UX: The Good, Bad, and Ugly
Picture this: you’ve just spent your latest paycheck on a new smartphone. It’s elegant, swanky, and trending with all the influencers you follow. But when you turn it on, you find that the Settings app is impossible to find and written in a font that is basically illegible. Because of this poor design, you can’t move through the phone as quickly and find yourself taking much longer to do the everyday tasks that would normally take you seconds. As a customer, you’re probably confused and frustrated. Chances are you won’t buy a new phone from the same company any time soon. Welcome to the fascinating world of UX, which stands for “user experience.”
As you can see, user experience can make or break a business. While there are no concrete definitions on what makes for a positive user experience, “good” UX makes it easy for the user to navigate your platform and can lead to greater profits, customer satisfaction, and a positive brand reputation. On the other hand, “bad” UX leads to a clunky, frustrating user experience and can contribute to a decline in sales, negative reviews, and ultimately an unused product. So what can help create a more positive user experience, and how do you know what features make for good UX? We’ve put together a list to help you identify some strong points of successful UX design. Among other things, effective UX design is intuitive, helpful, attractive, and consistent. Let’s dive in.
It’s Intuitive
At its core, UX should be extremely intuitive. If a customer goes to your website and it functions in a way they’ve never seen before, it’ll be harder for them to navigate. Time and attention are precious goods in the consumer world, and you’ve just likely lost both. Good UX needs to activate the muscle memory of customers, meaning that a few key things are similar across all other platforms (including your competition’s), so the user isn’t thrown off by what they find.
For example, suppose you are an architecture firm. Since you build homes, you may think it’s funny if the home page icon on your website is a blueprint icon instead of a house. While this is clever and exciting, it’s also alienating and can be tough to navigate. The average user will have no idea how to get back to your website’s home page, making it inaccessible for many. Our advice? Keep it simple.
It’s Helpful
In addition to being intuitive, successful UX design also makes the user’s life easier. In a world of so much excess, please don’t add more complication. Good UX solves problems instead of adding unnecessary content. For example, you could have an email newsletter you want your users to sign up for. One way to go about this is to add a pop-up banner once. But another way to do it is by adding constant sliding pop-ups on every page the user opens. The latter isn’t at all helpful to the user, and increases the chances of them growing disinterested and annoyed with how your website is designed.
Remember that you need to provide different information in different ways depending on your brand. If you’re a beauty brand, good UX would involve simple beauty tutorials with your makeup and images that show the product on a variety of skin tones. If you’re a bakery, bad UX would involve the lack of a menu on your website and no information on allergens in your cupcakes. Save your audience the time and effort it takes to learn about your service or product with good UX.
It’s Attractive
While it may not seem as important, UX design should always be visually appealing. Interesting images and color stories can excite and attract a user, build trust, and enhance usability. By creating positive first impressions, attractive designs engage users and establish credibility. They also facilitate intuitive navigation, evoke emotional connections for the users, differentiate from competitors through different color palettes, and encourage social media sharing. These are all reasons why your coders and engineers must work together with graphic designers and illustrators every step of the way. Ultimately, investing in a visually appealing UX helps create a positive brand image, engage users, and drive sales and business growth.
For example, imagine you’re browsing an online fashion store. It’s an absolutely stunning website with beautiful product images, a user-friendly interface, and a consistent brand style. This appealing design not only catches your eye but also makes you feel connected to the brand. It’s like window shopping at your favorite boutique but conveniently accessible from the comfort of your own home! That’s good UX.
It’s Always Consistent
Last but not least, UX should always be consistent across your platforms. If you’re constantly changing how your users can interact with your brand, it might alienate and confuse them. Consistency for UX is a must-have because it builds a common platform that users can learn and understand. It also reminds them that they’re coming back to the same place again and again, which increases brand recall and helps in building a positive reputation for your company. Picture it from the user’s point of view, where consistency can help build a mental model of how a digital resource works. Once they learn how to interact with a few elements, they can apply that knowledge to other parts of the website or app. It reduces the learning curve and increases efficiency.
Whether it’s a website, app, or any other digital resource, maintaining consistency in the design is crucial. It creates a seamless and intuitive experience for users, allowing them to focus on what to do rather than figuring out how to do them.
With these tips in mind, you can separate good UX from bad UX and know what will work for your brand. If you ever get stuck, ask other people to share their experiences and feedback from navigating your website or product. This first-hand experience will prove to be a great roadmap for what works, and what should be changed! Remember to keep your UX intuitive, helpful, appealing, and consistent for best results.
Always in your corner,
The Content Queens
