, typography, and other elements.   

Four Pillars of digital UX

Apply smooth digital integration

All the digital and non-digital touchpoints need to be interconnected and consistent with each other. If users get a seamless journey to experience, then they will automatically trust your brand.

Here I have also mentioned what to prioritize as your organization doubles down on digital UX. 

1. Scale up your design architect 

You will probably need more capacity and efficiency to up-level the UX of your website or app — in terms of skills, structure, standards, processes, and mix of people. When you are working with your customers, you need to be more focused on their requirements. If the design team has a clear image of project requirements, then it will be easy for them to implement proper solutions and set appropriate design standards. Your design team should first communicate with the internal users from the client-site, analyze their pain points, and initiate the project requirements.   Here design leaders play a leading role in up-leveling skills among team members and building a trustworthy relationship with clients by keeping their commitments.

2. Outsource experience designer if you need

Maybe your organization does not have a design team, or there is no option to hire a design team, then outsource an experienced design consultant is an easy option for you.  Outsourcing a web or an app designing expert team will expose you to interact with so many experts and creative architects. It will allow you to get access to the latest high-tech resources as well. An experienced designer will understand your business requirements and equip you with highly innovative, user-friendly, and latest web designs.  According to a Forrester research report, a digital UX could boost your conversion rate by up to 400%** with higher sales, higher customer engagement, and faster product cycle.

3. Review and do usability testing rigorously

Businesses should never assume that users will bring inconsistencies to their notice and actively measure user experience.  It is necessary to conduct a rigorous review and testing for your website performance to measure how your website is contributing to user experience. The process required several techniques, including a heuristic approach in which trained experts will perform key user scenarios, map user experience journey, and do usability testing.  You can also contract with a third party (like a UX design consulting firm) to ensure your review objectives, and make sure you hire staff for a project with UX experts, not generalists.

4. Update and implement new thoughts in your UX expertise

There is always room for improvement, so never be too proud that you have designed something perfect. Make sure you are aware of the latest digital design trends and apply best practices in key UX areas. Use alternative approaches in sections like search, navigation, clarity of the content, accessibility, and others.  

5. Visual and experience consistency

Visual consistency matters a lot to offer a great digital experience. A brand should maintain consistency in user-experiences in their product design across a range of products. Along with that, companies must follow consistency in offering digital experiences for which they must invest in UX design. Surprisingly, 65%* of companies have no thinking behind consistency in user experience. Inovar designers help clients to maintain consistency in the digital user experience through human-centric UX design.  

The above artifacts will help you to understand how customer experiences are now essential for every business and how digital UX can redeem the pace. Now it is your turn to take views from your employees and users about what they would like to see and dig deeper into opportunities that an individual UX/UI can provide. Designers will have greater flexibility and more time to make impactful designs, and websites will finally have room to become more user-centric in 2021. 

I would like to hear from you how your organization is coping with the challenges of ensuring high-quality UX at this historic time? If you are interested in contact with a design expert to get viable solutions for your website, then reach out to a UX design company like Inovar Tech.  

References

*  YUJ Developers, What is Digital User Experience? Retrieved from: https://medium.com/@yujsocial/what-is-digital-user-experience-cb82ceefae0d

** Akindunjoye, O How bad UX can ruin your online business Retrieved from: https://uxdesign.cc/how-bad-ux-can-ruin-your-online-business-61886a728cd8