Why User Experience Matters a Lot?

Dec, 2017

- By UI Design and Development Department of ICAT Design and Media College

Today, our life is dominated by machines and products than humans. We tend to spend more time with products than people. Even people to people collaboration happens with several products as medium. With such an increase in the number of products and the number of brands offering the products, the need for brands to provide better user experience through their product is very important to find a successful place in the market.

Most people today give more importance to the usability of a product more than the utilities it provides. Designs are designs only when they are usable. Designers, who ignore User Experience intentionally, ignore success.


So, What User Experience Design Is?
User Experience (UX) Design is about producing better experience through meaningful and usable solutions devised by understanding the users’ needs and behavior. Design for people is the ultimate objective of a User Experience Designer. One can understand the advantage of meaningful usable solutions from a lot of products that we use in our day-to-day life. For example, consider the design of a pencil. A triangular / hexagonal shaped pencil provides more grip to users than circular pencil. Also it will not roll on the table when it is kept idle. Pencils with erasers attached to their bottom doubles the usability as right components have been combined together. It is the job of a User Experience Designer to devise such solutions that are right to the product.

UX design process involves various activities like identifying and studying users, analyzing users’ problems, discovering use cases, designing elegant solutions to user problems, providing an easy interface, engaging users with the product and refining the product with respect to the changes encountered.


Products that are Successful with their UX Design

Each legendary brand of different products has their own iconic products that stand as an extra-ordinary example for better user experience. Some of them are:

  • Apple's iPhone still stands out in the smart phone market for its greater user experience. Though a lot of competitors have pitched in, iPhone still stays unbeatable due its simple and elegant design.
  • Google's Search engine, known for its simplicity won its several competitors by providing easier experience.
  • Amazon, one of the e-commerce websites has turned shopping as a hobby for many people by incorporating several user-engaging techniques like gamification. Gamification is the process of adding one or more elements of games into a product to increase the user engagement. The reward system and leader board in Amazon are the most widely acknowledged gamification techniques.
  • Microsoft stars with its dynamic operating system - Windows, and other utilities such as, MS Office and Skype that are being used in most of the professional environments.
  • Facebook amuses its users by providing an ever-enriching virtual, social networking environment that addresses the primary problem of connecting with people.

All these products prove us that products with great user experience reaps great success.


Let’s See the Advantages of Great User Experience Design

As we had seen, the primary advantage of a great UX design is the success it reaps to the brand.

With huge number of similar products emerging in the recent times, the need for brands to stand out of the crowd is increasing exponentially. Coming up with people-centric design solutions helps designers to create innovative products. Innovation is all about betterment, right?

User Experience also helps companies to gain repeated visits from users and to retain their customers for a long time. By providing higher user satisfaction, it helps brands to gain trust among their customers.

Further, it helps brands to gain loyal customers. The real assets of a company are its loyal customers, as they are the backbone for their business. A mere product will help companies to earn customers easily. But only usable products can help to bring loyal customers to a company, who will continue buying the products of the same brand. Amazon, known as one of the companies concentrating more on user experience design is doing great in terms of bringing in loyal customers, which has boosted the revenue of the company and made its CEO, Jeff to top the World Billionaire's List.

On the other hand, User experience also benefits the business of brands. User Experience prevents unnecessary redesign of a product. This turns into a big advantage from a business perspective as the cost associated with redesigning is saved.

Also, it prevents brands from spending more money on customer acquisition and customer support. Good User Experience helps brands to do avoid unnecessary expenses.

 

Users today have high expectations from every product they use. They want everything to happen at ease. They expect a model of “no pain, high gain” and welcome only such products. So, UX Designers are the ones who can help brands design easy-to-use and efficient products that can succeed in the market.

Image courtesy: www.mockplus.com