UX Design Challenges

What is it that will help app developers deliver a tailored and intuitive experience on the mobile?

How can developers satiate user demand for applications that are fast, deliver instant results, and can be customized to provide a personalized experience?  What is the one key that prevents app uninstalls and engages better with customers?

It is UX or User Experience around the mobile app.

Because of the problems UX tries to address, it becomes a complex field strewn with challenges at every step. If you are looking to make a mark in the field of UX design then it is worth your time reading about the top 5 challenges that every web app developer requires overcoming while designing UX:

1.     Follow the Concept of KISS

Keeping It Short and Simple (KISS) is the essential rule to attract users to an application. Using technical jargon, complex terminologies, and jazzy words ruin user experience as they may fail to understand what exactly does the app wants to convey.

Incorporating features like accepting users’ comments, feedbacks or ratings, and even options to share the content with others can help in enhancing the overall experience.

2.     Make Possible Efforts to Bridge the Gap

Since a web designer is responsible for delivering an output that can ensure engaging user experience, it doesn’t mean that everything in the development should be at par with his/her interests.

Studying target audience, understanding their behaviors, and determining their requirements plays a major role in laying out the entire roadmap for any web development project. Market experts suggest understanding user’s interests and expectations to ensure that the outcome connects with users on all levels.

3.     Always Keep User Security & Privacy on Priority

Keeping the emphasis on design and user experience, a web developer should never neglect web app security or treat it as a secondary factor. Nowadays, apps contain payment details, contact information, confidential data, and other sensitive details of a user. Therefore, application security features should be carefully coded to offer protection against threats and vulnerabilities.

4.     Make it Appealing and Impressive

Apart from focusing on fitting the app to today’s technological demands, it is important to offer impressive packaging to attract users and deliver a pleasant experience.

Adding transitions, animations, and responsive designs can help in boosting your app’s presence on the global front and can help in gaining ample downloads within a fraction of seconds.

5.     Create for One, But Aim for Universal

Today’s users may have multiple devices with different screen sizes; hence, it is important to design your app for multiple platforms. Ensuring its capability to run on as many devices as possible helps web developers in attracting as many users as possible. Develop an application for a single platform, but start testing its capabilities for other platforms using Beta versions.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly, UX designers may face one or more of these challenges from most unexpected sources. But it is imperative to keep user’s expectations in mind while designing and delivering a streamlined and memorable mobile app experience to them.

Lean UX Design is the way to go

What is the one key design differentiator that helps to enhance overall user experience?

What aspect help in bring the user closer to your brand over the digital ecosystem?

Yes, it is UX design that we are referring to!

Lean UX design helps to power up a range of digital products – from simple business websites to dynamic applications. Today we explore the different ways in which lean UX can propel your business past your competition.

The truth about ‘Lean’

The term ‘Lean UX’ has a unique connotation. If we take a look at the origin of this term, we will come across the concept of ‘lean ideas’ and ‘lean thinking’. The term ‘lean’ refers to streamlined business objectives and laser-like focus on identifying true business value.

Lean UX design principles aim at identifying consumer preferences. These practices will identify what appeals to your target audience thus helping you ensure unsurpassed User Experiences.

On that note, lets take a look at how lean UX design practices can add significant value additions to your business.

.1. Uncovering the crucial business requirements

Lean UX design practices will help you identify the pain points in your project. You can delve deep into the nuances of these specific problems thus solving them with lean design principles. With ‘lean’ design principles, you will have the opportunity to discover crucial business requirements. It will help you understand what works for your business and what doesn’t.

2. Customize business needs as per industry standards

No two organizations are similar in nature. Quite naturally, their processes and operations will also differ from each other. When big companies and enterprises work on application development projects, they are often unable to identify crucial requirements. Lean UX will help them identify these needs thus showing them what will work for target users. That’s a huge benefit when it comes to seeking funds for your project.

3. Breaking ideas for hypotheses

While developing a product or application with lean UX design principles, you will have the opportunity to break your ideas into small units of testable hypotheses. That’s a great way of identifying whether the product is marketable or not. Results of the hypotheses will determine the product or application development processes.

4. Determining the UI

At times, product developers have crystal clear ideas of their target users, product needs, and user stories. However, the problem lies with the UI designs. The perfect combination of Lean UX and Agile will help you identify the right User Interface designs. Quite naturally, compelling and attractive UI designs will lead to improved customer engagement.

5. Direct exposure for products

Lean UX ensures fast and swift product deliveries. Most importantly, it helps you take your products directly to your target users. Lean UX design principles show a remarkable upward movement through the ‘think-make-check’ loop. Business owners and product developers can create highly scalable products and applications.

