What is User Experience (UX)?
User experience (UX or UE) is how a user interacts and experiences a product, system, or service. This includes perceptions of ease of use, utility, and efficiency.
For most companies, designers, and creators, it is important to improve the user experience, motivated because if it is negative, it can decrease the use of the product or service and, as a consequence, any desired positive impression.
Why is User Experience important?
When you are part of the marketing business, and you want to attract customers through a product, a website, or a service, the user experience is very important.
When we talk about user experience as the total experience, a good user experience increases ROI greatly because quite a few small improvements add up to a great impression. You can name a few of its benefits: a good user experience leads to better customer retention, more customer referrals, additional repeat customers, higher audience credibility, and better conversion rates. When you invest in user experience, you lower your development costs and lower your business expenses in the future.
Some studies show show the following data:
- If the content is not optimized, about 79% percent of visitors will leave the website and look elsewhere.
- Users of phones or mobile devices are much more likely to leave a page if the website is not optimized for their device; of these users, two-thirds are looking to make a purchase that day, so it is not convenient for them to leave.
- After listening to the community and incorporating their suggestions into the redesign of the home page, ESPN’s revenue increased by about 35%.
- After a bad experience on a website, around 88% of users are less likely to return.
- According to information provided by the Adobe company, 39% of users abandon the interaction with a website if the images take a long time to load or do not load.
- A study reported that a good user interface could increase a website’s conversion rate by up to 200%, while a better user experience design could increase conversion rates by up to 400 %.
- Google has indicated that user experience is a factor in the ranking of search engines since they aspire to offer results that customers want to reach so that a greater number of people use the search engine.
How to measure the User Experience?
The definition of usability metrics is different from one product to another, but the criteria for creating them are always the same: what does the user feel when they interact with the product or service? The management of these metrics should not be delegated to the user. Rather it should be measured by the test team while testing with end-users with parameters and questions that users can fully understand.
The function of these metrics is invariably to achieve a better user experience in the products or services that are created, not to excuse production decisions.
Nowadays, there are many methods of creating software products that focus on achieving certain qualifications aimed exclusively at the characteristics of a product: that it is fast, that it works well, that its cost is low, that it is easy to update, or that it goes to market on time.
The perspective of the design thinking of the user changes the vision towards the users of the product, and currently, having a good product is no longer enough to be successful. It is necessary to create products and services that users want to use because it is easy and enjoyable to use.
You must minimize doubts by studying defined metrics to understand what happens when a user interacts with a product or service.
There are several types of user experience metrics:
- Objective metrics are components that include numbers to track and cross-check, such as the time the task took, the success rate, or the number of user errors.
- On the other hand, subjective metrics can give data on a user’s feeling about the experience when browsing a website. They may include user-friendliness or satisfaction ratings.
- Qualitative metrics assess the quality of the user experience on the site and include satisfaction, recommendations, and ratings.
- Behavioral metrics indicate numerically how users interact with a website during a visit.
Among the aspects that can help measure the user experience are the following:
- Measure user interaction using forms.
- Carry out usability tests.
- Track time-on-page and page views.
- Do customer success surveys.
- Lean on the customer service team.
- Measure the page loading speed.
How to achieve a good User Experience?
- Products should be built with the user in mind: it may be obvious, but sometimes it is easy to forget who uses the product, service, website, or application. Something may be beautiful, but that does not mean that it is of any use to the user.
- You must know the users. Ignore people. Organize users by the way they behave on the website or with an application.
- There are times when less is more. Some free space should be kept to be able to maneuver if necessary.
- Seek input from all departments of the company. Sales, marketing, technology, and design teams will think a little differently about the product, website, or app.