Overview

Every day as a UX’er, you are tasked with the goal of creating great UX.

In a world bursting at the seams with new offerings, products, services, and distractions, your ultimate goal is to create a user experience that is unique, compelling, and drives continuous engagement.

Today, I want to share with you five steps that you can use to help take your product’s UX to the next level.

#1: Understand your user

This first step seems like common sense, like a “duh, of course you should understand your user,” but here’s the rub: common sense isn’t common practice.

I have seen more often than not that organizations jump into a brand new venture without ever even attempting to understand their user base.

• What do they like?
• What do they dislike?
• What is going to make them feel valid, or patronized?
• How do they generally think and operate?
• What language do they speak?
• Are there any cultural nuances that you need to know about?
• How do they feel right now, and how do they want to feel?

If you can’t answer these questions with relative certainty, you’re essentially flying blind.

You think you know who they are as people, but you don’t. That can absolutely come around to bite you later in the form of low engagement, poor reception, and inability to articulate the value of your product.

#2: Understand their pain

A user’s pain is the fulcrum around which we operate as UX designers.

It cannot be overstated: pain is the primary motivator that moves a user into action.

Don’t get me wrong, pleasure is a great suggestion, but pain is a demand!

This does not have to be extreme pain, nor does it have to be acute.

• It can be caused from years of grinding, grating, day-to-day things that they have become accustomed to and hate.
• It can come from one, specific thing that just irks the absolute hell out of a user, and makes their life harder.
• It can even be a mild annoyance that they are barely even notice, but that messes with their workflow.

All of these things are pain, and to understand a user’s pain, we have to understand several things:

• What is a user trying to do?
• What is their desired outcome(s)?
• How do they feel before, during, and after using their current method of solving their problem(s)?
• What in the process is causing them the most grief, affliction, and frustration?
• Where are their areas of avoidance? If you see users avoiding something, there’s a fair chance that area produces a high degree of pain.

All of these things combine to create a much clearer picture of what your user is going through within the context of them actually going through it.

What you are looking for here is to deeply understand and empathize with their pain on a deep level. Once you feel actively pissed off at what the user is having to deal with, you’re ready for step three.

#3: Create an oasis

Your users live in a desert of unfulfilled needs.

Think about it: every day, you yourself perform hundreds of actions, operations, and processes that help you get to where you want to go.

The problem is that the problem exists, and nearly all user problems are caused by an incongruity between how they want to feel and how they actually feel.

What you want to do is to create a situation in which their problems no longer exist. It’s not just that your product helps temporarily alleviate their pain, it works to neutralize the problem at the root and creates a situation in which the pain is gone.

Not numbed, not “taken care of for the moment,” I mean gone.

I liken this to creating an oasis because of several key factors:

• Oasis are rare.
• Oasis refresh and replenish.
• Oasis can make you forget that you’re in a desert.

Let’s look at each of these individually.

Oasis are rare

If you look across an entire desert, you will find maybe a handful of oasis, is you’re exceptionally lucky.

In the desert of your user’s unfulfilled needs, your job is to create such an oasis that they can find quickly, easily, and know that it’s not just a mirage.

This is done through consistent market messaging, demonstration of efficacy, content strategy, and information architecture.

Oasis refresh and replenish

Once your user is at your oasis, your next job is to make sure that they get refreshed and replenished.

This is done through on-boarding, getting immediate needs met to the best of your ability, and triaging any acute pain as fast as possible.

Bring them in out of the heat, help them with their bags, and get them comfortable.

Oasis can make you forget that you’re in a desert

The last, most important, and arguably more insidious aspect of oasis is that if you spend enough time at them, they can make you forget you’re in a desert.

Good solutions do the first two things here, but great solutions make a user forget their problem even existed in the first place.

Take 2-day shipping. Used to suck to have to wait 6–8 weeks for your package to arrive. Now, we both expect it and are disappointed when our package deliveries are out a couple weeks.

This is the money shot right here: you want to make the user forget that they ever had that problem in the first place.

#4: Give out free drinks

Alright, your user is here. They’re triaged, relaxed, and comfortable. What do you do now? How can you keep them happy here?

Simple: offer free drinks.

This is a tie-back to the whole idea of “cake now, cake later,” but essentially what you want to do is keep offering them variable rewards on a regular basis.

Give them things to look at, to interact with; things that appeal to what they want and the outcomes they are looking for.

On a shallow level, by and large, people are looking for:

• A light, approachable UI,
• Some toned down, soothing color combinations,
• Micro-interactions/transitions that are fun to look at,
• Additional information about getting their needs met, and
• Any little freebees that you’re willing to offer them while they attempt to emotionally justify a purchase with you.

Talk about it, have messaging about it; posts about it, likes about it, conversations about it, checklists about it, videos about it, and offer free samples of what a user can expect.

→ Did the just show up? Free drink.

→ Have they been here a minute? Free drink.

→ Are they about to leave? Free drink.

What you’re doing here is getting them comfortable with the brand promise behind the application, and driving a user experience that consistently leads your users to what they’re looking for.

#5: But always charge for food

Let me be clear about this one: food is not drinks. If drinks are passing fancies, food is absolutely jobs-to-be-done.

If your user has some specific needs that are a relatively heavy lift, you want to show them that your product is more than capable of doing it for them, and then some, but they need to pay for it.

Let me explain: if you don’t charge for your good food, how much can it really be worth?

So how do you go about charging for food?

There’s a couple of ways that are really great for quality UX:

1. Buy now, pay later.
2. Buy now, cancel whenever.

You gotta understand, price is only EVER an issue in the absence of value, and value is determined specifically by supply, demand, and pain.

Where there is significant pain, there is significant value, and anything you can do to lower the barrier between non-paying customer and paying customer is exactly what you want to do.

Make it easy to convert, compelling to convert, and necessary to convert, and users will convert.

This, in turn, leverages another effect.

“BUT WAIT,” I hear some people start to scream, “UX ISN’T ABOUT MAKING USERS PAY, IT’S ABOUT THEIR EXPERIENCE!!!”

Allow me to introduce you to one of the most POWERFUL drivers in UX:

The Endowment Effect

Whenever you have to pay money for something, you value it that much more and it creates a sense of ownership in you that you otherwise wouldn’t have.

It gives you skin in the game, makes you more likely to spend more with the product, AND makes you more likely to recommend the product to your friends.

It’s the same effect that makes more expensive medicines seem to work better than cheaper ones.

This effect, right here, is why you charge for your solution.

Charge for your outcomes, and people’s experience will automatically improve because they will use “logic” to back up their emotional purchase.

Bringing it all together

We covered a lot of ground, so let’s bring these all together into a cohesive set of steps:

1. Work to understand your users
2. Work to understand their pain
3. Create experiences that work to solve the root of their pain
4. Give users as much fun, free stuff as you can
5. But make sure you charge them for the actual solution.

All of these when used together can help you create a more effective, appealing, and satisfying user experience that will leave a lasting impression, and keep your users coming back for more.