You Will Adapt Your User Interfaces to Service Us! The Benefits of UI Adaptation for User Satisfacti
- gingferbadeticno
- Aug 20, 2023
- 6 min read
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You Will Adapt Your User Interfaces to Service Us!
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When we work based on assumptions or just our own experiences, we often fail to notice what the user experience could be like for other people; specifically our users. This means we can easily miss opportunities to improve our service or product to meet their needs.
By researching first, we save ourselves a lot of work, time, money, and resources further down the line, as fewer adjustments will need to be made. If we designed first and then researched after, we would have to incorporate huge changes into our designs to meet the needs of the users whom we have spoken to.
A user interview is an in-depth one-on-one discussion between an interviewer and a user from the target demographic. It is designed to discover the underlying needs and requirements of the user when using your product.
A user interview can also be conducted while a user interacts with your product; the interviewer can ask questions which reveal precisely what the user is thinking as they navigate. Ask your users about the problems they generally have with this kind of service and where their greatest pain points are.
We will discuss user testing in more detail in the Testing section, but bear in mind that if you are improving a pre-existing product (rather than researching for a new design), user testing can be a valuable research resource to uncover where users are struggling with that product.
Designing a satisfying user experience involves meticulously planning a customer journey for the users and helping them find what they are looking for through an intuitive process. Customers will follow a certain process/journey anyway when they are performing an action based on their previous experiences with other products. Your job as a UX designer is to think about how your product/service can accommodate how the customer already behaves.
The design of your product revolves around functionality and usability, rather than colors or pictures (these are established later by a visual designer). Having established during your user research what your users expect from your product or site, what their goals are and how they like to operate a system, it is functionality and usability that always come first.
Organizing the hierarchy of the content on your site can be done in multiple ways. This leads us to another important UX method: Card Sorting. In a card sorting session, users organize topics from content within your website into groups that make sense to them. They then need to label each group in a way they feel accurately describes the content. This can be done using actual cards, pieces of paper, or one of several online card-sorting software tools.
When you have finished constructing your wireframes you will have a visual representation of how your site might look in accordance with the results of the user research you have already undertaken. Your wireframes will focus on the location of content, images, buttons, and other interactive elements on the page.
With the use of the prototype, the intention behind different features becomes clear, and the UX team is able to see how the overall design will work together and repair any inconsistencies or errors. By building a prototype of your design before further development, the UX team makes a number of savings, in terms of both cost and time.
Looking at the results of the user survey you did in the previous section and the brief you created with our brief builder, try your hand at drawing your first wireframe. Use our Guide To Drawing Your First Wireframe for additional guidance.
However, testing is not something you can afford to bypass, as even a simple round of testing could make or break your product idea. The time and money a company spends on testing at this stage will save infinite amounts of both later on. Despite what you may think, testing need not be either time-consuming or expensive. Not only that, but research has found that testing with 5 users generally unveils 85% of usability problems.
Testing your product need not be a complicated process. User testing can be as simple as making paper prototypes or drawing whiteboard sketches to demonstrate your product to your potential users. You can repeatedly test using these simple methods until an acceptable solution to an obstacle has been found. You can also use your prototypes to test out more interactive elements on users.
Remember the earlier you test, the easier it is to make changes and thus the greater impact the testing has on the eventual quality of the product. While user testing, in the above sense, can give you the deepest understanding of problems, and thus also the most valuable solutions, there are also other modes of testing, such as remote user testing and A/B testing, that have their own places in a given project. We will go into these two types of testing in more detail later.
The idea is for participants (preferably in your target demographic or representative of your personas) to perform tasks using your product, site, app, or SAAS while the UX designer or the UX design team observes. The purpose of in-person usability testing is to identify problems or issues the user has with the interface and why these issues arise.
It might be worth inviting the whole team to user testing to observe how the user responds to the product. Having the opportunity to observe the user will help the whole team understand the usability problems and to empathize (that word again!) with the user. So as not to distract the user, webcams, screen sharing, and microphones can be used.
The benefit of remote user testing is that users are interacting with your product in an environment that is already familiar to them (e.g. their home or office). This takes away the potential layer of anxiety or uncertainty when visiting somewhere new, which might otherwise affect results.
Within a start-up, a UX designer can be responsible for every part of every process, due to small budgets, small teams, and limited resources. At a start-up, a UXer (you can call yourself that) is likely to oversee a project from beginning to end and actively take on separate processes including user research, testing, and design all by themselves.
Despite the lack of recognition, you will still get the rewarding feeling of having created such a useful, usable, and delightful product for your users while meeting the goals of your business.
Whether at a startup or large corporation, you will be working intimately with developers to reach your end goal for a project. The developers will be working to transform your design ideas into a real, working website; how you approach this relationship will determine the success or failure of your project.
The reality is users love change and it is our responsibility as designers to provide them with experiences that allow them to learn and adapt. The best way to fulfil these needs is by regularly releasing major product redesigns. In what follows, we discuss benefits of frequent major redesigns, how often you should redesign, and what areas to change.
Easter eggs are an instance of gamification. There is endless inspiration that can be used from that domain. For instance, you may consider asking people to solve a puzzle before accessing a page and vary the puzzle every day. Such fun, unexpected interactions increase user excitement. Using the same system repeatedly can cause users to get bored and seek change. Keep users interested in your interface by hiding Easter eggs and other small game-like elements throughout (and frequently changing their placement or design) so users never get bored.
There are pros and cons to each, but generally speaking, the more custom your design-system solution is, the more time and money it will take to implement. Thus, using an existing design system is the lowest-cost approach and requires the least time to implement. (It will, still, need more time than if you continue design as usual, however, because you will have to either replace or update some UI elements and agree upon a standard).
Investment in a custom design system will be worth it if the organization has particular needs that cannot be met by open-source design systems. As customizations and adjustments to the design system increase, the cost savings you may have gained from using the existing design system will diminish, and, in the long run, you may be better off creating your own design system anyway. Be sure you know what your organization needs before you embark on design system endeavors and evaluate the tradeoffs.
Last, for a proof of concept or an initial prototype which is likely to change, creating a full-fledged design system is probably not going to generate a desirable ROI in the near term. The benefit, after all, is the replicability of design, which is in the future. Though it may be tempting to establish these from the outset, keep in mind that a design system should not be thought of as a portfolio of work, but rather as a functional toolkit or resource for designers and developers to work more quickly. That said, if you are doubting the usefulness of a design system, it might be worth considering the timescale you will use to evaluate your design work. Design systems are best when the company foresees years of future, replicable design work. 2ff7e9595c
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