So, if you have been wondering on how to add the “WOW” factor to your software, Lean UX design is the way to go! Nothing beats a crisp design and a fulfilling User experience to scale up your business.

Tech innovations have completely revolutionized the business arena. From simple functions to critical operations, the entire business landscape has undergone massive transformations. Businesses today are highly scalable, dynamic, personalized, and contextual. Even the brand promotion strategies and campaigns are innovative. Business owners are striving hard to align their brand promotion goals with customer satisfaction and experience.

Quite naturally, UX is playing a highly significant role in the current business scenario. From product development stages to their launch in the market, UX is playing a remarkable part in the business arena.

Business environment and UX

There has been a steady rise in the popularity of User Experience. However, when it boils down to creating innovative UX designs; quite a few factors turn out to be important. Design experts should have crystal clear ideas of crucial factors.

Most importantly, they should put the best efforts to strike a balance between business approaches and technology. Let’s try to identify some of the crucial aspects in this regard.

• Channelizing human emotions: Customers will gain unsurpassed experiences only when they relate to a particular technology or product. Quite naturally, UX design involves human emotions, thoughts, and behaviors thus creating positive outcomes.
• The integral elements: UX design practitioners and experts need to take a different approach. While creating UX designs, they should keep specific design interplays in their minds. It’s here that we come across the most crucial elements including business strategy, insights, research, and branding.

Design experts will require understanding the specific goals and objectives of a particular business. All they need to do is align these objectives in the design process.

      I.          Emphasizing designs in the business context

Creating exceptional UX designs for businesses won’t be an easy task. The entire framework involves proper understanding, conceptualization, and perfect execution. UX design practitioners will need to set a background for their project designs. In most of the cases, the specific business goal or approach will serve as the background.

The bottom line is to create exceptional User Experience and optimum business value. While working on UX designs, designers should have these aspects in mind.

    II.          Improving communication skills

Creating exceptional design principles will be a hard nut to crack without in-depth knowledge of the business jargon. If you are creating UX designs, you should engage in effective communications with your partners.

Knowing the business terminologies and specific communication skills will help, as you will develop crystal clear understanding of their specific requirements. That will help you translate abstract ideas into effective concepts.

   III.          Importance of customer’s perspective

It’s highly imperative to align your design goals with customers’ perspectives. Effective UX designing is not just about creating simple designs. While doing so, you will have to make crucial considerations of customer’s desires, behaviors, thoughts, and expectations.

It is this approach that separates a company from the rest of its competitors. By catering to specific consumer demands, businesses can stay ahead of the growth curve and carve a distinctive niche in the market.

Parting thoughts

While creating UX designs, design practitioners will require taking a crucial factor into consideration. Their efforts should be channelized towards combining creative thinking and innovative thinking, thus developing engaging designs.

Of late, mobile apps have created quite a buzz across the entire business landscape, thanks to the widespread adoption by users globally. Highly interactive and stunning mobile applications can optimize your business ROIs, by bringing your brand closer to your target customers.

Interactive and feature-rich mobile applications have resulted in increased revenue generation. Case in point – A whopping 42% of cumulative sales generated by pioneering merchants were through mobile applications. Quite naturally, you too would want to embrace responsive web apps as a potential sales driver for your business with a bit of professional expertise.

The design aspects

Once you make up your mind to build highly interactive apps, there will be two crucial aspects worth considering. While UI or User Interface happens to be one of them, UX or User Experience will be the other part.

Since UI and UX determine your app’s credibility, it will be highly essential to develop a crystal clear understanding of these concepts. Begin by comprehending your target audience and market, thus creating splendid UI designs. Try not to forget that exceptionally beautiful User Interface designs happen to be the key to unmatched User Experience.

If you wish to get an idea of the most effective UI aspects, here’s a guide.

1.     Responsive designs

While designing UI for your enterprise mobile applications, you must put emphasis on responsiveness. From tweaking media queries to the CSS or JavaScript, you must take special care to incorporate responsive designs.

Display issues will affect your app’s credibility, thus inflicting fatal blows on User Experience.

2.     Iteration of UI designs

Performing design iterations will turn out to be quite beneficial. You will achieve highly scalable, attractive, stunning, and engaging apps capable of retaining customer attention. Most importantly, these iterations will teach you a lesson, thus making the next UI design project easier than ever.

3.     ‘Simple’ is good

Although a majority of UI designers misinterpret ‘simple’ as minimalistic, that’s not what it should be. While designing your app’s UI, the focus should always be on creating clutter-free designs, and that should be considered as the true connotation of ‘simple.’

In a nutshell, your enterprise apps should offer easy navigation and uncomplicated operability to users.

