How to Create a Great User Experience? All You Need to Know

What is User Experience?

Do you ever wonder how using certain products make you feel? Do you get frustrated or are you delighted? The feelings and emotions that interacting with products evoke in us can be referred to as user experience. This term was pioneered by Donald Norman who said – “I invented the term because I thought human interface and usability were too narrow. I wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with the system including industrial design, graphics, the interface, the physical interaction, and the manual.”

Source: Unsplash

User experience means different things to different people and there are various UX definitions – some are very distinct from the standard one. If you’re curious what they are, take a look at our article, where 10 business experts explain what UX is.

Since you have an understanding of what UX means, it’s time to discuss UX experience design and the elements of an effective UX design process.

UX Design Process: What to Include and How to Do it Right

Let’s start off with a question – what is UX design? There isn’t a universally accepted definition. It’s a multidimensional concept which incorporates a variety of disciplines like interaction design, information architecture, visual design, usability, and human-computer interaction.

However, to get a better grasp of what UX design indicates, let’s take a look at how the Oxford Journal Interacting With Computers explains it:

The primary purpose of UX design is to “improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through the utility, ease of use, and pleasure provided in the interaction with a product.” To put it simply, it’s about building products, which not only provide value to customers, but are also easy and pleasant to use.

Source: New Breed Marketing

Now, what does it take to create great user experiences? The key lies in the UX design process, i.e., a set of rules and processes designers follow at various stages of developing the product. It’s instrumental to creating solutions that truly resonate with its users.

First, UX specialists learn about who the target user is and what needs and expectations they have of the product. Next, they proceed to validating their hypotheses by creating visuals and conducting usability testing.

Let us take a closer look at the elements of the UX design process as well as the benefits following it entails.

The Elements of the User Experience Process

User Research

User research is the starting point of any user-centered design. It’s also a continuous process that helps designers enhance the usability of an up-and-running product.

In order to create a user-centered experience, designers require a deep understanding of the target audience – its users’ goals, fears, and challenges. This can be achieved, for example, through conducting user interviews, session recordings, or running surveys.

With these insights at hand, UX specialists can proceed to building out user personas, user journey mapping (which we discuss below), as well as creating wireframes and prototypes.

We discuss user research in more detail further down in this post.

Information Architecture (IA)

Information architecture (IA) is another crucial element of the user experience. Its role is to organize information in a way that makes it helpful and intuitive for users to navigate. One of the ways IA can be verified is by testing the intended design with users, which brings us to...

Visual Design

Visual design is a term used to describe the look and feel of a product. It includes elements such as the app’s or site’s layout, colors, or the symbols that help users interact with the interface. Visual design concepts are tested out by UX designers through wireframes and prototypes, which we discuss in detail below.

Source: Unsplash

Usability

The term ‘usability’ describes the degree to which a product can be used by its target audience so that they can reach their goals. There are five constituents to usability – a product’s learnability, efficiency, memorability, its errors, and the levels of user satisfaction.

Accessibility

Lastly, accessibility is the rate at which a product can be easily used, understood, and reached by a disabled individual. This might mean, for instance, designing a voice interface for the visually impaired, or enabling a bigger font or element size for the elderly.

The Benefits of a UX Design Process

So, what benefits does following the user experience design process provide? Below, we mention some of the most prominent ones:

• User retention improvement: when a product offers a rewarding experience, users will be more likely to return to it.
• Higher conversion rate: if you ensure that your site visitors can easily find the information they are looking for, you raise your chances of improving conversion.
• A stronger brand: great user experiences are also memorable ones. This means that, by ensuring flawless UX, you can strengthen your brand image and boost the chances of getting a positive review online.

You can read more about the UX design process and what it includes in a dedicated chapter of this guide.

How to Conduct Effective UX Research?

Research is essential to creating an effective UX design, which is why it’s important to shed more light on the subject.

User experience research provides information required at all steps of the design process. It allows designers to validate their product plans and hypotheses, as well as compare the intended service against others present on the market.

There are two main types of user research – quantitative and qualitative.

Quantitative vs Qualitative Research

Quantitative research, as the name indicates, is the collection of data that can be numerically measured and analyzed. This can be, for instance, the number of website visitors who bounced from your site or results from a user survey (measured on a 1-10 scale).

Source: Unsplash

While quantitative data will tell you ‘what’, qualitative data lets you in on the ‘why’ – i.e., the motivation for user actions. Examples of such insights include descriptive answers to open-ended questions in a survey or findings from 1:1 user interviews.

How to know which method to employ, and at which stage in the research process?

How to Choose the Right User Research Method?

