Being business savvy as a UX designer will help you land advertised job opportunities easily. Below you will find a curated list of business strategies UX designers should know that will help them navigate the competitive market.

Leverage Artificial Intelligence

The world of artificial intelligence cuts across multiple industries. One of the best ways to leverage the power of AI is by using it to increase sales, improve productivity, and gain a competitive edge. You can attend coding bootcamp like General Assembly or Thinkful to master artificial intelligence. You can also decide to hire experts in AI to help you achieve your goals.

Conduct Competitive Analysis

It’s paramount to conduct in-depth research regarding your competitors before entering the market. This will help establish your niche, as you will easily identify the gap in the industry. Through research, you may also be able to identify ways to improve on your competitors’ services or products. You can also evaluate their success and failures and come up with new ways to operate.

The world of design is ever-changing. There is always a need to improve user experience in the market. To be a successful UX designer, you must invest ample time in finding out about competitors before delving into the market.

Curate Templates

The best way to get ahead in the market is by making your work effective and efficient. To ensure you produce quality content fast, you should rely on custom templates. Instead of starting from scratch when a new client approaches, you can rely on these set structures. Building your personalized templates or design systems will help you control time, labor, and quality.

Pricing Strategy

As a professional, you may keep your prices relatively low to attract customers, or price them beyond standards and cut off the ordinary customer. It’s a bit challenging to put a price on creativity, but you can draw a lot of information from other businesses or competitors.

Some businesses and experts in UX design started by under-quoting their services and slowly worked up to their level of success. This does not have to be your strategy. Ensure you have a proper business plan in place to ensure you can meet your long-term goals.

Review Your Performance

You have to have a structure in place to ensure you are improving on your craft. It’s important to ensure your design ideations positively impact a company’s profit. You can obtain data on the company’s website customer experience. It’s easy to establish by checking the number of customers visiting and the amount of time they spend on the site.

Increase Services

In addition to offering UX design services, you can go further and include web development or SEO services to your portfolio. Most companies prefer having one umbrella company delivering all their website solutions. Therefore, adding other services to your portfolio will help you stand out in the market.

Improve Customer Service

It’s always essential to review your client’s level of satisfaction. This will help you in improving the types of services you deliver. There are multiple professionals and businesses who have built their reputations based on customer service. If you are an established company, outsourcing a customer service team might be the best option.

Build Customer Loyalty

One of the cornerstones of success is retaining existing clients. It is much easier to maintain a relationship with an existing client than to work on acquiring a new one. Ensure the loyalty of your clients by rewarding them. You can create a customer loyalty program, improve customer service, or prioritize feedback. Most companies offer their clients discounts on certain services or during specific months.

Conclusion

Keeping your skills up-to-date as a UX designer cannot be overlooked. The world of design is always booming with new technology, methods, and approaches to improve user experience. Failure to develop a proper business strategy that keeps you informed can easily result in losses.

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the field of web design and development has a job growth rate of 13 percent, which shows promising growth. Fostering the best practices to succeed can help you thrive, whether you are working as a freelancer, in a startup, or an established company.

About the author: Daisy Waithereo Wambua is a seasoned writer with a decade of experience in writing, proofreading, and editing. She has spoken at Maseno University to help young women explore new careers and learn more about technology. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Communications and Public Relations, a Certificate in Web Development, and a Master’s Degree in International Studies.

Posted by: Situated Research

The post Business Strategies UX Designers Should Know appeared first on Situated Research.

Online businesses in 2020 are forced to compete with large online and big box retailers, including Amazon, Wayfair, and brick-and-mortar stores like Walmart and Best Buy. In order to compete, e-commerce websites need to have a great user-experience (UX) and a streamlined buying process. Complicated checkout systems, over-cluttered product pages, and a lack of mobile optimization can severely inhibit a retailer from competing with large companies that have large, dedicated user-experience teams.

For the business owner, a well-designed e-commerce platform allows them to run their business easily, and can help streamline daily operations and customer service calls. Following are some tips and best practices to follow to help grow both organic traffic and sales conversions moving into 2020.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and UX

User Experience and SEO are critical components of any e-commerce site, especially as industry verticals are becoming more competitive. Digital advertising prices continue to rise and generating organic traffic is essential. In addition, cross-functional expertise is required to build a website that has good UX and SEO, as these fields continue to overlap. Google algorithms are becoming better at reading page content, placing priority on well-designed content that is not artificial. Prior black-hat tactics to raise search rank, like loading page footers with keyword-dense text, are now causing page ranks in search engines (like Google or Bing) to drop. Driving organic traffic can feel daunting and will take time, but will pay-off in the end with good SEO practices.

Website Sitemap

Part of good UX and SEO involves a well-designed sitemap. A sitemap reflects the website page and navigation structure, and hierarchically organizes website content. Adding a sitemap to Google Search Console is important for any e-commerce site, so that search engines crawl and understand product information. Google will be notified to any changes that you make to your site, which should happen on a frequent basis so content does not become stale. A sitemap not only makes the new content you post discovered quickly by search engines, but is reflected in the website navigation to users (helping tell them about the content on your website).

Simplify Page Content (and Clutter)

Clear, simple to understand content can raise engagement with your audience. In many instances, “less is more” – as said by Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe, a German-American architect that pioneered the minimalist movement. Your website visitors appreciate you communicating your message in a simple, yet efficient manner.

