UX (user experience) refers to how much a potential customer enjoys interacting with your brand. Proper UX strategy is critical for attracting and maintaining customers because studies have shown that many people will not return to a website if they did not enjoy using it. The role of UX is so important that Google uses it as a benchmark measurement for search engine optimization.
Experience design is an element that internet companies have to factor in if they wish to stay relevant. Some industry experts are even predicting that user experience will overtake product quality and marketing as a key factor that determines a brand’s success by 2020 (SuperOffice). So, the fundamental question that businesses need to ask themselves is– how do you provide a good user experience?
Great User Experience is Like Top-Notch Customer Service
Quality user experience is good customer service. User experience is the part of the website design and interface that makes your customers feel welcomed and responsive knowing that the designers took the effort to make their visit as enjoyable as possible. There are four elements of customer service that can be applied to user experience:
Promptness
People don’t like to wait. When they visit e-commerce store, they want the websites to load quickly. Every second spent waiting for a page to load brings them one step closer to looking elsewhere due to an onerous user experience. Site speed is definitely a factor, in addition to streamlined navigation, and fewer clicks to each purchase. When your customer is able to quickly and easily find what they are looking for, it will keep them from turning to other brands.
Empathy
A great UX designer should view the website from a customer’s point of view. This allows the designer to predict any potential problems that a customer could possibly face and design them out before it actually happens. Identifying the flaws in your own design is a hard task but it helps you reap maximum benefits in terms of user experience. A great way to test this is to put your site in the hands of professional web testers, or even friends and family. In fact, I always turn to my teenage sister to hear how she responds to the UX on Learnt. Generation Z insight is invaluable!
Friendliness
Customers tend to go back to service providers who make them feel valued. Right from an easy, uncluttered website to big and prominent call to action buttons, every small aspect leaves a lasting impression on your users. Additionally, the UX should portray your brand as a customer-friendly and reliable one. Your brand’s online store should mirror that atmosphere through design, easy user flow, communication with admin behind the site, etc.
Pro-activeness
Providing quality service includes anticipating your customers’ needs. In user design, that means predicting where there will be problems and informing the customers when a fix is being worked on or letting them know that they can expect some delays. Your customers will appreciate your efforts as they do not expect you to be perfect. If there’s a bug that your team knows or a site maintenance, inform your users! After all, it’s very easy to put a notification or message of sorts on your site.
Challenges Involved In Creating Stellar User Design
User Experience is the collection of every single customer’s experience with a brand. This means that you must plan your UX from the first advertisement, to the sign-up process, and all the way to the final payment and delivery of the product. Additionally, if your product has an ongoing life cycle, you should also consider UX for repeat customers.
Since each part is typically handled by a different team, it is hard to make all of these teams work together to provide a consistent user experience. This is because the marketing team tends to do things differently from the customer service team which could potentially cause a mismatch in the user experience. The rift may seem invisible but customers subconsciously find themselves put off by the lack of flow. To make things worse, most of these departments assume that UX is the responsibility of the design team and overlook it completely.
Coordination and team-wide communication are crucial to get around this problem. The best way to make sure that all teams are creating a solid user experience is by getting them to document the user’s journey from the very beginning. This documentation allows the company to spot the rifts and take action to smooth them over.
Every Brand Can Benefit From Quality User Experience
Retaining customers is a vital part of every brand’s growth. Quality customer experience makes this happen by keeping the customers happy and making them choose your brand over a competitor’s.. When you treat your customers well and provide a valuable product, they are sure to share their positive experiences with your brand.
User experience is proving to be the most effective way for online businesses to convert leads. and I urge brands to challenge themselves regularly to improve their company’s UX.
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About the author: Eliza Morrison Nimmich is a Co-Founder of Learnt and Tutor the People. She handles a lot of the customer interaction, which gives her invaluable insight to their experience using the websites, and ways to improve their UX!
