Why User Experience Matters

Ever felt like you’re going round in circles, getting nowhere fast? All of us have been there, and we’re pretty sure no one out there can say, ‘wow I just love this feeling of never reaching my end goal’. In this article we take a look at the usability and user experience of websites, so that by the end, you will understand -

• SEO and user experience
• The user experience research process
• The difference between user interaction and user experience

What is User Experience?

User experience – or UX for short - is the experience someone has when they engage with a product. The term, ‘user experience’ is generally used in relation to computer apps and websites. So, when it comes to user experience, you need to make sure you give the customer/client/visitor the best possible engagement experience. To achieve this, your user experience needs to be -

• Usable
• Useful
• Accessible
• Credible
• Valuable
• Findable
• Desirable

A user experience design agency like Creative Ideaz will help you achieve every one of these goals for the best user experience design possible.

The User Experience Research Process

When it comes to conducting thorough user experience research, the process needs to be in-depth, in order to ensure all aspects of a user’s experience are understood. This entails everything from conducting user interviews, carrying out surveys, and employing methods such as usability testing, and field studies. These research tools are paramount to ensuring you develop a product that delivers on user experience and steers well clear of poor user experience examples.

Poor User Experience Examples

We’re not ones to make negative statements just for the sake of it, but sometimes a vital part of ensuring you don’t make mistakes in your user experience, is looking at companies who have failed in theirs. Here are a few examples you may have come across -

1. The WhatsApp delete message tool – you type a message in WhatsApp, hit send, and then immediately wish you hadn’t sent it. So, of course, you just press ‘delete message’. If only it was that simple and your trail of deleted messages didn’t show up on the chat app. Instead, your chat shows up ‘You deleted this message’ and the time when you deleted it. And it’s not just you who gets to see this – it's the people on the other end of the chat too. It’s cringey, raises suspicion, and isn’t exactly a smooth user experience.

2. The dropdown list of doom - where every single country in the world is listed and you’ve got to get to the one starting with U. U for ‘urgh’ - it can take an age to find ‘United Kingdom’, and who has time these days.

3. Sneaky UX – You want to send a parcel so you choose a courier, you check their website, decide to go with them and then wait for your parcel to be collected. That’s simple enough. But what happens if your parcel is damaged in transit and you need to make a claim? If the parcel company has been sneaky enough not to make it clear what items they can ship, you may have inadvertently sent something that they won’t cover with their insurance. This is seriously unhelpful UX and will likely mean that the user ends up using a different parcel delivery service in the future.

SEO and User Experience

SEO and user experience go hand in hand and should absolutely be included in your user experience strategy. While SEO is there for the search engines, UX is there for visitors to your website. Without decent SEO, you won’t get any visitors as they won’t be able to find you if the search engines can’t find you either.  

In days of yore, SEO simply meant ramming as many keywords into your website as possible. However, the SEO process is a whole lot more intricate these days. As well as keywords, Google and other search engines (yes, there are others) also crawl your websites to check on everything from how safe and secure your website is, the design of it, ease of use, to how long visitors stay, engage and interact with it. Nail all of these factors and you’ll be doing yourselves a favour in terms of SERPs.

What’s the difference between User Interaction and User Experience?

User interaction is a person’s engagement with a computer system, app, or software. User experience, meanwhile, is a much more all-encompassing term that covers the user’s whole experience with a brand or product. So user interaction is the more technical side of things, whereas user experience is the broader picture.

What’s the difference between User Experience and Customer Experience?

Do not confuse user experience with customer experience as they are two separate entities. User experience is how a user interacts with your business, products and/or services. Customer experience, meanwhile, is how a consumer perceives his/her interactions with a business. Customer experience looks at the bigger experience of the consumer, while user experience is much more intently focused on a business’s website or app.  

If you want your business to excel, it’s vital that you look at both the user experience and the customer experience and aim to get them working closely together to produce a seamlessly positive experience.

User experience is at the forefront of ensuring your business soars, but if you’re still finding it hard to get your head round ‘what is user experience strategy’, let the experts at Creative Ideaz help. We’ll develop a strategy to get your brand booming, ensuring user experience is spot on from start to finish.