Similar to a cluttered advertisement, websites with distracting content, too much text, or an unclear message will lose their effectiveness. Over time, more and more things fight for our attention, and the average user has a shorter attention span. Users are willing to spend less time figuring out what you’re trying to get across, so get the job done with simple, clear messaging on your website. Design each page using proper keyword research and ensure landing pages have a clear engagement goal in mind so that your content has a purpose.

Optimizing Website Structure and User Journey

Supporting the intentions of website visitors is critical to raising conversion rates. Whether the goal is to sell a product or communicate an important piece of information, users should be able to fulfill their needs as efficiently as possible when using your website. If a product is difficult to find or a message becomes muddled, conversion rates will fall.

Part of optimizing the user experience (UX) of a website is to ensure that different types of users (personas) are able to achieve their goals efficiently: whether it be completing an action or finding information. A well-designed navigation structure will help the user journey, so that users can find what they want in the least amount of clicks (and with less confusion along the way).

Make Sure Your Site is Responsive

More people are becoming accustomed to purchasing groceries, clothing, home décor, and vehicles in the comfort of their homes. According to Forbes, Cyber Week had 62% of traffic coming from mobile in 2018, and fifteen percent of orders of were placed on mobile phones over the Thanksgiving holiday. Other sources place over 60% of website visitors (and climbing) using a mobile device like a phone or tablet. With this in mind, websites need to use a responsive design to be sure that content is optimized for mobile devices. The lack of an intuitive UX can result in user frustration, causing visitors to leave before completing a purchase on a website.

Website speed

Website performance contributes heavily to page rank and SEO, as well as usability. Research by Google describes how sites appearing on page one of Google display content in 1.19 seconds on average, while those on page two display primary content in 1.29 seconds. Some tools that can help you gauge and improve your website speed are Website Grader by HubSpot, Google PageSpeed Insights, and Pingdom Website Speed Test.

SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate

An SSL certificate authenticates your website to encrypt data that is being transferred from a website to users. SSL certificates ensure that a website is secure when visitors make purchases, which is important is the growing age of e-commerce. An SSL certificate encrypts sensitive user data, such as personal bank information, phone numbers and addresses.

Google Chrome, the most-used browser, has begun notifying users when a website is not fully secured with an SSL certificate. Fully encrypting data using SSL will provide users the best, most secure experience: ensuring that sensitive data is transmitted securely between the browser and web server. In a world where data breaches and security are becoming commonplace, users will trust and show loyalty to brands that value their privacy and sensitive information: highlighting the need for SSL certificates on websites.

Conclusion

Optimizing your website has a powerful effect on your marketing effectiveness, as well as your bottom line. Increasing conversions on your website, whether serving a goal of purchasing products or communicating information about your business (in a clear, efficient manner) will attract new customers and build loyalty. By optimizing the user journey for your website, different types of users can be served in a more effective manner.

The skill sets involved in designing a website continue to broaden and overlap. Experts in development, graphic design, SEO, UX, marketing and content writing need to know how their design decisions impact other areas of design. For example, designing a page around a keyword (SEO) impacts the website structure (UX), written content, and image content on the page (which can also impact website speed). A working knowledge of these fields is required to balance design decision trade-offs to make websites more effective, and this expertise can yield powerful improvements. In many instances, a simple analysis of a website by an expert can present some low-hanging fruit, which can have a huge impact on results.

To gauge how your website currently measures up, and identify some low-hanging fruit that can improve your website, request a free website marketing analysis from CueCamp. This report is in video form, generated by CueCamp’s team of experts to show the user-friendliness and marketing effectiveness of your website. Start out 2020 on the right foot, and reach out today.

Authors: Shannon Olear and Matt Sharritt, Ph.D. (Situated Research)

The post Boost 2020 Profit: E-commerce Experience Optimization appeared first on Situated Research.

User-centered design isn’t just about creating a great experience for customers—it’s also a smart business move. 

In our previous article “The True ROI of UX: Convincing the Executive Suite,” we talked about how to persuade company executives on the ROI of UX, and how to illustrate the value of UX in increasing business KPIs. In this second piece, we discuss how, in order to really drive the message home, it is essential that UX teams present successful case studies of similar B2B UX redesigns.

The trouble is, finding data from real-world B2B UX redesigns is extremely challenging. Through dogged perseverance, our UX team found some useful data, but the proven difficulty of defining the ROI of UX (ie. how to exactly measure it) complicated matters further, and it became evident that the ROI of UX needed to be categorized into “soft” and “hard” dollars.

On the “soft side,” results are categorized into increased customer loyalty and net promoter scores (NPS), increased word-of-mouth referrals, productivity gains, and increased efficiency. On the “hard dollars” side, increased earnings and cost savings are gained from fewer support calls, less spent on development, fewer development “redo” cases, less user-testing, increased sales, and so on.

