Knowing your product and comparing it against the competition, is where we begin. Standard heuristics are a general guide for evaluating the usability of a system, which can identify pain-points in a user experience. Gathering competitor statistics is crucial to understanding where other businesses have succeeded and failed in the market.
Research reports yield valuable insights that may lead to opportunities for growth and development. User testing is the only way to know if a product is useful. Screeners, questionnaires, empathy maps, affinity diagrams, and data graphs are some of the tools we use.
Patterns emerge from research data that elucidate specific user needs, attitudes, and behaviors. This information narrows down and defines what problems exists, and how might we go about solving them.
Personas are only as good as the quality of your research data. They inform site usability, uncover unmet needs and help guide decisions. Innovative opportunities emerge from the journeys that people share with us.
These scenarios enable us to better understand our user's perspective and serve as an instrument for interface design. With a solid structure, teams can stay focused on what is implementable at every phase of a project.
Initial investment in UX design can significantly reduce costs in the future. UX Design and Design Thinking involve research, analysis, and testing. Therefore, possible usability issues, or problems can be identified prior to development, which is far less expensive.
Key Performance Indicators (KPI) offer the best insights into how users interact with a product. This data is used to quickly determine the success of a product, and it measures the following:
1) Task success rate.
2) Time on task.
3) Search vs. Navigation
4) User error rate.
Some studies have shown that "stock" photos and other graphics add little value to a product. This is because most images are not customized to a particular application, nor are they contextualized to facilitate user needs.
Product design is typically regarded as ornamental and focused on making objects look good. In UX, product design revolves around structure and function, as it relates to the needs of users. The toolkit of a good user experience creative is strengthened by solid ethnographic research.
Often questions related to what usability is, as compared to desirability, are brought up in UX design and it is crucial to differentiate the two. A product may look good, but lack utility. Conversely, a product can be useful but lack desirability. The Neilson Norman Group concludes that there are four levels of user experience:
1) Utility - usefulness of a product.
2) Usability - efficiency, safety, memorability, learnability and satisfaction.
3) Desirability - the user wants to use a product in preference to another.
4) Brand Experience - does the customer feel good about the company.