4.     Seeking multiple references

A good UI designer will work hard to create a splendid User Interface design. However, a great designer will develop innumerable designs and perform critical evaluations as well.

Highly proficient, skilled, and great designers will seek real references from multiple users. They will do this at the initial stages of app development, thus working on the inputs and reducing operational glitches.

5.     Adhere to OS guidelines

The OS or Operating System happens to be an integral aspect of UI designing. While creating the designs, UI experts must comply with the guidelines laid down by the specific Operating system.

Final word

With these five significant aspects in mind, UI designers will successfully create unique UI designs. As the consequence, you will get the opportunity to elevate the User Experience of your target audience up by a notch.

If you belong to the digital space and have also launched a brand out there, User Experience or UX won’t be a new term to you. For present-day website owners, UX will prove to be the ultimate necessity. It is here that we come across the most crucial question.

What is User Experience and why is it the buzzword in the tech arena?

Let’s begin with an appropriate definition.

Defining User Experience

The term UX or User Experience refers to the concept of UX design, which happens to be the parameter for customizing and tailoring your business website. In simple words, user experience relates to the practice of comprehending an individual’s relation with technology. It is a way of ensuring unmatched web experiences for customers.

UX encompasses quite a few critical aspects. Since it involves both human behavior and technology, User Experience amalgamates domain-specific knowledge, behavioral science, and web development features.

It’s the key to ensuring great customer experiences, which inevitably makes it an important aspect of website development.

Statistical insights

Get into the skin of your target consumers and try answering this question. How would you feel to visit a site that offers poor browsing experience? Although your reply is assumable in this context, let’s take a statistical reference.

According to market statistics, almost 88% of online customers will refuse to return to your website, if it offers a poor first-time experience. Therefore, the first impression is highly crucial in this context.

When it comes to leaving an indelible impression on customers’ minds, there’s nothing like including the best UX designs. Reliable market statistics state that almost 94% of users consider UX designs while developing ideas about your website.

That brings us to a point, where we know what the best UX designs can do for your website. On that note, it is imperative to gain a crystal clear idea about its significance.

Why is User Experience important?

Even if you happen to be the owner of a highly functional business app, it would be of no use, if your target consumers are completely unaware of its use. An app or website with scalable and unique UX designs will enhance its comprehensibility, thus helping consumers use it in the perfect manner. Some of the other aspects that make UX important include:

        I.            Digital resource development

When it boils down to developing exceptional digital resources such as websites and apps, UX plays a highly crucial role.  A business website with attractive UX designs will inevitably fetch more customers.

      II.            Improving experiences

Well-thought and deeply-researched UX designs are the prime factor for improving user experiences. UX determines the appearance and navigation of your website. Websites without clutter-free UX designs will be chaotic, and untidy, thus offering poor navigation.

    III.            Critical for startups

A new brand certainly won’t have a strong reputation to depend on upon. Therefore, it is the web experience offered by them that creates the entire buzz around their services and products. That way, it’s a critical success factor for startups.

Concluding note

UX designs or User Experience is not just an integral part of web development. Rather, it is a unique way of enhancing the credibility, appeal, desirability, value, and usability of your brand.

For digital marketers, it’s a common problem of users not interacting with a brand like they are supposed to. The job of a UX designer is to bring about the best conditions under which the end audience is sufficiently encouraged to perform a desired action. The core to understanding this lies in the behavioral psychology that initiates the ‘call to action’.

What triggers a change in behavior?

If you are working on a website or an app that is supposed to encourage users to exercise more, you need to look for the core motivations. Psychology provides two ways to achieve this. Extrinsic motivation like money or some kind of reward can do the trick for some. For others, it’s about the enjoyment or a feeling of satisfaction (reaching a goal) and then sharing their accomplishments with their social connections.

The best example of an extrinsic motivation is the Pact App. Users of Pact exercise to earn money and reach health goals. This would work well with the audience group that isn’t self-motivated to exercise. In other words, these are the people who don’t enjoy exercising. On the other hand, websites like Freeletics try to promote exercising by rewarding points to its users. This would be just like a game that comes up with a level of greater difficulty and challenge every time.

So where does UX fit into all this?

It is only by a deeper understanding of the end user and the way they interact with products, can we expect to come up with an interface that delivers value. Personas, the journey of customer experience can become useful tools to capture insights and thus serve as important references in the design process.

What makes a UX design fit for your users?

Generally speaking, people who use apps and websites to do certain kind of activity, ranging from shopping to exercising, follow these cues.

Users don’t want to think or work more than they need to

They will try to do the least to get things done and it’s better to present all necessary information that will build trust and make them ‘take the action’. Marketers also need to focus on affordability presented on the screen. Also, defaults in forms allow people to do less manual work.

