The term User Experience (or “UX”) is so on-trend right now that it can be tough to distinguish between companies who are consistently investing in their UX efforts and those who have simply worked the term into their vocabulary because it’s an effective buzzword.
You may think of UX as research or product testing, but those are just some of the actions teams like ours take to deliver a great experience for our users. When implemented well, UX can have a positive and long-lasting effect on a company’s growth. It can also be the difference between systems we find mundane (or maybe even dreadful) and those that are a joy to use.
The goal of the UX team is to delight your users.
I love the term “delight” because it means multiple critical things are coming together seamlessly.
- The “on/off button” was obvious
- The process to achieve the goal was clear
- The action could be completed in few steps and with little cognitive load
- The application provided value
- There was some sort of wow factor or pleasant surprise — this is key
Here’s how we get there at TRIBUS.
Develop a deep understanding of who your users are
The best way to get to know your users is to talk to them — often. Here are a few questions I urge you to be able to answer on your user’s behalf as soon as possible.
- What motivates them to use your platform?
- From what device and type of internet are they connecting?
- Are they visiting to browse around or are they in a hurry to complete an action?
I’ll never forget one of the statements made during my interview with Redfin’s Senior Director of Product, Pei-Chin Wang, earlier this year: Imagine that mom searching for nearby homes while riding in a car with noisy children in the backseat. You can’t help but visualize her urgency, possible distractions and her need to complete the task at hand.
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Embed customer empathy into your culture
First, define what types of users you have and create a detailed persona for each. Then, when making product decisions, frame them around the users from your personas: “How would feature X help Sally to do Y?” Just don’t forget to update your personas or add variations regularly as things change!
You can also collect lots of valuable information and trends from current customers by talking with your support team. We even go so far as to have our managers and executives rotate into our live chat and help desk systems regularly, so we can all experience customer communication (positive and negative) first-hand. No matter how you collect feedback from your customers, make sure you maintain some level of customer interaction in every department. That’s an obvious task for sales and support, but what about design and development? Include customer quotes along with analytics and metrics so it becomes more personal and you never lose context. I also record some of my calls so that key moments can be shared with my team later.
Conduct continuous testing
It’s imperative to validate design decisions through many user testing sessions. These are just a few ways we’ve worked testing into our process:
- Eliminate your own bias by forcing your team to begin with a testable hypothesis and not a solution.
- Design>test>iterate and repeat. It helps when you can test early and often because if you find the right path from the beginning stages, you can avoid some code debt later on.
- Invest in user monitoring and feedback tools so that you’re collecting data even when you’re not actively hosting tests. We love Google Analytics (of course), Hotjar and short in-app polls.
- Remember that the goal is consistent improvement. It’s far better to get something into a user’s hands that could be improved upon than launch nothing as you strive for perfection.
No matter what your budget or team looks like, there’s some form of user experience efforts that can fit into your workflow. I covered a few of my favorite usability tests in a previous post — the best part is that each one from that list requires very little setup time, user interruption and cost.
Share the results
I have a much happier team when I can explain that we’re building/changing X because it won out during our usability testing. Or that a certain percentage of our users agree that Y works best for them. Especially when the results surprise you, share that news with your team.
We also host post mortem meetings after big projects so that everyone involved can share their feedback and learn the rest of the story — what actually happened once the feature was in the wild. When you’ve spent months designing and building, you surely want to know how customers are using it and what their feedback has been.
