4 Things You Need to Know About User Experience

User Experience (UX) is a process of creating the best possible experience for users, dependent on their needs, ambitions and values. The design aspect should cover areas such as creating meaningful and relevant content for users as well as other aspects including visual design, usability and overall function.

Here are 4 things you need to know about user experience:

1. Know your audience

The most essential factor of user experience is understanding your audience’s expectations. You must know who your target audience is before you’re able to create a specific process for UX. It would be advised to carry out as much research as possible to gain a deeper understanding of your target audience’s wants and needs – this may entail sending out questionnaires or taking a look at competitor websites to analyse the tactics they are using.

2. Short attention spans are everything

According to scientific studies, the human attention span is just eight seconds (even shorter than a goldfish), therefore, designers must have the skills to be able to cater to this form of behaviour, so that the audience can get the information they need as quickly as possible, without losing interest. With this in mind, the information should be easily navigated in the shortest time frame possible. This can be achieved by removing unnecessary features that have no relevance and instead, focusing on simplicity, without losing sight of the needs of the user.

3. It’s not set in stone

While there are certain rules about what User Experience should entail, there’s no single approach. What may work for one website or product may not suit another, so it’s all about carrying out research to determine the best solutions. The UX structure should act as a base but able to become adapted in correlation with the changing needs of the target audience.

4. You need to identify problems

If there is a significant lack of traffic being directed to the website despite taking UX design aspects on board, problems need to be identified from the get-go. In this instance, you need to put yourself in your target audience’s shoes and disconnect yourself to understand what may be going wrong. In this instance, you can get a clearer insight into what the user may be looking for and how they plan on using the website.

If you believe the current UX experience strategies simply aren’t cutting it, it would be advised to look into the analytics of each landing page to work out where the problems may lie and how they can be resolved. If possible, aim to prevent obstacles occurring before the website goes live. Mistakes can be either human error or technology glitches. But these errors can have a major impact on UX and trigger certain negative behaviours.

User experience is often based on trial and error to find a solution that works, but the pointers above should give you some indication of how to create the best UX design as possible.