Here are the internal and external ROI measures:

Internal ROI

• Increased user productivity
• Decreased user errors
• Decreased training costs
• Savings gained from making changes earlier in design life cycle
• Decreased user support

External ROI

• Increased user productivity
• Increased sales
• Decreased customer support costs
• Savings gained from making changes earlier in the design life cycle
• Reduced cost of providing training

The B2B UX redesign case studies below represent the results of our research into the top 15 global design agencies/consultancies who performed B2B UX design/redesign projects. These case studies come from prominent design/consulting firms such as Accenture Interactive, Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey, Forrester, IDEO, Frog Design, Fjord, Adaptive Path, and others.

ROI of UX: B2B Redesign Case Studies

Bank of America

The giant bank identified and funded a UX redesign project to improve its online enrollment application for online banking. In developing the business case, the design team identified yield (or the percentage of customers completing the process) as the primary metric.

Prototyping and testing various design solutions with yield as the primary success metric proved a successful design strategy. The week the new registration form went live, the yield metric nearly doubled, and exceeded the desired ROI benchmark. This was a win for the design team, as well as the business unit that sponsored the project.

General Electric Software UX Unification

Known for its industrial expertise, by 2010 General Electric Co. had quietly become the world’s 14th largest software developer by revenue. These capabilities had grown opportunistically, primarily in response to requests from specific clients. As a result, little software consistency existed across the company and significant development efforts were invested in problems already solved in other divisions.

Overall, users of GE software reported that the quality didn’t reflect the excellence of GE’s hardware engineering. GE leadership decided to make an investment in creating a common software platform for the company. The Software Center of Excellence developed a UX Center of Excellence that would guide GE management, and drive the culture change to ensure that their software user experience matched their well-earned reputation for stellar hardware engineering.

Leaders, engineers, and designers collaborated to build processes and tools to support culture change together with a core foundation of design tools and success metrics that would support its UX practice. In the first year after its launch, the IIDS generated a 100% productivity gain in development teams and saved an estimated $30 million for the company. These digital transformation initiatives provided the foundation for GE Digital—and GE’s leadership in the industrial internet.

Courtesy frog design

Cathay Pacific

Cathay Pacific Airways is known for its leadership in the adoption of new technologies. The airline was the first in the world to announce plans to install in-flight email, the first to link its Airbus aircraft to its maintenance centers electronically, and the first in the world to auction air tickets online.

For company employees, a staff of eight to ten people work full-time to answer questions and book travel. Working with a design consultancy, Cathay Pacific created a new online portal called TravelDesk, a one-stop shop for staff travel.

The portal design project resulted in significant cost savings for the company:

1. The online portal reduced call-center volume (employee benefits center regarding policy questions, and service center regarding flight availability).
2. It increased productivity. Ground staff at the airport previously spent significant time managing the listing and check-in process for employees using their travel benefits. This project reduced the time required for these tasks.

Virgin America Website Redesign

Virgin America was on a mission to make flying fun again. In 2014, the airline decided to reinvent the digital travel experience, and in order to meet the needs of modern travelers, create the world’s first responsive airline website. The company decided to design and engineer a new digital platform that could respond to modern travel needs and behaviors.

After successfully A/B testing the new design against the old, Virgin America’s reinvented responsive site was released. They announced an IPO following two successful quarters running the new site that had exceeded performance goals in the following areas:

• 14% increase in conversion rate
• 20% fewer support calls
• Flyers booked nearly twice as fast, on any kind of device

Virgin America responsive website design.

HubSpot

In a recent major iteration of HubSpot, the company decided to re-think the user experience on its site, starting from the ground level with user feedback. They tested entirely new conversion methods, copy messaging, and even visual treatments. As part of the process, they pushed countless experiments live, and iterated with each piece of feedback, putting the user in control.

The result? The conversion rate doubled (tripled, even, in some areas). As HubSpot receives upwards of 10 million visitors per month, one can imagine the impact this had on revenue.

Continental Office B2B Website Redesign

With a brand refresh just a few months prior, Continental Office, a customized workplace solution provider, needed to update its 6-year-old website. The team wanted to ensure they were integrating buyer personas to provide an engaging user experience complete with relevant content marketing.

The old website was fine at the time but wasn’t built around telling the whole story while understanding the customer journey.

“In creating that great user experience, you have to stay relevant with what people are looking for and then build your website around that, which I believe is what we did and has allowed us to have these successful results.” – Rachel Iannarino, Vice President, Marketing.

The results of getting to know customers and building a website around that speak for themselves. Through the redesign strategy, traffic increased by 103% year-over-year and net-new contacts increased by 645%.

“Even though we had such great results last year, it’s already up — the number of new contacts is up over 80% from last year already. And I can’t lie; I keep waiting for these numbers to kind of plateau, but fortunately for us, the results just keep trending in a positive way” – Iannarino said.

Music & Arts

Music & Arts sells musical instruments and comprises 150+ retail stores, and 300+ affiliate locations. Their sizable eCommerce site had numerous usability problems that hindered online sales.

There is a detailed case study of this UX redesign project on the Toptal Design Blog: “eCommerce Redesigned: How Minor Changes Made Major UX Improvements.”

After a three month UX redesign project that significantly improved basic usability issues (consistency, simplicity, user flow, system feedback) their online sales increased around 30% year-over-year.

Pubmatic

This ad-tech platform’s UX redesign project took over a year. The B2B platform was about 7 years old and was made up of a hodge-podge of UIs, a variety of different-looking web-applications that were created at different times. As the company was maturing, it needed a unified UX design and a brand-consistent look-and-feel.

