Your product can in theory have the best features that hit the nail on the head when it comes to user needs, but if the actual user experience turns out to be a nightmare, it can end up being all for nothing.

User experience can make or break your product’s success, so you want to do all you can to make sure you get it right.

“Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.”

– Stephen Hawking

Why UX Design Matters

User experience boils down to how your customers interact with your website, app or digital product, and how satisfied they feel that your product has served their needs as efficiently as possible.

This encompasses all aspects of your customer’s experience, from the visual and graphic design of the interface, the functionality of the features, to the overall intuitiveness and ease of use of the product.

With this in mind, investing into creating a superb user experience for your customers can have many advantages and benefits for your business.

For starters, it can lower your costs of customer acquisition. It also lessens the burden on your support teams, by eliminating any confusion your customers could potentially have while using your product.

Finally, having an easy-to-use application that fulfills expectations leads to maximized user satisfaction, and ultimately increased customer retention.

So, how should you approach UX design to get the biggest bang for your buck?

How to Approach UX Design to Achieve Maximum User Satisfaction?

Perhaps too often, product creators assume what their potential users might want, without actually conducting sufficient research. Likewise, executives who typically make the final decisions regarding product design may think they know their users well, but this doesn’t always turn out to be the case when launching a new product.

The most important thing when it comes to UX design is creating applications and products strictly with the end user in mind.

The good news is, there is a clear strategy that can be followed in your UX design process to ensure your customers’ experience with your product is the best it can be.

Before we dive in, it’s important to note that the design process can vary depending on the type of product you’re creating, but the general steps we will cover here are essential for achieving success.

Start With In-Depth Research

Assuming that you’ve already identified the problem you intend to solve and have defined your product, before your product team starts creating anything, you need to first dive into some research.

Quality research always involves identifying the latest industry standards and trends, as well as studying your competition, how they interact with their users and how customers engage with their brand.

But more importantly, you should employ direct interaction with your target audience, through interviews during the planning phase, as well as testing of working prototypes in later stages in order to integrate user feedback and improve your product’s design.

In addition to 1 on 1 interviews, you can also run focus groups with target users to identify their attitudes, emotions and frustrations they encounter in their line of work, as well as their experiences with any products or solutions they may be currently using.

Sure, interviewing potential users and organizing focus groups can be a bit time-consuming in the initial planning phase, but it will actually save you both time and money in the long run.

Understanding your users’ needs and pain points from the get-go will maximize your chances of getting the UX design right the first time around, without having to resort to any expensive do-overs further down the line.

Analyze and Plan

What you want to do next is dive deep into analysis of the gathered information, and then brainstorm ideas on how you could address your users’ pain points in the best possible way.

Begin by defining detailed user personas of your ideal customer, which include characteristics such as their demographics, background, behaviors, spending habits, motivations, pain points and needs, as well as the channels through which they can be reached.

Quality user personas allow you to create user journey maps, which are essentially a representation of your customer’s interaction with your product, from their initial contact with your brand to becoming a satisfied customer whose problem you’ve solved as efficiently as possible.

Creating journey maps is key because they allow you to understand the entire process your customers will be going through when using your product. This means that you can put yourself in their shoes and anticipate what could potentially annoy them, as well as map out their desired actions every step of the way.

May the Designing Begin!

Now, it’s actually time to start building out your product’s design based on everything you’ve prepared so far. This entails things such as deciding on a color palette, building a site map, creating icons and images, mockups and user flow diagrams.

While your customer journey map serves to give you a macro-overview of your interaction with your customer, user flow diagrams now define the precise paths your users will take when navigating your app or website.

The most important deliverable you will produce in this stage is a wireframe. A wireframe is a visual representation of your product prototype, which includes the structure and layouts of all the pages and the information that will be displayed on them.

A wireframe provides a detailed description of your user interface, as well as a comprehensive view of what your users’ experience should look like when using your product.

Once you’re satisfied with the look of everything, your development team can create a prototype that simulates the actual feel of the user experience. It can be a low-fidelity prototype in the form of clickable wireframes, or a high-fidelity coded prototype.

When your prototype is ready, it’s finally time to…

Test and Validate

This is the key step in the entire UX design process, because it will provide you with an understanding of how well your design works, and help you identify anything that you may have overlooked in the previous stages.

Ideally, you want to do your testing with high-fidelity prototypes, because they will give you much more valuable and in-depth feedback from your end users. In addition to end-user testing, your team can also perform regular in-house testing to identify any major flaws in your product’s usability.

Testing, validation and improvement of your design can go through several iterations. This is where the strengths of an Agile approach come in, allowing you to integrate user feedback and make any necessary changes to improve your design in the next iteration of work.

Don’t be afraid to scrap any elements and redesign them completely if they turn out to be subpar, even if it takes you that extra iteration. You want to make sure your product is as good as it gets before releasing it to the rest of the world!

Streamline Your UX Design Process with Telecorp

Our team is among the industry leaders when it comes to creating unparalleled user experiences for our clients and their end users. 

We have years of experience delivering UI and UX solutions that are precisely tailored to user needs, by employing a people-focused approach while adhering to the highest industry standards.

Contact us to learn more about how we can help you take your UX design to the next level!