Customers/users have their limitations

Users will only embrace as much information they need before they start losing interest. For UX designers, it thus becomes important to provide all the necessary information in a format that is easy to scan and read better.

Mistakes are a part of the process

“Its human to err” and this statement can be very important for UX designers. Designers will need to anticipate what kind of mistakes users might commit and make it easy to rewrite/undo or go back.

Customers are social

Technology has been a great motivator to build relationships, share news, and even encourage buying behavior. UX design should include all this to maximize the effects.

The complicated human memory

We only remember things that we want to. Research also shows that the average human can remember only 3-4 items/tasks at a time. Further, human memory can be fragile and degrade quickly. Only a product and interface worth remembering is carried forward in the journey.

Design is the way we like to interact with the world. The easier it gets, the better can it express and communicate our needs.

“Experience” has been the buzzword in the web development industry for a couple of years now, but of late, it significance has been growing among users and customers. This must be a good think and in 2015, all forward thinking companies focused on delivering a lingering “experience” through their online platforms. In 2016, it can be comfortably predicted that the term “User Experience” or UX would rise in importance for all stakeholders – the developers, the businesses and the audience.

“UX is all about how we live, about everything that we do and about everything that surrounds us.”

Here are the top 5 predictions for the UX design industry in 2016:

1.     Testers liberated

The increasing significance of UX has led to companies invest more in testing to nullify all possible errors. Testing is a means to improve the quality of the website and prepare it for the real world. Adobe’s Digital Optimization Survey states that only about 44% of global businesses invest around 5% in website/app optimization. In 2016, things are going to change when testing will become a standard practice before anything is deployed for the masses. To ensure a greater degree of credibility, testers would also be helped out by in-app usability testing platforms and other automatic testing tools.

2.     The merge of digital and physical experience

We talk of all the modern conveniences but there’s still more joy in a family shopping experience – when several people go out and have a say on a product they are eyeing for someone. Well, today internet of things makes this possible even when you are on a digital shopping spree. Flipkart has recently launched a social shopping platform called “Ping” where a large group of people can have a say on a singular buy. If your group is searching something for a birthday boy, this collaborative experience makes the “buying” more fun. UX like this would be rewarded in 2016.

3.     Automation and AI take front seat

Artificial Intelligence would have a greater say in the designing of online platform and apps. Businesses are already starting to take a lot of user input to analyze the right type of content, color scheme, imagery, typography and design layout for web projects. Automation would similarly help designers come out with preferences defined by analytics and put them into the final work.

4.     Integrated wearable

Till now it was Apple and Google take the front seat when it came to wearable devices. In 2016, brands like Sony, Polo and Nike too would become a player in this industry. Wearable devices have just not entered the market but have become the means to the trendiest technologies that the human race has seen. This development also gives a chance to UX designers to create more magic and push the envelope!

5.     Storytelling

Everyone is eager to hear a good story. UX designers in 2016 can use storytelling through their design to capture the attention of the executive and the investor. Further, user-driven storytelling will promote concepts as if they are a reality already. Easily digestible, short and out-of-the-box, these will be the tools of next generation pitches.

The award-winning UX Design Studio at GoodWorkLabs kickstarted the internship program in 2015, where in we take few bright and innovative design students to take up interesting projects, solve real life problems and build beautiful & usable products. Megha Chawra, a B.Des student from MIT, Pune, successfully completed her internship of 5 months.

Our HR team asked about her experience working with our team and how useful was her stint here at GoodWorkLabs. Let’s read her experience penned down and shared by her.

“Goodworklabs is one of the fast UIUX growing company in Bangalore. I was a UI/UX intern for 5 months and in these months I had the great experience in learning the whole system of a Mobile and web applications from research to development and testing process.

The company follows a structured process of User experience called Lean UX. Starting from understanding the needs of the client’s product, we nail down towards research module particularly in user personas, comparing other similar apps etc. Coming up with the key priorities, we start developing the information architecture and wireframes keeping the end user in the mind. Then, while doing the visual design I learnt to explore in color schemes, layout and interaction styles, right usage of fonts.

Once the designs are done, the very most important technicalities which I learnt was to understand the requirements, challenges and work structure at the development side of the app i.e asset creation, spec infos, device and resolution sizes of both iOS and Android which we generally tend to ignore while making the visuals.

Overall, It’s a great place to learn and improvise the skills. Have developed the capability of patiently managing the needs of the clients and the developers. People over here are very friendly, supportive and fun to work with. Working here have built my confidence in digital designs.” – Megha Chawra, B. Des final year student, MIT Pune, India.

To apply for internship program at GoodWorkLabs, send in your application along with your profile and work to contact@goodworklabs.com