User experience is the primary selling factor for any online business. The way your users feel while interacting with your website or your mobile app determines the success factor of your business.
Earlier, when a business owns a flagship product which was the need of the time, then nothing else mattered but today the scenario is totally different. Nokia, to take as an example lost a significant customer base because of the poor user experience its mobile phones used to provide to users.
In today’s business scenario, user experience matters the most. Any business that is not prioritizing on the user experience (UX) is probably ignoring the lack of customer satisfaction its building for its user base in the long run.
Similarly, small businesses that were start-ups a few years back are today’s multi-billion businesses owing to their unique user experience only. All the online biggies today; Facebook, Google, Apple, Whatsapp etc. banks on the unique user experience that they provide to their users and increases their returns on investments.
About user experience
The term ‘user experience’ was first coined by Donald Arthur ‘Don’ Norman, while he was working for Apple as a User Experience Architect. User experience can be defined as the factors that monitors the interaction of the end-user with the product or service used. Product, be it digital or physical impacts the user in several ways. An exceptional user interface acts as the primary selling point for the business. Business ventures that aims to deliver memorable user experiences gain significant momentum in terms of sales and customer loyalty in their respective industries.
Let us see some factors that can help businesses in producing better user experiences for their customers:
Usability
It may sound like a normal thing that is related to common sense, however, being able to let your user use your website to the fullest is an important issue that should be considered. Apart this, there are broken links and images and certain other glitches in any website that needs to be taken care of.
Another way to create better usability for your customers is to create responsive website. Responsive website design is now a common term from those who don’t even belong to the website design and development industry. It refers to the website’s ability to adjust itself in varied devices, according to the size of the screen it’s displayed on.
Responsive website design also accounts for better search results for your business website. Failing to include your business web in the responsive list might even cost you complete ignorance from Google, as it provides preference to those websites who are mobile friendly from app development prospective, according to its latest algorithm update.
Why it matters?
What can your online collateral do for your business is what actually matters? Often times, businesses tend to wrap them in personal tastes and forget about the requirements and needs of the actual user. This is the point where lack of user experiences starts.
It’s all about putting your users first! Marketing is not about you in particular. It’s about your customers. Who they are, what they like, how they like doing things and so on. Small business owners who think ‘me’ instead of ‘them’ are not going to be able to put themselves in the shoes of their customers. They must always remember that your product is with you to solve their problem.
Banking on user experience design
Brand value of any product or service is determined by the way It interacts with the user. Its actually a conversation taking place. To take an example: Amazon has maintained its basic user experience for years. By allowing users to link them with each product and service the platform has to offer, they are on a track of constant revenue generation.
Here are few steps that can help you develop a comprehensive UX strategy:
· Ensure the products are listed with a proper description.
· Offer a seamless checkout experience.
· Deliver something for ‘free’ to users. We are well aware of the ‘Black Friday’ rush!
· Interact with users through your platform. Humans are social beings. Interactions drive them to a collaboration, which gets converted to sales eventually.
· Set the benchmarks of User Experience design upon, ‘delight’ and ‘reliability’.
It is also imperative to know here, that user experience design is no advertising or promotional campaign. Rather, it is a medium to fuel customer engagement through enhanced interactions.
Be it the product or the service list, online or offline ads, service policies or the check-out experience, every single step must be designed in a user-friendly manner.
For a venture, in its initial years of inception, the user experience is the primary requirement to produce the necessary momentum through user engagement and enhanced service offerings.
Conclusion
It’s high time now that companies, especially those who are offering products and services online start thinking about creating positive user experiences, because compromising on user experience means you are willingly putting yourself in a tough business situation.
Make sure to have a team of creative professionals at your disposal who can guide you through ifs and buts of user experience if the need arise. Also make sure to go through your website multiple times to remove any possible glitch that can be there in form of a broken link, badly formatted content or even a simple grammatical error.
Saher
