How to deliver a modern user experience to your customers?

About 33% of people would rather read something with a beautiful design than something plain if they have 15 minutes to consume content. This is just one example of the modern consumer’s preference for a good experience.

We now have MedTech, FinTech, MarTech, RegTech, and a lot of other infusions of tech in different domains. With digital interactions, both official and personal, growing considerably since last year, marketers are competing neck-and-neck for gaining consumers’ trust and loyalty. All marketers know that it is the experience age, where products are not just utilitarian. What role does UX play in this modern world?

Modern User Experience

Modern User Experience creates experiences for consumers that are personally relevant, meaningful, and add value to their lives. Reaching the insides of a user’s mind and defeating all kinds of confusion, questions, and problems is the aim of UX. This aim is all the more emphasized upon in modern-day UX, which is all about creating not just impressions, but experiences that last.

Principles of Modern User Experience

Here are the broad principles that modern user experience works on.

Simplicity

This is a point you will find in every other article about UX design, and that is because there isn’t enough stressing over this aspect. A modern design need not mean one that impresses through complexity. In fact, it is the opposite.

“If the user can’t use it, it doesn’t work.” – Susan Dray, UX Professional

For users to use it with ease, your design needs to pass a few parameters. Firstly, the design needs to be relevant to your industry and your business. Where there can be one button instead of four, as a thumb rule, go for one. Maintain consistency of colors, components, and behaviors all across the page/app/property to facilitate navigation.  Remember that any design that takes a second more than another option could be rejected by the user.

Trust building

68% of users give up on a website because they think that they are not being cared for. That might really not be the case, but showing is telling. Your design needs to display clear intentions to users. It begins with being genuine in your descriptions. Build trust at each stage to convert more and more through the funnel.

Invite feedback from users and give them a sense of control. When users make mistakes, cover them up through design. Don’t put them in situations where they feel stuck at any point. Create pathways and exits out of each intended and unintended location.

Treat users as participants

The moment you call them ‘users’ or ‘consumers’ or ‘customers’, they become distant entities for you. What we mean is not that you shouldn’t. The point of modern user experience is to think of them as human beings just like yourselves who need simple solutions to problems. Treat them as stakeholders in the design journey through constant research and participatory surveys.

Long-term thinking

There should be a good balance in terms of short-term and long-term goal setting. Think of each design as part of a series of games and not a single game to be won. Except that this tournament is not ending and the one who stays, wins.

Sometimes, you might have to sacrifice short-term goals in favor of long-term ones. For example, adding a particular design element that adds aesthetic value now vs keeping it out to add more complex elements and create space for later.

Measure what matters

We all know that companies try to pull customers in with statistics of all kinds, including the absurd. Similarly, we as designers try to fool ourselves with metrics.

Metrics are a good reference point for setting benchmarks and evaluating performance. However, all metrics need not be enough for all products. Keep individual product performance parameters in mind and don’t just stay hung up on popular measurements such as engagement.

Modern User Experience best practices

To put these principles into action, these are some of the best practices to follow along with specific practices required of your design undertaking.

Co-creation:

Don’t separate design from design research. Let everyone be involved in both. Designers must be involved in research themselves, and researchers must be involved in the decision-making stage. Get all your staff involved in the testing stage. Co-creation won’t spoil the broth, it will only add perspective.

Treating experiences as ecosystems

Users live in ecosystems, digital or otherwise. Introducing a new product to them is a disruption of their ecosystem, which could or could not be positive. Keep that in mind while designing UX. What you’re putting across must be something that adds to the user’s ecosystem and becomes a seamless part of it.

Giving equal value to each interaction

With increasingly minimal UX designs in the modern digital age, each interaction is becoming more and more crucial. You can no more afford to cover up quality differences of one element with another.

Keeping designers motivated

A really good design strategy might turn into a disastrous application if designers are talented but just not happy with their jobs. Remember that creative professionals are vehement and artistic by nature. Make the bright and sunny space they need for creating exceptional products.

Agility

Always listen, learn, and respond without delay. Divide your UX design process into smaller, iterative batches. Introduce agility as a way of working in day-to-day processes. If needed, formally train your designers in agility. Be careful to not let this practice interfere with their spontaneity of ideas, a concern that would need senior management involvement.

In order to check if these principles and practices are actually working for your product, continuous testing is required. This contributes to the iterative methodology prescribed before. Do remember that digital ecosystems and experiences are ever-changing. Hence, UX design needs to keep up and deliver flexible solutions. After all, UX has crossed borders and merged into the entire CX (Customer Experience) now.

If you have UX requirements, get in touch with Divami. Our portfolio speaks for us and assures you of modern, cutting-edge, smooth UX.