As a result of the UX redesign, NPS increased from 6 (detractors) to 9 (promoters) over 3 months immediately after launch when measured against the old platform’s satisfaction data.

Final Thoughts

A very interesting experiment related to the ROI of UX was conducted by the Geoff Teehan, Director of Product Design at Facebook in 2006. They called it the “UX Fund.” The $50,000 fund invested in companies that focus on delivering great user experiences. The hypothesis was that the ROI of UX should be reflected in their stock price over time.

Over a ten year period, from 2006 to 2016—including a major financial crisis in the middle of it—the “UX Fund” returned 450% vs the Nasdaq’s 93.2% return (that’s 45% annual return over ten years which beats any other asset class). You can read more about this experiment here.

Despite the evidence that UX design investments enhance customer experience and address business problems, executives still find it a challenge to define the financial benefits using traditional ROI measures. UX designers best serve businesses if they can not only create great “designs that work,” but are able to articulate and convincingly demonstrate tangible business results and KPIs to executives and stakeholders.

In order to be convincing and really get to the heart of what executives need to hear, UX designers need to think in similar terms to business leaders. Think: how can we best provide business value? If we do this, what will the return on our investment be? What metrics will demonstrate that we’ve made the right choices?

If done well, design can help bring order and coherence to the disorder that is the current state of the B2B world and enterprise applications. A 2016 design study of 408 different companies found that the more a company focused on and invested in design, the more they saw sales increase and experienced higher customer retention rates—customer engagement soared, and they moved through product cycles faster. All this simply because they put UX design, and more importantly, the customer, at the very heart of their business.

Clearly, good user experience is good for business. Today it’s become part of a UX practitioner’s job to offer decision-makers a compelling demonstration of the true value of exceptional UX design, and that there is indeed an impressive ROI in UX.

Written by:  Miklos Philips, Toptal
Posted by: Situated Research

The post The True ROI of UX: B2B Redesign Case Studies appeared first on Situated Research.

In this article I will explain what that rule is, and what it means to product and service design. I’ll also raise the possible implications of this phenomenon on organizational management, collaboration, and general performance. The psychological phenomenon I will be discussing in this article is known as Miller’s Law. Rather than just tell you what Miller’s Law is, I ask you to take part in this exercise for a more immersive learning lesson.

The Exercise…

Step 1

Read the italicized instructions before starting. Grab a pen and paper. This is an exercise where you will try to recall words you’ve just read, off memory.

Below is a list of 20 words. Read them to comprehension , and try to memorize as many as possible. Try to keep the words ‘in your head’. Do not write the words. Spend about a minute. After you are done reading, scroll down until you see the word ‘STOP’. Then, read step 2.

STOP < ··············································

Step 2

Now, use your pen and paper to write down as many words as you can remember from the list. Think hard, but do not scroll back up to view the words. If you scroll up, the experiment is ruined. Give yourself about half a minute…Once you have finished writing the words you tried to recall, scroll back up and check how many you got right.

If you are like the vast majority of human beings, you will have remembered 5–9 of the words. Hundreds of experiments prove universality of this limitation on memory. When I first discovered this phenomenon, I knew it had huge implications on product design, because of the degree to which this limitation affects day to day tasks. This capacity for keeping ~7 bits of information ‘in the head’ short term, is known as Miller’s Law.

Miller’s Law · The Magic Number

In 1956 there was a paper written that became one of the most highly cited papers in psychology. Titled, The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information, it was published in 1956 by the cognitive psychologist George A. Miller of Princeton University’s Department of Psychology in Psychological Review. The crux of the paper suggests that the number of perceptual ‘chunks’ an average human can hold in working memory (a component of short-term memory) is 7 ± 2. This is frequently referred to as Miller’s law. Here is a summary of the article, sourced from wikipedia:

In his article, Miller discussed a coincidence between the limits of one-dimensional absolute judgment and the limits of short-term memory. In a one-dimensional absolute-judgment task, a person is presented with a number of stimuli that vary on one dimension (e.g., 10 different tones varying only in pitch) and responds to each stimulus with a corresponding response (learned before). Performance is nearly perfect up to five or six different stimuli but declines as the number of different stimuli is increased. The task can be described as one of information transmission: The input consists of one out of n possible stimuli, and the output consists of one out of n responses. The information contained in the input can be determined by the number of binary decisions that need to be made to arrive at the selected stimulus, and the same holds for the response. Therefore, people’s maximum performance on one-dimensional absolute judgement can be characterized as an information channel capacity with approximately 2 to 3 bits of information, which corresponds to the ability to distinguish between four and eight alternatives.

Moreover, the human mind can remember ~7 bits of information when completing a task that requires cognitive effort. This is critical, because humans are constantly performing tasks, and trying to juggle various stimuli in the mind when doing so. One of the key concepts behind Miller’s Law is ‘chunking’, which basically means assembling various bits of information into a cohesive gestalt. For example, the word · p e n c i l · is actually a ‘chunk’ of letters, organized into a perceptual gestalt. If the letters were rearranged · c n l i p e · it would be six separate chunks of information. Chunking is a critical element of information organization, and is the basis for our UX and organizational rule.

