What is a User Experience?
Have you ever said:
“Geez, this website is taking forever to load!”
“What does the (drive-thru) menu say? I can barely read it.”
These are examples of bad user experiences. As designers, it is important to ensure that the users of our designs have positive experiences when engaging with them. If they don’t, it can cheapen the appearance of a brand.
A user experience is a small portion of a customer’s journey with a product or company. These small experiences can make or break the view of the product/company.
So how can you, as a designer become more aware of integrating user experience (UX) into your work and how? What can you, as a business owner, do to ensure your customers are receiving the best experience?
First, let’s understand UX design.
You can’t not have an experience.
Experiences can come in a wide range of types and sizes. Some are small and you won’t really notice while others are larger.
Some of these may be a child getting a sticker at the doctors, customer service, packaging, the product itself, the product instructions, a website, an app, a company office, business cards, and a whole lot more.
We have experiences in everything we do, and they aren’t always positive. But when we do have a positive experience, we often subconsciously remember it and will be more inclined to return to where that experience took place.
Someone once said, “Good UX design often goes unnoticed, as it is working properly and causes no issues for the user. Bad design is always pointed out and noticed.”
Let’s get into some positive examples
A major aspect of UX design is the accessibility of the designs. Take Starbuck’s drive-thru sign language ability.
A few years ago, a YouTube video was going viral about how Starbucks was signing through the drive-thru dash with a deaf customer. This showed that Starbucks thought about all of their customer’s experiences with them.
Having the drive-thru being deaf accessible is an amazing experience that will stick with this woman, as she now knows, “I can come back here and not have to worry about if I can get a drink or not.”
How about,
The ease of navigating an app or website. We are all too familiar with websites where you are unsure of how to get anywhere or do anything. A good site has easy navigation. It’s a site that you will always want to come back to. A website should be intuitive, informative, and functional.
Duolingo is a great example of a website with a good user experience. The site uses a minimal design approach, has an easy sign-up, and allows the ability for personalization. There is no question of, “How do I do XYZ?”
What’s a negative experience?
We have all gone to a website that we couldn’t find anything in or hated visiting, maybe a website like, Craigslist.
Craigslist’s site is hard to read in both contrast and size, visually busy, and is not responsive.
Having a responsive site allows for easy navigation and reading on a phone or tablet. Since Craigslist doesn’t do this, it forces people to try to zoom in and find what they can’t see.
This video shows how Craiglist looks on different sized screens.
The blue type is uncomfortable to read, due to its poor contrast. In the video below I used a color-blind simulator, called Colorblindly, to have an idea of how people who are color-blind view a site.
If you look at the “event calendar” and the “new” in the side navigation you can watch how its contrast changes and how poor, it can become. This can cause users to avoid Craigslist since it’s too hard to use.
Marion, a marketing and design company, beautifully discusses six more bad UX aspects of a website or app (check it out).
How to ensure you think about UX in your designs?
Never assume.
When we assume, we avoid major points and design opportunities. When we assume, we ignore issues that may lie within our designs that could cause offense, struggle, or be inaccessible.
Insert it into your process and always ask yourself, and others:
Is this working?
Do the users understand this as I do? Is it intuitive?
Does this fit my target audience? Should I test this?
Testing is a key aspect of ensuring a positive user experience. By testing, you will be able to discover if your designs function properly. It also allows for discoveries along the way of development rather than at the end when it is out in the world. These discoveries can show you that the colors chosen aren’t conveying the proper tone or that the navigation on that app doesn’t open.
As a business owner,
Some ways you can ensure your customers are having their best experience possible could be as simple as a survey. Ask how their experience was for firsthand input.
Or hire a UX designer, to go through your company, website, pamphlet, etc. to help discover where any issues may lie and design solutions for those problems.
Go through the experience yourself, do you find any problems?
We live in a world of experiences;
it is important that our designs leave positive impressions and be remembered. Test your designs along the way, ask yourself questions about their functionality, and assume nothing.