As explained by the Nielsen Norman Group, there are four stages in the UX research process – Discover, Explore, Learn, and Listen. Below, we mention the methods that can be used at each step.

Stage 1 – Discover

At the initial stages, you will benefit from the following:

• Field studies
• Competition analysis
• Stakeholder interviews
• User interviews

These methods will help you understand what other products on the market you’re competing with, and how you can meet your users’ expectations, resolve their problems, and help them in their goals.

Stage 2 – Explore

In the ‘Explore’ phase, we recommend turning to:

• Card sorting (i.e., asking users to organize topics or elements into categories)
• Task assignments (i.e., asking testers to complete a task during the study)
• User persona development (i.e., creating a fictional, yet realistic customer profile)

These methods will help you uncover potential user journey paths, new features and enhancements, and others.

Stage 3 – Learn

In the ‘Learn’ stage, you gain a deeper understanding of your users’ interactions with your product. Therefore, you will benefit from:

• Usability testing (among others, checking whether your designs have a gentle learning curve, efficient, and memorable for users)
• Accessibility tests (checking if all user groups, including the disabled, can use your product fully)
• Benchmark testing (learning where your product stands against others on the market)

Stage 4 – Listen

Last, but not least, researchers listen to their audience to learn how they can improve the UX design. The recommended methods include:

• Analyzing Frequently Asked Questions
• Running customer surveys
• Analyzing customer data from analytics tools (for example, the queries they search Google with).

We describe each of the above-mention methods in detail in a dedicated chapter of this guide.

Let’s now see how you can use the gathered customer insights to fuel your user journey and to create your user journey map.

How to Develop a User Journey Map in 6 Simple Steps

Before we proceed to the tactics, let’s first look at the definition.

What is a User Journey and a User Journey Map?

In the most simple terms, a user journey is the entire experience a user has while interacting with an interface or product. It shows you all the steps they’ve taken in order to achieve a goal – for instance, finalizing their purchase.

That being said, user journey mapping is the process of documenting this entire interaction. It helps designers visualize the entire UX experience and lets them spot any improvement areas, unnecessary steps, or other important elements of a given user task.

6 Steps to Creating a User Journey Map

There are six steps to mapping out user experiences. These are, as follows:

Step 1 – Creating User Personas

User personas are a fictional, representative reflection of your actual customers. They are a way of giving your user research data a personality so that it’s more relatable when you work on your designs.

Step 2 – Determining Your Users’ Goals

With personas, you can understand what your target audience’s goals, fears, and challenges are. Create a list of reasons why customers turn to your product or service and what they aim to achieve by using it.

Step 3 – Map Out the Touchpoints

Determine all the points of contact or scenarios your user engages in when they interact with your product. Create a list of all potential ways they can come across your brand – both online and offline. An example of this is, for instance, a virtual check-in for a flight (which takes place well ahead of the passenger entering the plane and using the actual service).

Source: Nielsen Norman Group

Step 4 – Find Out What the Customer Frustrations and Pains Are

Ask yourself the following:

• Is it possible for my customers to achieve their goals by using my product?
• Were there any roadblocks that caused frustration?
• Is there any step that customers retreat from the customer journey?

These and other questions will provide you with a list of user journey improvements.

Step 5 – Eliminate the Obstacles

With the list of roadblocks, it’s time to categorize. Decide which problems call for a ‘nice-to-have’ improvement and which entirely block the user from continuing their journey, and prioritize the latter.

Step 6 – Enhance Your Product

Apply the improvements derived from your user journey map to enhance UX.

As user goals and priorities change over time, we advise you to update or verify your user journey maps’ validity every 6 months.

User journey maps give you a ton of insights, which can be used for creating the intended product’s first visuals – i.e. wireframes and higher-fidelity prototypes.

All You Need to Know About Effective UX Prototyping

The best way to check if your design is market-ready is through UX prototyping. A prototype is a basic version of your design with the potential of turning it into a fully functional product. It enables initial product testing and feedback collection.

Why Should You Consider Creating a UX Prototype?

You might be wondering – why should I bother building a prototype? It has lots of benefits, we’ll get to them right now:

• Checking product-market fit – it’s difficult to assess whether the product is ready for market launch without having a physical product at hand. Having a prototype, even the most simple one allows you to share it with your target audience and get their feedback. Use it to improve your product or push it into development right away.
• Boosting user experience – you can easily spot issues which require further work as they block your users from meeting their goals. Fixing them prior to launch will improve the overall UX.
• Faster development time and lower costs – use a prototype to discover which features are missing and which ones are unnecessary. This will not only save you a lot of money, but it will also cut your time to development.