The Rule

Always organize elements of information in categories no larger than 9, but preferably ~5 chunks.

The more chunks of information you add to an ‘interface’, the more difficult it becomes to ‘work’, using the information at hand. This is especially critical for first time users, because they haven’t had the ‘practice’ needed to encode the interface into long term memory, or, for the behaviour to become habitual. I constantly see this rule being broken by giants like Facebook, Google, and WordPress. Don’t even get me started on automobile interface design. The ~5 bit chunk rule also compliments minimalism as a rigorous design philosophy. To expound, due to the limitations of working memory, as a product becomes more feature-full it inevitably becomes more difficult to use, because the user has to manage more information while operating the product. This makes good information design so critical.

Millers Law also highlights the importance of foresight and proper planning in the design process, because as you add more features to a product — your interface must be able to accommodate those new features without breaking the visual foundation of what you built. Rebuilding a foundation takes immense time and resources.

Another perceptual phenomenon observed in relation to Miller’s Law is known as the primacy, and recency effect. These terms are used respectively to describe how we remember items sensed at the beginning and end of an experience, more than ones in the middle. For example, if I were to show you a list of words, you would more likely remember the words at the beginning of the list, and the end. This is also known as the serial position effect. From wikipedia:

Serial position effect is the tendency of a person to recall the first and last items in a series best, and the middle items worst. [1] The term was coined by Hermann Ebbinghaus through studies he performed on himself, and refers to the finding that recall accuracy varies as a function of an item’s position within a study list. [2] When asked to recall a list of items in any order (free recall), people tend to begin recall with the end of the list, recalling those items best (the recency effect). Among earlier list items, the first few items are recalled more frequently than the middle items (the primacy effect). [3][4]

This observation raises huge questions in business and design. If people remember more at the beginning and end of an experience, how do we enhance the positives, and mitigate the negatives at these respective times? When does an experience truly begin and end? Should we be organizing more important elements at the beginning and end of lists due to their increased retention? These are all valid questions that UX designers and executives should ask when inventing or developing their product.

Millers Law can be applied to any aspect of your life that involves performing a mildly complex task. By reducing the amount of elements in your reach/access — and keeping them organized by relevant chunks not exceeding 9 bits, your brain will be able to remember exactly where things are so you can access its functionality. When lists of items grow too large, they become very difficult to mentally map them, requiring the user to do more cumbersome searching.

The adherence to Miller’s Law is especially relevant in the light of lean methodologies and recent trends in tech and UX. Users want and need a trial before they purchase something — it’s that simple. If they don’t experience the value within the first day or week of using it — they won’t buy. Since new users do not have lengthly time to learn where everything is — information design needs to be planned and well thought out before development happens.

Millers Law Beyond Information

We live in a world with an exponentially increasing amount of information. By not organizing it properly, or eliminating some completely, it ultimately degrades our ability to complete critical tasks for the purposes of survival (navigation/gaining income). That is why it’s so useful to omit items, products, and services from your life that aren’t giving a quality return on investment. This falls in line with the Pareto principle, the idea that 80% of your outcomes comes from 20% of your investments. Are you juggling too many tasks per day to be efficient? Is your team using too many tools to collaborate? Do you have too many members on your team? Are you overloading your new employees with information, leading to confusion?

Millers law teaches us that humans have a finite amount of information they can process, and that information overload will lead to distraction that negatively affects performance. Companies should look for ways to organize information in a way that is much more digestible for their customers and employees. This could be by eliminating tools or applications that are producing cognitive overload, reducing the amount of members on a team, or even organizing your departments based on our knowledge of working memory.

This is especially true in new science of the concept of flow, made famous bypsychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow is a word Mihaly coined to describe a state of concentration or ‘absorption’ with a specific task that humans ultimately find rewarding, pleasurable, and fulfilling. He describes it as an optimal state where we perform at our best and truly live ‘in the moment’. One sure way to kill flow is by increasing distractions in the workplace. So, do you think that by giving your employees more tools, that it actually enhances performance? Miller’s Law teaches us time and time again this is not the case. When it comes to completing tasks, less is more.

Actionable Insights

Turn off your desktop slack notifications. Get rid of the things you never use. Stop checking your various inboxes. Master one tool, not many. Now start focusing.

Written by: Jeff Davidson (via Prototypr)
Posted by: Situated Research

The post The Most Important Rule in UX Design that Everyone Breaks appeared first on Situated Research.

Infographic from: Website Magazine
Posted by: Situated Research

The post Why UX Matters to Marketing [INFOGRAPHIC] appeared first on Situated Research.

The first step to improving your own UX (and reaping the business benefits) is to conduct a usability assessment of your product, software or website. This process uncovers the most common problems. Often, usage analytics indicate UX issues with your product. Usability testing explains these issues. 

We regularly see websites that are underperforming because they were designed without the end user in mind. In these situations, executives who think they know their users typically make design decisions. As a result, websites are designed for the executives and not for the customers. The same holds true for software and video games.

Proper UX design requires understanding users’ needs and creating a solution that solves their problems and helps complete their tasks in the easiest and quickest way possible. To do this properly, you need to get inside users’ heads by interviewing them and observing them while they interact with the product. With continuous testing and adjustments, you can improve ease of use, reduce mistakes and increase overall customer satisfaction.

