User experience (UX) involves everything a person does when interacting with a website or an app. UX is crucial for any business with an online presence as its quality inevitably affects sales, customer conversion and retention, and other things related to a company’s success and revenue. That is, the end-user has to be at the center of a digital product’s UX design. Every designer trying to come up with a great user experience for the end-user must set specific goals before embarking on this complex task.
If you don’t have a UX department in your company, but you still have a project set for launch, you should consider hiring a UX design agency. The market has quite a few spectacular design agencies that make sure each delivered design meets a particular audience’s needs and provides them with an outstanding user experience. By hiring a UX agency, you get access to the great talent that will be focused on your project only until it’s finally completed and delivered to you.
When choosing a UX agency, you should pay attention to the information you get from your prospective candidates. There are things and concepts that each UX design company has to understand and execute in their work since, otherwise, they won’t be able to create quality designs. It also has to do with the goals designers should set for themselves when trying to implement good UX practices into a project.
Let’s take a look at the most crucial of these UX goals.
Goal #1. Customer Satisfaction
Creating a user experience that is simple, natural, and pleasant for the end-user and allows them to make whatever interaction they want to accomplish in an app or on a website is an essential part of customer satisfaction. It is a straight path to repeat visits and uses. When people interact with a product or service, they want to get a solution to their needs or problems. Therefore, if a user feels that they are not getting what they want from it, they will soon leave your site or app and look for another option.
Increasing customer satisfaction has to be the primary goal of the UX design process. It’s necessary that when a user ends their session in a digital product or service, they have to feel satisfied with the achievement of their goals or receipt of solutions to their problems. This feeling is pivotal for customer satisfaction metrics and, subsequently, for customer loyalty.
Goal #2. Clear Language
No one wants to spend even a split second on a website or in an application that isn’t clear in terms of the language used in it. The terminology used in a digital product has to be concise, precise, and clear.
Using short sentences, don’t overload them with complicated terminology (except for cases, when it’s necessary) is a way to go. Filling a digital product with the explicit text content will make users spend more time using it if they see that its language is correct and understandable. At the same time, if users will have to resort to looking up words in a dictionary, they will most probably close your website or app very quickly and head to look for an alternative.
UX designers will spend a reasonable amount of time using UX tools, making sure that everything is clear and responds to the needs of your particular audience. Your marketing department can be of great help in letting the design team understand what your customers need in terms of textual content.
Goal #3. Factual Feedback
Valuable feedback that confirms successful interaction, completion, or provides useful information in case of errors is a must. If a user visits a website or uses an app to make a purchase or order services, they want to make sure everything is going fine before making a transaction. If you’re going to provide your customers with excellent user experience concerning this interaction, your product or service should be able to provide informative feedback to their actions.
Users should always receive feedback right on time before they start getting impatient. Let’s say a website visitor wants to get some guidance on navigation through it – it should be available to them in some obvious way and provided right away. Otherwise, they might decide that they won’t get the needed solution on your site and leave to look for a better one. Timely provision of informative feedback to users ensures better client conversion, sales growth, better brand awareness, and customer loyalty. So, make sure your UX agency sees eye to eye with you on this matter.
Goal #4. Consistency
Consistency is a mutual effort – not only that of the UX agency you hire but also your marketing and development departments. While the agency will perform thorough research of your audience, market niche, business mission, and objectives, it’s still essential that you collaborate with the design team and stay in touch throughout the entire process. All the features of your digital product should be in a perfect match with your business’s mission and goals.
The features on your site or app must be predictable and expected. People love to know what they’ll get if they press this button or that link. If something is too unpredictable – and it’s not about being creative. Still, some things leading to the things they shouldn’t lead to – users may consider your product or service unreliable and, hence, move on to other solutions.
The goal is to make sure that all of the digital product’s features are convenient and simple to use and navigate through. Consistency is one of the guaranteed ways of providing audiences with a great user experience that ensures higher sales and a more significant ROI. UX agencies conduct multiple usability tests throughout the design process, including paper prototypes and user testing. Agencies make sure everything is in place, and users will enjoy using the product, no matter how simple or complex it may be in its entirety.
Goal #5. Pleasure of Use
Lots of digital products nowadays have somewhat similar functions. You can safely say that most of them can fulfill users’ needs to some degree. However, users favor just a small fraction of the countless websites, apps, and services. The thing is that not all of them provide the best user experience possible.
Think about mobile games. Let’s take Supercell’s Clash Royale, for example. It has a seemingly infinite amount of literal clones and variations, but only a tiny part of them has become somewhat successful. Companies create these copies around the same concept with almost complete cloning of the original game’s features. Their developers rarely give credit to how Clash Royale’s creators have achieved such success. Why do people keep playing the game, even though there’s nothing new in there? Why has it become a global phenomenon?
The answer is user experience. It’s excellent and enjoyable. People love using things that are pleasant to use. It is perhaps one of the hardest goals to achieve for a UX designer. It requires not just applying design skills and understanding of some basic notions about human behavior and user interactions but instead thinking out of the box while combining everything into one entity.
If you have a wholly disassembled Dodge Challenger in your backyard, how are you going to make it a fantastic roadster it should be? While you could thoroughly examine the assembly instruction and maybe get some assistance from a mechanic friend, if you don’t know how to do it correctly and aren’t creative enough to think it through to the very last screw, even the best of your results will be far from perfect.
And it’s pretty much the same with creating a digital product that would look and feel amazing, work properly, and have all the features in the right places, providing smooth and pleasant navigation. It is what UX agencies specialize in, and this is how they help their clients save on unnecessary fixes, at the very least.
Conclusion
Digital products that aren’t created with user experience in mind fail. That’s a fact. Even if your company isn’t a design company and you must hire UX professionals to take care of UX design matters, you should know some of the essential and most crucial things designers should aspire for when taking on such tasks.
Therefore, when you make a shortlist of UX design candidate agencies for your project, make sure to have an informal discussion on the subject of what goals they set for themselves during the UX design process. It will provide you with an idea of how well an agency understands its job and whether it suits you or not.