User Experience
User Experience1 encompasses all the disciplines that aim to positively impact a customer interaction with a product. From a business point of view, its main goal is to improve the customer satisfaction and to increase sales. From a customer point of view, it helps to design a product that is simple to use and to understand. But it also has many more benefits.
User Experience is a very specific aspect of the Customer Experience field, which is the sum of all the experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods or services over the duration of their relationship. As such, it solely focuses on making a customer experience with a product engaging, easy and memorable.
Think a moment about Apple. Every Apple's product – from the Mac to the IPhone – has been conceived with the user in mind. And each time, it was a success story.
This practice is becoming more and more common with the emergence of rich internet applications, i.e. web applications that have the features, the look and feel and the responsiveness of traditional desktop applications.
User Experience is really about building a product that meets the needs and expectations of the customer. It relates to copywriting, usability, information architecture, visual design, interaction design and several other facets.
Embracing a user-centred design process is very valuable. And as competition is more and more intense over Internet, it is also a mean of setting a company apart. In fact, today, User Experience is vital to the success of a product.
Benefits
There are several benefits from implementing a strategy to enhance the user experience:
- Increasing quality and efficiency of the product by providing the customers with a product optimized for the most frequent and important tasks.
- Retaining customers by improving the user satisfaction and loyalty: if the product is perceived as really valuable, customer will keep using it.
- Gaining new customers thanks to better conversion rates: for example, optimizing the user flow and the sign up form can maximize the completion rate of a registration process.
- Reducing costs by minimizing support: if the product is easy to use and to understand, it will generates less calls from customers.
How can I help?
If you are a startup looking to build a web application that delights your customers, I can assist you in the two following areas:
Footnotes
- User Experience is often abbreviated UX or UE.