5xTwo

UX Matters

In today’s digital environment, besides quality products and excellent customer service, many companies are tackling another facet of marketing head on with all they have got – improving User Experience (UX) on their websites and digital applications.

UX plays a critical role in the Customer Experience (CX) journey. You can have great CX and poor UX, and that still mars the overall brand engagement. Customers eventually evaluate the brand experience as a whole, and this translates to direct impacts on the bottom line.

After all, we’re human beings and we like short cuts. In terms of memory processing, in this case.

Physically, our organic brains can’t take in that much information at the same time, especially when what’s in front of us is complex or we’re expected to multi-task a lot. This cognitive overload stresses our minds and our natural defense mechanism creeps up – cognitive short cuts take over, making things simpler and logical. This is where UX Design comes in to simplify things, making what end users want to achieve in the most convenient and efficient way as possible.

Do we really need UX?

Have you ever filled out an online form and gave up halfway because it was way too much hassle? Or how about abandoning an online shopping cart because you couldn’t really understand the next steps? Frustration, my friend, is the common enemy here.

Another good example – have you ever visited a free video streaming website, spent some time creating your account through a painstaking form and then only to be told that you’re not able to watch it due to whatever reasons? Why can’t they do a systems verification beforehand? I know, right?

I love how Steve Jobs put it so succinctly when he said: “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” In the case for UX, we’re talking about how digital applications help us achieve what we want faster and better.

Form follows the function of any useful application. It’s that simple, really. That means it has to work simply, quickly and accurately. It must feel intuitive to the intended target audience.

As an introductory article to UX, we’ll cover the basics here:

Objectives of UX

• To develop a service which is usable and useful by the intended target audience

Sounds pretty straight forward, isn’t it? But to do so, the project team will need to invest a reasonable of time to research, understand, design and validate the user flow, all based on a human-centred approach that focuses on an in-depth understanding on people and technology. By people, I mean taking deep dives into specific personas of user behaviour, their content consumption habits, demographic quirks and well, basically anything that makes them tick. Basically, you will also need to put on the hats of a psychologist as well as an anthropologist.

“The conversion rate of a form is inversely proportional to the number of data fields on the page.”

Business vs Customer Goals

In my observations, I’ve seen many websites and apps which are counter-intuitive to their intended target audience. I can understand why their UI (User Interface) was set up in such a manner – they were probably tweaked for achieving certain business objectives (such as data collection, analytics, conversion reporting etc), but let’s face it, at the end of the day, if your customers aren’t delighted with the effectiveness of your digital applications, that’s the end of the road for you. They simply move on to your competitors. In the online world, competition is just a click away.

The key to managing business objectives and satisfying your customers’ digital experience is to find a right balance between both pressures. For customers, the idea is to minimise pain and make their online journey as seamless as possible while for business, it is a rational prioritisation of the organisation’s needs, measured against additional resourcing and technical feasibilities, among other factors.

“Plan for user research throughout the UX Lifecycle – iteration is key.”

UX Lifecycle

To put it broadly, I’ve listed down the UX steps for your easy reference. I reckon this might be helpful for readers who are new or unfamiliar with the subject.

• Understand

This is a stage where Requirements Gathering, User Needs Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Contextual Enquiry, Focus Groups and Heuristic Reviews take place. Sounds like a massive amount of work to be done? You bet. This is the most critical stage as it charts the direction for the whole UX project – spend the most time here to get it right before we move on to the more exciting parts later on.

• Analyse

At this phase, we should be looking at establishing the User Personas and User Journeys. This forms the target audience of your new website/app and it is absolutely critical to understand how they form the basis of what you have in mind for your project development. As this article is an introduction to UX, I’ll cover the specifics in another article. Also, once the above mentioned requirements are set up, we will need to embark on Content Audit, Card Sorting, draw up the Sitemap and signing off the Information Architecture plan.

