2021 is a year dedicated to the customer.
Businesses are moving away from organizational-centric strategies and thinking more and more about the needs of their customers.
But what exactly do customers want?
Customers want their experience with brands and digital assets to be pleasant, simple, and seamless. In other words, they want the usability and the user experience to be easy, intuitive and if possible, emotionally rewarding
We’ve come up with 7 factors that influence usability and user experience.
The goal of this article is to present the 7 factors that influence usability and user experience and how your business can create an experience that contains all 7 factors.
1. Useful
The Internet is fast-paced and consumers don’t like to waste their time with brands and digital assets that don’t help them quickly achieve their goals.
Companies that produce useless content, products, and services will lose customers to businesses that provide intuitive and emotionally positive user experiences.
Amazon only provides useful product reviews for their customers.
Users rate the reviews as helpful or unhelpful. Amazon then ranks the reviews based on their helpfulness.
This is useful to customers because it avoids any irrelevant information and focuses only on the most relevant and helpful reviews without customers putting in any effort.
Bad Example: Sketch London
Sketch London recently renovated their website and decided to included a dancing egg animation on their homepage.
The egg makes a lot of noise and is essentially useless for website visitors.
How Can Your Business Design A Compelling User Experience?
Use comment sections to navigate the concerns and questions your customers ask. Address the concerns and questions and apply solutions.
2.Usable
Usability refers to how effectively and efficiently and intuitively users can reach the goal they are trying to achieve by using your product,service,website, etc.
Good Example: Hardgraft
Hardgraft designed their website effectively and efficiently by creating a product page that is ridiculously easy to navigate.
Their product page is completely image-based and is formatted in a simple grid style. Users simply have to click on an image to learn more.
Bad Example: Parking Signs in LA
Parking signs in Los Angeles are a great example of bad design.
There is a lot of information clustered into one area because in L.A. they have a lot of complex traffic rules.
The signs are difficult to read and understand for the user and thus lead to bad usability and a poor user experience.
How Can Your Business Design A Compelling User Experience?
The Userlytics remote user testing platform allows you to peek over the shoulders of participants as they interact with your websites and apps, prototypes, and/or competitor assets anywhere in the world, from their home or office.
This state of the art user testing platform provides picture-in-picture videos of user experience test participants in their home as they follow and answer pre-defined tasks and questions; what they see, who they are and what their context is.
The platform is designed for maximum user testing flexibility and scalability; you can assign different tasks and questions as a function of previous responses, thus creating highly advanced user testing test scripts with branching (“skipping”) logic.
By viewing and listening to participants while they attempt to achieve predefined goals using your product or service, and doing so in an iterative “Agile” manner,, you can uncover hidden usability issues and design a compelling user experience.
3. Findable
A findable user experience refers to a product being easy to find. In the case of digital and information products, the content must be easy to find.
Good Example: Burberry
Burberry goes beyond Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and includes WeChat and Line in their marketing channels.
Burberry communicates through Line and Wechat which are two interfaces widely used in the Asian communities. This allows Burberry to widen their reach while still expanding their demographic.
Burberry also uses Snapchat and Periscope to reach their customers, this automatically places them in an advantageous position for better communication.https://www.youtube.com/embed/G9zvkbKaY-4
How Can Your Business Design A Findable User Experience?
Find out where your customers are spending time and then make it so they can find your brand there.
For example, if your demographic is female millennials then Instagram is the platform for you! Instagram’s main age and gender demographic is female millennials.
4. Credible
Credibility refers to the ability for the consumer to trust your brand and the products/services that you provide.
Without trust, consumers will not buy any products or services from you.
Good Example: Fit2Fat2Fit
The creator and owner of Fit2Fat2Fat, a weight transformation program, Drew Manning, knows what it’s like to struggle with weight loss.
Drew shares his own weight struggle and transformation with pictures and motivational books to relay trust and confidence to his customers on the legitimacy of his programs.
“This is my story of how I plan on going from being obsessed with being fit, to fat in 6 months and how I plan on showing everyone how to get back to fit again in 6 more months.” – Drew Manning
Bad Example: Toyota
Toyota has faced numerous recalls in past years.
According to Edmunds.com, “Over 34 million vehicles in the United States and many million more worldwide are involved in Takata airbag recalls, which have occurred as far back as 2014.”
Toyota stumbled and not create a trustworthy product and therefore made it more difficult to trust their products.
How Can Your Business Design A Credible User Experience?
Include customer testimonials on your website to give your product or service some credibility.
A great way to get unique, fun and creative customer testimonials is to create various contests where past customers send a video of themselves using your product, a short clip of why they love to use it, and why they chose your brand or product.
The most creative video wins a prize and you get free content for your website!
5. Desirable
Desirability refers to how much your product or service is sought after.
Desire is created around design, emotional design, branding, image, company lifestyle, and aesthetics.
Good Example: Apple
Apple is the poster-child of desire.
They’ve designed a brand that has hard-core followers who wouldn’t use a PC if it was offered to them for free.
Apple’s sleek, elegant, and expensive design, image, and aesthetics attracts people who desire a lifestyle that contains those characteristics.
How Can Your Business Design A Desirable User Experience?
Start with your target customers and find out what their desires are.
Then design everything from your product to company values to your advertisements with this desire in mind.
6. Accesible
Read the article by B2B International on “Creating A Desirable Brand“
B2B interviewed over 40,000 people to identify the world’s most desirable brands and understand what those brands do differently.
Good Example: Beaglecat
Beaglecat is a fantastic example of a website that was designed to have a mobile-friendly user experience.
Their mobile website is eye-catching, and doesn’t overwhelm the viewer with information.
A few scrolls and viewers can see Beaglecat’s mission, values, and team members.
How Can Your Business Design An Accessible User Experience?
Think about the accessibility of your product or service and usertest and compare both your existing assets, as well as prototype assets (low or high fidelity), and competitors or best practice companies. Frequent and iterative user testing across a range of possibilities allows for constant insights and out of the box user experience design thinking.
7. Valuable
Value refers to being able to provide a user experience that is enriching to the lives of your consumers.
Good Example: Whisky Exchange
Whisky Exchange adds value to their website by giving detailed descriptions of their whiskies.
Here is an example of the features included on their website that add value for their Nikka From The Barrel Whisky.
Their website includes an image so viewers can see what they’ll receive when purchasing a Nikka Whisky.
We learn from their website that Nikka From The Barrel Whisky has black pepper, cinnamon, orange, and smoke characters.
Here we see the details and facts of Nikka From The Barrel Whisky.
Whisky Exchange encourages the consumer to visit their website by providing valuable information that cannot be found elsewhere.
PayPal uses interactive design irresponsibly.
They got carried away with their receipt animation on Dribble. The receipt takes 3.5 seconds for customers to see their transaction details.
Although it’s cool to see a little animation pop-up during checkout, it doesn’t add any value for the user.
How Can Your Business Design A Valuable User Experience?
Add value by:
- Being An Authority: Writing blogs that demonstrate your knowledge and expertise in your field will give your brand authority. This is valuable in the minds of customers who are looking for security from a brand.
- Showing You Understand Your Customers: Open up two-way communication channels with your customers. Try to understand their needs, wants and desires and then show them that you understand.
- Listening to Feedback: Remain active on comment sections, listen to the feedback your customers have, and apply their feedback to your product or service.