At Situated Research we conduct our research a little differently. In a separate article, Capturing Feedback in a User’s Natural Environment, we discussed the benefits to user testing without the use of a lab or moderator. Our team video tapes the user, in their natural environment, using the product as they would in everyday life. We then take the video and analyze it by using our cloud based research platform, Transana.

Conducting research this way allows us to uncover hidden usability issues that otherwise would not have been found. It also allows the user to act as they would in their everyday life and not feel like they are in a lab setting getting tested. The worst thing you can do is have a user feel like they are the ones being observed and tested and not the product.

To learn more about understanding what your customers think about your products, reach out today and tell us about your project.

Written by: Michel Ann Sharritt
Posted by: Situated Research

The post What Do Your Customers Think of Your Product? appeared first on Situated Research.

This helps you stay on the winning side by assessing your branding, usability, accessibility, information architecture, or any other element of your web content strategy.

By examining your competitors’ websites, you can gauge what you do best and what they do best: creating key objectives that you can improve upon.

Over 3,000 companies have had their website analyzed by Situated Research to see how they measure up against their competition.

Detailed Web Analysis

We’ll trace your business objectives through your website to see what services you offer and how effectively you communicate. We’ll look at your site’s navigation structure, color psychology, and social media initiatives.

Assess Competitors

Find out how effectively your industry competitors attract new customers, and how their website’s overall experience stacks up against yours. Typically two or three top competitors can reveal insights into how you can better target clients.

Key Findings Report

A summary will show specific areas that you lead your competitors, and where they lead you. Key findings will allow your design team to maximize the effectiveness of your website and attract more customers.

Your website is an investment. Effective marketing will attract more clients, giving your business the boost it needs. Spy on your competition to grow your market share and maximize the ROI of your website.

To learn more about competitive website assessments and how you can get yours today, visit our website: https://www.situatedresearch.com/services/competitive-website-assessment/

Written by: Michel Ann Sharritt, VP Situated Research

The post Want An Easy Way to Spy on Your Competition? appeared first on Situated Research.

This list is a starting point to providing the user experience that you want to give your customers online. Remember, if users come to your website and have trouble finding information or ordering a product, they will often leave your website and you will lose their business. 

Website Usability Tip #6: Recognition, Not Recall

Minimize the user’s memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the site to the other. Nor should the user have to remember or learn a new way to do something. (ex. Checkout Process)

• Use common icons that make sense to the user
• Do not over-complicate your interface
• Only use pop up instructions on buttons if you must

Website Usability Tip #7: Flexibility & Efficiency

Flexibility: allow multiple ways of accomplishing the same thing.

Users can find information through:

• A search box
• Using menu navigation
• Breadcrumbs
• Links in the footer

Efficiency: build in simple and efficient methods of doing common tasks, without making it difficult for someone new to the system.

Amazon’s checkout process and shopping cart system are an example, with users being able to set up a ‘one-click’ checkout system where a default credit card and address are stored to make checkout super speedy and easy.

Website Usability Tip #8: Aesthetic and Minimalist Design

Aesthetics is important when designing for the web. Knowing how to balance aesthetics with what users want can be a challenge.

Here are some key points to remember:

• Make sure colors play off of the colors of a well designed logo
• Do not overwhelm users with too much content
• Content should be relevant to the site
• Use clickable videos
• Never use avatars

A big mistake that web designers often make is adding more pages to a website to make it look more ‘legit’. Always remember that users on the Internet usually quickly skim over information, and avoid wordy text. Overwhelming them with redundant information will make them leave the website.

Website Usability Tip #9: Assist Users

Help users recognize and recover from errors.

• Error messages should be expressed in plain language
• If there is a process for ordering something (or otherwise), guide users through the process
• Never make users guess what to do next
• Constructively suggest a solution if a mistake is made

Website Usability Tip #10: Documentation

Even though it is better if a website can be used without any assistance, it may be necessary to provide documentation for complex tasks.

Any such information should be easy to search, and focused on the user’s task.

• List concrete steps to be carried out
• Make sure instructions are not too long
• Ideally, it should be contextual (placed where it is needed, so users don’t have to search for it)

Let us know if you have any questions on our website usability tips. If you would like a free expert analysis of your website’s usability and marketing, you can request a free website analysis video to get a professional free analysis of your website, emailed to you in the form of a short video.

We look forward to helping you create the ultimate user experience.

Written by: Michel Ann Sharritt
Posted by: Situated Research

The post Tips on Improving Your Website’s User Experience, Part 2 appeared first on Situated Research.

Our team has come up with ten usability guidelines for web developers and business owners to follow. This list is a starting point to providing the user experience that you want to give your customers online. Remember, if users come to your website and have trouble finding information or ordering a product, they will leave your website and in turn you will lose business.

Website Usability Tip #1: Visibility

Always show users where they are at on the website. 

• Use breadcrumbs
• Highlight where the user is at in the menu navigation
• Use sitemaps

Website Usability Tip #2: Communicate Clearly

The website should speak the user’s language. Nothing should be left up for interpretation. 

