Creating groundbreaking User Experiences in your products

In the world of designs, there is nothing like designing a User Experience. Building an amazing UX is a display of pure skill, effort and understanding of the product and the world. Designing a user experience is like charting the most efficient path from a problem to a solution, but it doesn’t stop there.

The journey of a UX designer never ends because there are always new, more efficient paths that remain uncharted.

More than that, how does one judge if a UX is great? How does one differentiate between a good UX and a great UX? Megha Kumari, head of design at GeekyAnts has this to say:

“It’s different for an app to look beautiful. What really matters is how useful it is and how efficiently it solves the problem it was built to solve. One that does that is a great UX.”

This is perhaps one of the best descriptions of what a UX should be. We’ll dive in deeper into this later, but first, let us take a look at what the process of developing a UX looks like/should look like.

Developing A Great UX:

We, at GeekyAnts, have built experiences from the ground up for countless clients. In our experience, every product has a different requirement and needs to be understood first.

Combining all the knowledge that we have gained from working on building UX and catering to clients, we’ve been able to boil the entire process of building UX down into 5 comprehensive steps:

1. Research: Understand the product that you’re building. Survey the market for similar products. Find out the reasons why some products are popular and others aren’t. Understand the user base. Prepare questionnaires and talk to your clients and make a clear picture of what they’re trying to achieve with the product. Identify plus points and pain points of the product.
2. Storyboarding: Create rough drawings to chart out different possible ways a user can reach from a problem point to a solution point. Create multiple illustrations of user journeys from all possible perspectives.
3. Wireframes: Based on storyboards, create wireframes of low fidelity and high fidelity, outlining layouts and buttons and specify the reasons behind each element on screen.
4. Prototyping: Create prototypes of user journeys in the form of a UX. Define the product, the problem and its solution. Make your goals clear and iterate.
5. Testing & Feedback: Opt for the A/B testing method. With multiple prototypes ready, divide them amongst groups of people and let them use it. Observe behaviours, responses and feedback to judge efficiency of each. Fall back on those feedbacks and re-iterate.

We have been using these methods to create UX for our customers and they’ve been satisfied with the results. They should help you get started but are they all enough to create unforgettable experiences? As designers, we want our creations to be satisfying, but how can we be sure that they are?

Success of a UX:

The science of designing UX runs far deeper than this. Once your UX is out there, you need to know if it is serving the purpose it was built to serve, helping users use the product in the most efficient fashion possible and if it is worth the investment.

To oversimplify, is your UX successful?

To determine success, you need data. To get data, you need to identify metrics that you need to track. According to us, there are 4 important metrics that need to be kept in mind when building a UX:

• The objectives of the product under question.
• The users that the product is designed for.
• The intended use cases of the product.
• User satisfaction.

Careful evaluation of these metrics can help you determine how ‘usable’ your UX is. What Megha quoted above is the definition of ‘usability’. Usability is important to measure because it leads to retention, If people have difficult experiences, they look for easier ones. That’s the psychology. Attempts should be made to ease the journey of a user through the product, without compromising on efficiency of the overall performance, in turn increasing usability, which translates into the UX being ‘successful’.

Business Dependency:

Contrary to popular belief, business is 100% dependent on the UX of a product. As much as it is about understanding the end-user, it is more about understanding the product. As important as a user-base of an app is, it is still a variable in terms of age, usage experience, background et cetera.

“You cannot define the product for the user. You need to define the user-type for the product”

As designers, we also believe in looking out for the product owner. It is very important for us, as design service providers, to consider the product owner and his/her background. As an example, say a client is building a news app, which has no scope for monetization. It is the job of the UX designer to predict possible scenarios to make the product beneficial for the owner as well. In this particular case, the UX designer must look for places to post advertisements which may become a possible source of income for the product owner.

There are ways to quantify user experiences as well. It is interesting to see how Business Frameworks can work for UX just as well:

The AARRR Framework:

The AARRR framework is a device created to monitor a customer’s life cycle with a company. For designers, it allows them to track the following:

• Acquisition: Sources from which new users reach the product.
• Activation: Thefirst experience with the product and satisfaction level.
• Retention: How many users return to the product?
• Referral: Is the product likeable enough for recommendations?
• Revenue: Can user actions and behaviour be monetized?

The RARRA Framework:

The RARRA framework is identical to the AARRR framework , but is used for scenarios where retention of a customer base is prioritized over acquisition. This helps design engagement based products better than task based products.

Google’s HEART:

Google dipped its feet in these waters and came up with their own framework to measure product feature success. It focuses on user-focused metrics which are:

• Happiness: Satisfaction of a customer with the product.
• Engagement: The amount of interactions a user has with the product.
• Adoption: Time based observation of new users obtained by a product.
• Retention: Time based observation of returning users against new users.
• Task Success; The percentage of users that are able to successfully complete tasks in the product.

Summary:

To summarise:

• Building great user experiences is less about the look and feel and more about the consumer journey. Always solve the problem.
• The success of a UX is directly proportional to the success of the product.
• Engagement > Looks, but don’t forget about aesthetics. A good looking app that feels good too is always a big hit.
• Great UX translates into business directly.
• There are tools to measure the usability of your UX. Use them to understand the interaction between the UX and the users better.
• Be mindful about product owners as well. Create UX which caters to their needs too.

Closure:

Being aware of the impact that your UX makes in the market makes all the difference in the world. It is the key to revealing the positives, the negatives and the means to bridge gaps between products and users to truly deliver a satisfying experience.

Metrics are a great way to create this awareness and become strategic in your approach to create some truly unforgettable product journeys. Use them in the right context and not only will you see products perform better but your growth as a designer too.