• Design

The creation of User Flows, Wireframes (non-functional model) in conjunction with visual and interactive designs come into play here. This is the part where the creative elements are in their full glory. At this design implementation stage, it takes into consideration of Navigation Design, Visual Design and a whole lot of User Psychology (eg Gestalt’s Laws, Von Restorff effect, Hick’s Law, etc). Also, don’t confuse UX with UI – UX is the overall design thinking applied into the form of the intended customer experience, the UI.

Remember, a great customer experience first starts with excellent UX, followed by UI.

• Validate

The final step would be to create a Rapid Prototype (simplified but functional model), launch an initial Usability Test, conduct a Multivariate Testing and with the help of Data Analytics (Google Analytics is very helpful here – more on this in the next article), you’ll be able to fine tune your development, especially the heuristic model intended for your target audience. The Usability Testing forms a critical part of the UX process as it directly (and indirectly, given how humans tend to communicate) affects the last leg of your UX project.

Do note that it is critical to find actual users to participate in this test because the website/app was built specifically for them – pay extra attention to their comments and non-verbal body reactions as they often provide additional insights. Under the worst case scenario, for whatever reasons you can’t get actual users, then evaluation by proxy through the business team should be sufficient as it is assumed that they know their target audience very well. However, that is not recommended due to a multitude of biases – at the end of the day, we are not our users.

“In reality, we are all guilty of The False Consensus Effect.”

Curiosity is the Mother of All Inventions

Finally, for better or for worse, your UX project is not closed even when your website/app is launched. Just like how restaurants collect customer feedback, surveys etc and work the data into enhancing the customer experience, the UX lifecycle is similar. Work with your data analytics team, product and front line sales people to put together an after project review on a regular basis. Challenge assumptions whenever they seem out of place. Our users are constantly evolving, our digital services have to adapt or we’ll be pushed back by competition as soon as we’ve launched it.

UX is a process of continuous testing and validating your target audience’s digital experience. Simply put, it’s an iterative process – understand (tear down misconceptions, challenge previous assumptions, etc), analyse, redesign/tweak and validate your UX model again and again. Consumer expectations don’t stay stationary. So do their digital experience.

“Good affordance directs users to a specific set of actions. Conversely, bad affordance invites errors.”

Don’t Make Me Think

Just like how our brains control our visual focus in a busy scene, say a busy pedestrian crossing, at any one time, we are focusing on something that matters to us at that moment. In this case, all other non-critical sensory details are watered down and we focus on what we need to do with all we’ve got – the road opposite to where we are getting to, then your eyes will switch to scan left and right before your foot steps forward. Do you see that this is a series of step-by-step action, all directed by our central organic computer?

Our cognitive system is designed in a manner that all our senses work together to reduce the cognitive load. At any one time, our brain devotes its energy to focus on the details that solve the given problem. As a further example, while reading “this” word, you are not aware of the words written in the line above the word or below, nor can you see very well what is to your extreme left or right.

In the case of UX, if your digital application overwhelms them with too much content (ie you’re overwhelming their cognitive system with a lot of unnecessary information) or a poor content architecture (ie you’re making it difficult for them to navigate your site), your customers will likely abandon their shopping cart or forget about that white paper download and simply visit your competitors instead. That’s it. End of their user journey, and end of your company’s potential revenue.

“It all boils down to the basics – understanding our end users well.”

In Conclusion

Consumer expectations are constantly shaped by the digital interactions all around them. Google had redefined the concept of simplicity by presenting a clean, uncluttered interface that allows them to focus on the task at hand. Carousell has taken the C2C (Consumer to Consumer) space by storm with its efficient reinvention of its highly-interactive buying and selling process. Facebook made it all about me, me and me. Consumers now have much more information, more choices and they expect to do whatever they want, however and whenever they want it – welcome to the Age of the Customer, and that started many years ago.

At the end of the day, simplicity, convenience and personalisation trump all. We absolutely need to find the right balance in fulfilling business objectives and delighting our customers’ digital experience. After all, as the saying goes, customer is king – so, impress them!