• Links and buttons should be concise and clear
• Labeling should make sense to the user
• Labeling should also be short and to the point
• ‘Error 404’ pages mean nothing to most users
• Buttons should be labeled in a way to bring a call to action (buy now)

Website Usability Tip #3: User Error

Users often click on items by mistake and need a clearly marked “emergency exit” to leave the unwanted area without having to go through an extended process. 

• Use clear breadcrumbs
• Use sitemaps
• Have a search button
• Make sure your logo is clickable to take the user back to the home page
• In some instances pop boxes may be useful warning your users of their error

Website Usability Tip #4: Consistency

Consistency is key to keep your users happy and coming back for more. Users should not have to reorient themselves each time they click on a page.

• Keep the same format for all pages of your website
• Placement of menu navigation should remain consistent from page to page
• Heading font sizes and placement should be consistent
• Labeling should not change
• Functionality of buttons, forms, etc. should not change

Website Usability Tip #5: Error Prevention

Even better than good error messages is a careful design which prevents a problem from occurring in the first place.

• Eliminate error-prone conditions
• Check for errors
• Present users with a confirmation option before they commit to the action
• Design a simple environment

Check back next week for the remaining 5 usability tips. In the meantime, if you would like our team to review your website you can request a free website analysis video to get a professional free analysis of your website, emailed to you in the form of a short video.

We look forward to helping you create the ultimate user experience.

Written by: Michel Ann Sharritt
Posted by: Situated Research

The post Tips on Improving Your Website’s User Experience, Part 1 appeared first on Situated Research.

After any amount of time in the design industry, you’ll most certainly hear someone refer to users as “dumb.” People talk about having to “dumb down” interfaces, design for “the lowest common denominator,” and try to make applications “idiot-proof.”

Designers say it themselves once in a while. The really terrible designers say it repeatedly.

“Well, you can only hold their hands so much.”

This sort of thinking discounts a key component of good design: human psychology. Understanding some basics of user behavior, then applying them to design, is one of the most important things a company can do. Here are 14 things you should know about the people who use your websites and applications.

1. They’re Smarter Than You Think

They just don’t care about learning your system. It doesn’t matter to them.

It can be so easy to forget how little everyone outside the tech industry depends on personal tech the way we all do. Unless technology makes itself necessary to people’s lives, they can pretty well get by without it. Even when technology is vital to their work, they can often get by learning only the parts of it they need. So they do.

2. They Have Other Things To Do

The goal of most users is not to spend all their time on a website. It’s to get off a website.

The good designers know this—and they bake it into their products.

If Google were designed to keep users on its search site, they wouldn’t use it. Other search engines would be faster and less intrusive.

In most cases, you should focus on how to make your site or app the least time-intensive. The most convenient. The most worth using because it helps users move on with their lives rather than attempt to take them over.

3. They Have a “Doing Mode”

You know that thing everyone believes about users not being willing to read while using an app? There’s a reason for it.

They’re not in reading mode. They’re in doing mode. We all have it. We get on a mission to complete a task, and we go blind to what could help us complete it.

“Doing mode” has a massive benefit. It helps users ignore the distractions and obstacles that keep them from getting where they want to go. Imagine what driving would be like if you couldn’t ignore the distractions. Constantly scanning billboards, reading shop-front windows, glancing at the little poster-board signs spiked into the ground at intersections. You’d never make it home alive. It’s not a flaw that people read less while in doing mode. It’s a survival skill.

4. They “Satisfice”

Most of the time, people need only enough to get by. So they learn only that much. They might even learn to do something the wrong way. It doesn’t matter as long as they can still get what they need.

This is called satisficing. It’s a term promoted by Steve Krug in his seminal book on web usability Don’t Make Me Think.

Satisficing is just what it sounds like (a portmanteau of the words “satisfy” and “sacrifice”). And this, too, is a survival skill. There are not enough hours in the day, or in life, to become masters of all we touch.

Most things, we just need to learn enough to get by.

5. They Don’t Use Your Software The Way You Intended

No matter how much work you put into it, the first thing people do when you put out an app with any reasonable amount of complexity is they start using it in a way you didn’t anticipate.

Sometimes it’s a major drag. But then, sometimes it leads to an opportunity.

When early Twitter users wanted to reference another person, they preceded the other person’s username with the @ symbol. When they wanted to reference a particular subject that reached beyond their personal timelines, they used hashtags. Twitter hadn’t designed for either of these situations. Users just started doing what they wanted. Twitter followed by building in support for these two functions. Next thing you know, the whole world is talking to each other and discovering all sorts of topics they couldn’t possibly have tripped over previously.

Take it for what it is: a chance to see a design through someone else’s eye. To learn how other people interpret design elements when they don’t know what you know about web design.

6. They Rely On Patterns

Patterns help people learn how to work with a new app or site, how it might be set up, and how long it might take.

Buy a product on one department store website, and you know how most of the others work. The experiences are similar, if not nearly identical, on most ecommerce sites because the pattern works well for the use case and because it helps people form expectations.

The ability to spot and use patterns also sets the stage for the elements in a design that stand out. The important elements, like buttons that tell you how to sign up, or send, or save, or publish. In a tremendous number of cases, the buttons that trigger these actions are displayed in a different color or shape (or both) compared with all the others.

When we can see patterns, we see what breaks those patterns.

