Blog Post

3 Crucial Attitude Adjustments For Better User-Experience Design

  • By Mark Baker
  • 18 Jun, 2015

In theory, companies should value user experience design (UX design) in their websites as much as they value lead generation. Unfortunately, that's not always the case. Somewhere in the online world, there is a digital landfill with mountains of broken links, slow-loading pages, and confusing website designs that have sent potential customers running from the site instead of exploring it.

The following three strategies will help you create a website that encourages users to stay, instead of frustrating them and causing them to leave.

1. A LESSON FROM NETFLIX'S UX: TRY HARD TO UNDERSTAND THE PREFERENCES OF YOUR USERS.

Netflix's past UX changes demonstrate the right kind of UX mindset, which involves two crucial steps:

1) Maintain an awareness of what your customers want in their browsing experience.

2) Build around that preferred UX. Don't make your customers adjust to your preferences. Rather, you should adjust your site to their preferences.

Starting in 2011, Netflix used a carousel system to view movie options. Not only was it slow, but it even caused some people to experience motion sickness or eye strain as they cycled through the titles, as noted in this 2011 article documenting backlash from users.

It got so bad that users created a coding hack to redesign the Netflix UX themselves. As Inquisitr.com noted: "Earlier this year a hack called God Mode was released by some unhappy Netflix customers and it allowed users to view the entire genre at one shot, according to Tech Chrunch."

In response, Netflix released a new design in June 2015 that responded to their customers' UX concerns. The new UX, among other things, featured larger thumbnails with more information and more browsing options. But the company should have pinpointed the dissatisfaction long before it got to the point where users were coding their own solutions to compensate for the poorly designed UX. No one should have to resort to such extremes with your site.

2. A LESSON FROM BANKS: PUT EMOTION INTO YOUR UX.

If you've ever left your bank's website with a feeling of dissatisfaction—that kind of feeling you get when you've been handled by an institution who sees you more as a number than a person—you are not alone. In fact, TheFinancialBrand.com devoted an entire article to the subject, detailing the crisis of bank-customer relationships.

Although you may not be in the financial industry, your business can learn something crucial from their problem, as noted by TheFinancialBrand.com: "What the banking industry needs to do, more than anything, is to allow the UX teams to return to the roots of making sure we stop thinking features and again think about consumers’ emotional relationship with their money."

Simply substitute "money" with whatever need your service fulfills for your customers. It never hurts to ask the question, "What kind of emotional relationship do my customers have with my product, and how can I design my UX to acknowledge that relationship and make it a positive one?"

3. USER TESTING: WHY UX TEAMS SHOULD EMBRACE FAILURE

Figuring out exactly how to fit your UX around the preferences and emotional relationships of your users is easier said than done. The goal is to understand the emotional arch—the story that unfolds for each user—with every click through the website. But the complexity involved can easily overwhelm any UX team.

However, there is a saving grace: user testing. And this is where many successful UX designs have found their path through the maze.

As CreativeBloq.com explains:

...we now have a tool that can guide our creative process—user testing. You can create fast and cheap prototype experiences so you can tell first-hand whether the drama is being built in the way that you expected...Each of our creative decisions is informed by real-life information of how people respond to the story. We're not expecting to get it right the first or even the tenth time.

That's the real beauty of user testing. It provides a safety net for failure so that you can glean helpful data from each misfire of your UX journey.

Contact us for help in achieving a powerful and effective UX-design process that builds itself around your users.

Mark Baker

Mark Baker is a natural artist. Since starting his first business hand painting graphics onto vehicles in high school, Mark gained experience in the entertainment, sports, and retail industries before founding this company in 1993. Honest and pragmatic, Mark knows that anything can be accomplished with a great communication plan and creative thinking. 

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