There is more than one prototyping technique which you can use, let’s take a quick look at them now.

Prototyping Methodologies You Can Use

1. Paper prototyping – its low cost and flexibility make it a popular option among designers. It can be tested with any type of interface including a website, mobile app, or software. It’s frequently confused with sketching but it goes beyond paper drawing. Paper prototypes can be made of cardboard or cut out of paper which makes interacting with them easier.

   

   Source: Martha Eierdanz

2. Digital prototyping – they are most often used in app prototyping due to their robustness. With digital prototyping, you can easily assess the functionality and usability of a product as users get a real feel for it.
3. HTML prototyping – while they slowly become obsolete, some UX designers still go for this option. The prototype is built in HTML, so it requires some coding skills. The design is plain – it doesn’t include any images or fancy colors but it can be useful when it comes to web prototyping.

Since you know what prototyping methodologies you can select from, it’s time for some practical skills on how to approach it.

Steps to Effective UX Prototyping

There are five steps that you should follow to develop a UX prototype, these are:

Step 1: Develop your Idea

You can’t build a product without knowing the reason why you want to build it in the first place. Figure out what problem your product is going to solve, then focus on building a design that would enable users to meet their goals in the simplest way.

Step 2: Create a List of Product Requirements

What features does your product require to deliver on its objectives? Start with shortlisting the must-have or core features and focus on prioritizing those, instead of listing an endless number of features which will only increase your development costs and decrease usability.

Step 3: Start Sketching

While at this stage most designers will already have product layouts and structures in mind, the purpose of this step is to explore what’s possible and what isn’t. So try to approach it with a fresh mind – start by drawing the core screens of your app.

Step 4: Use Your Sketches to Build Wireframes

Now that you have your sketches ready you can start building wireframes. Wireframes lay out the content and functionality, taking into consideration users’ needs. Its main purpose is to show to stakeholders which entities, pages, and components are going to be included in the app, and how they will interact with one another.

Step 5: Build a Prototype

The ultimate step is to build the prototype. You have two options:

1. you can use your wireframes to build a basic prototype
2. or you can use specialized tools to transform your ideas into a more interactive prototype filled with fake content.

User Experience Design – How to Improve & Best Practices

With all of the above, it’s now time to review the best practices that will help you ensure you’re creating a good UX design.

The Main User Experience Best Practices

Here are some of the best UX experience best practices worth following while creating your design process:

Know Your Target Audience

You design products for specific users, this means you’ll have to get to know them inside out. Find out what their problems and pain points are, what their needs are, and what goals they try to achieve. Only by having this information, you can start thinking about product design.

Source: Unsplash

Remember About Simplicity and Familiarity

As humans, we often cling to what we’re familiar with – this also applies to products. Familiarity allows users to learn how to use new products faster, which also has a positive impact on engagement.

Check How Users Interact with Your Design

We frequently assume that users will interact with our product in a certain way; these, however, are just assumptions. And reality can surprise us, which is why it’s worth verifying your assumptions by observing how users interact with your product in real-life.

Not only will you be able to spot any potential roadblocks which prevent your users from meeting their goals, but you might also discover some design elements that bring joy to customers.

Make Your User Flow Consistent

User flow visually displays all the steps that a user must take to reach their goal. While designing your user flow keep three questions in mind:

• Will your users be able to meet their goals in the end?
• Are there any elements that might make the experience less pleasant?
• Are there any steps that could be either simplified or disposed of completely?

Source: UXdesign

Put Readability and Accessibility First

Readability and accessibility play an important role in creating great user experiences. Just because the text in your app is error-free, doesn’t necessarily indicate it’s easy to read. Low readability will create navigation problems, and your users might feel lost. Instructions should be straightforward and easy to follow. This can only be achieved by using a simple and familiar language, which all users, irrespective of their age group, can understand.

If you’re seeking inspiration, then here are a few user experience examples that you can look at including, Google Search Engine, Facebook, Paypal, and Starbucks.

Summary

Offering great user experiences is no longer an option – it’s an expectation that most customers have, and are willing to pay extra for. However, creating great UX requires an in-depth knowledge of your target audience, which calls for extensive UX research. It forms the basis of an effective UX design process. Having it in place not only improves your chances of creating products that meet customers’ goals, but are also easy and enjoyable to use.

While creating your user experience design process remember to keep accessibility, readability, and simplicity in mind, and make sure that your user flow is consistent.

This was just a brief introduction to UX, and there’s much more to uncover! Click below to proceed to Chapter One – What is UX? 10 Experts Share Their Definition.

Chapter 1

What is UX? 10 Experts Share Their Definition