7. A Million Things Are Competing For Their Attention

Right now, as you read this article, you probably have a whole bunch of other things competing for your attention. All the more reason for a design has to have an impeccable sense of what the user wants to accomplish.

A clear, deliberate, one-step-at-a-time process in a task flow is vital. Forcing people to serialize (instead of multitask) can help them be more productive in your app. The more the user is able to move forward, the better. It increases the odds he or she will be able to finish a task without wandering off to do something else.

8. They See What’s There

There’s a big difference between what you think you’ve put onto a screen and what the user thinks you’ve put onto a screen. And between you and the user, only one of your two perceptions matters.

The effect is a communication gap. You meant this. The user thought you meant that—mostly because that is what you actually put on the screen.

It’s a classic problem. When you know a lot about the web and are designing for it, you bring a ton of information about it with you into the project. Only the user doesn’t have any idea why this element exists or does what it does. And the user doesn’t have the benefit of having you stand over his shoulder to explain it.

Users see what’s actually there. Not what you think is there.

9. They Lie

People seem to know themselves pretty well when being asked hypothetical questions. And yet when they’re actually in a situation, they’ll do something completely different.

It’s not because they want to lie to you. They just can’t help themselves. It takes a great deal of self-awareness to know how you’d actually act in a given situation, and few people have a great deal of that.

This is just one of the ways they lie. Here are a few others:

• During a usability test, testers will rate a task as having been very easy after spending five minutes figuring it out.
• In a survey, they’ll say they’d use something when they wouldn’t. (They just won’t know that until they get their hands on the new feature.)
• In person, they’ll tell you they’re “web savvy,” and then fumble around the computer screen for minutes on end attempting to do things you take for granted every single day.

The list goes on. These are just a few that may be relevant to your design effort.

10. They Don’t Know What’s Possible

Very few tech users are also designers. When they tell you how they’d like something to work, it’s usually according to their worldview—a fix that would make their problem slightly less annoying, but not one that fundamentally erases the problem’s causes.

When users look at an app, they are doing so with the appropriately narrow perspective of how they use it. So they have a hard time articulating what they really need or want an application to do to solve a problem for them. They don’t know how to fix the problem—they just know they want it fixed. So they make suggestions.

Your job is to take them with a grain of salt. Read between the lines. See what’s really causing their issue.

11. If You Improve Their Lives, They’ll Love You

People shift to new technology or processes when those things obviously improve their lives. The “cost of switching” has to be indisputably worth the effort. If it’s not, there will be no voluntary switching.

Most people want to be shown how the new way is better. If you solve a real problem, and you can demonstrate how to do it, your users will love you.

In the best of cases, the solution is self-evident. In some cases, however, users need a review of the solution, an email newsletter explaining it, or a short video on your website.

If the solution isn’t really a solution, no one will care what your rationale was; they’ll just want to go back to the way things were. You might even find yourself actively defending your decisions.

12. They Come With Questions

Anytime users come across a new web app, they come with a series of questions that need to be answered right away. If these questions aren’t answered, there’s a solid chance they’ll take off. This is because of the very human need to get oriented.

They start by trying to make sense of what the app does. You can address this right away with some sort of value proposition statement that answers the question.

“We make planning your day as easy as saying Hello.”

That explains the app’s major purpose. It also begins to answer the user’s second question: How does it help me?

Next, the user wants to know how hard this app is to set up and learn. You can address this through a small series of graphics that show a short sign-up form, a stick figure speaking into a smartphone, and a completed to-do list, each with a few words explaining how easy it all is.

When all the benefits start to look appetizing, the user wants to know how much the product costs. If you have tiers or subscription pricing, or anything else that needs some qualifying, you can throw this on a pricing page. If it’s a quick and easy answer, you can put it right there next to the value proposition.

Then all you have to do is show them how to get started.

They come with questions. Your job is to deliver answers that turn them into customers. You just have to consider what questions they might ask.

13. They Blame Themselves for Mistakes When It’s Your Fault

When designers have problems with an interface, they blame its designers. When people have problems, they blame themselves.

They think they’re not smart enough to use the app. They say they didn’t get enough sleep to understand it. They say it’s too advanced for them.

Is this a good user experience? No. It’s a bad user experience hidden by the fact that everyone having it is blaming the wrong person.

A lack of complaints doesn’t mean there aren’t any. It means you may not be hearing them.

14. Their User “Experience” Is Based On Far More Than Your Website

UX is the net sum of all the interactions and impressions and feelings a person has with a website, digital product, or service.

Their impressions of your design are affected by a lot more than just your design. They’re affected by the company’s reputation, if they know what it is. They’re affected by what other people have said about the company or product, whether negative, positive, or undecided. They’re affected by what it looks like, and how they’ve felt in the past about other things that looked similar to it. They’re affected by how they feel that day and how open they are to this new product at the moment they encounter it. They’re affected by how well they can learn it, what they might get out of it, how frustrated they’ve been by other products that have failed to do what they promised.
You name it; it has an impact on a user’s experience.

This article was adapted with permission from Experience Required. Cover photo from SFIO CRACHO via Shutterstock.

Written by: Robert Hoekman, Jr., Fast Company
Posted by: Situated Research

The post UX Reality Check: 14 Hard Truths About Users appeared first on Situated Research.