A seamless user experience = positive impact on the bottom line

"Design is not just what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works" - Steve Jobs.

Creative design in web design today is not just developing wireframes, PSD files and then converting them into web pages. While the look of the website makes the first attraction, it is the user experience awarded to the website visitor that decides the user engagement and conversions of the website. The user experience entity is a consummation of the customer journey, web accessibility, web analytics, ease of usability and so on.

The focus of user experience has moved away from product centric to customer-centric. Hence the objective is to create that user experience and interface that will help the customer achieve their goals.

Any new asset created and placed on the website should answer the question "how am I gonna help my user have a better experience with this asset?" The best way to answer this is by having a deep understanding of what users value, their abilities & limitations within the site.

How do we build a powerful user-experience

Step 1- Completing the prerequisites

The first step towards building the powerful UI/UX website is learning. Learning about the client, business model, the kind of customers targeted by the client, the USP of the client offered to their customer et al. This can be broadly segmented into four areas:

Understanding the client’s industry - manufacturing, retail, fashion, BFSI they all have a different routine and approach from their customers.

Understanding the client’s business model - B2B, B2C, D2C they could be on any business model and we emphasize on understanding how the business flow works. This is crucial while building an e-commerce site.

Understanding client’s customer journey - Every digital asset on the website has a role to play in completing the conversion. The UI/UX arrangement is the first step in the algorithm to ensure the user follows the journey for maximum efficiency of all assets used.

Understanding current customer pain points - the pain points the client targets. This can be mobile first, pricing, visual appeal etc.

Step 2 - Research methods could be used in UX

Collecting the above-mentioned information can be complex since we need to get a complete understanding. Hence we use more than one research method to fetch complete details.

One-one interviews - Sit with the SMEs one on one to collect the details.

Focus group - Discussion with the diverse SME pool of resources to encourage discussions on the requirements and objectives of the digital assets.

Concept testing - Testing the proposed idea to get quantitative updates on the feasibility and the success ratio of the same

Card sorting - Used method to arrive at the information architecture of the site. To classify contents into groups and sub-groups and sort the accessibility

Usability testing - Getting the designed UI/UX model to be tested in a staging or development environment by diverse user pool from both the client end and our end for feedback.

Diary study - This is usually carried out for long-term projects that require long-term testing models and involve complex design procedures. The sample group provides us with their test feedback qualitatively for improvements.

Strategy and Prototyping

Once the groundwork is done, user experience strategy & implementation phase will kick in where UX experts, based on the client requirements will build experience flow, interfaces matching client use cases and interactive mockup screens/clickable prototypes that gives a clear picture of how the product/web asset will look like.

There will be numerous iterations with client & internal stakeholders to arrive at the final user experience document that gives a 360* view of the product

Once the user experience phase is done, technology evaluation phase kicks in where we decide the right tools to use to build the user experience unlike the other way around. By getting into the tools at the end, we expel the limitations caused by the different tools and technology in the design to satisfy the user requirements.

Benefits of a perfectly built UX

• Increase in the overall conversion goals of each web pages (Subscription, downloads, purchase goals etc.)
• An appealing and easy to use website nominally hypes the credibility and trust in the brand
• The ease of usability and the Journey mapping factors increases the engagement rate with the site causing a drop in bounce rates
• Since the design process is completed through a detail-oriented outcome-driven process, it averts the redesign efforts and cost
• With more user data flowing in and the assets mapped to their respective goals, it improves the performance of the integrated business intelligence tool