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Good User Experience
The user experience is what sets your app apart and guarantees continued user engagement, user satisfaction, and achieves your marketing goals. It’s not just about the pretty interface. Design is important, but it’s the impact your website and apps have on users—their enjoyment—that creates powerful impressions. It’s important you take the time to develop a strategic understanding of your users and design around their needs. You must care about what your customers want from the experience.
For example, EffectiveUI worked with the Discovery Channel to build Earth Live, an engaging, consumer-facing Web app to promote environmental awareness. It’s a data visualization platform that lets users simulate manipulating Earth’s cloud layers and biosphere, watch sea temperatures rise and fall, and track worldwide environmental projects and breaking news stories. Users can combine visual elements dynamically to create scenarios around hurricanes and other atmospheric events, remix layers and share custom views. Earth Live not only generated ad revenue, but in the first three months, it delivered more than 355,000 page impressions to 160,000 unique visitors.
How do you focus on the user experience in Web apps and still work toward marketing goals? Here are nine best practices marketers can follow:
1. User Experience Research
User research is core to building a successful digital experience. What is the core issue and what do users want and need? Trust your users, they’ll let you know. I hear a lot of companies say, “We’ve already done the research—here are the survey results.” Why aren’t they actually talking to users, watching how they work, listening for pain points and understanding the tasks they need to accomplish or find information they need? It sounds tedious, but it’s very important, and many companies miss this step altogether.
2. Define Success
Know what success means for your business by listing how you’ll measure it. Don’t forget to count metrics related to your users and their goals.
The first questions companies ask about Web apps are often the wrong ones. They wonder whether they should focus on the iPad or the Slate, or whether to use Flash or HTML5.
First consider your business goals: What do you want to accomplish with the application and how it will provide value for your customers? Once everyone agrees on the answers to these questions and you’ve done your user research, you can safely move on to discussing technology platforms in a secondary conversation about the overall user experience.
3. Focus On What You Do
If you’re a credit card company, you don’t need to build a game. If you are a shipping company, you should not build a social network. Stick with the primary purpose of your business. Consumers know one thing for sure: If you build an application that does not have direct utility related to your business, it is probably an application designed just to market to them, and they will probably let it fail.
4. Value Good Design
Good design is more than just how something looks, it’s how it works. Just as people upgrade the operating system on their computers because it looks newer, users are more likely to trust data from a website that looks modern. As Raymond Loewy, the father of industrial design, once said, “Ugliness does not sell.”
5. Don’t Build for Everyone
If you build for everybody, you wind up building for nobody. Define a small set of user types—or personas—to help you understand who your audience is and what they want to accomplish on your website and application(s). A common mistake from building for everyone is to concentrate too much on features. The current thinking recommends applications with fewer features, which extends to the customer making fewer decisions. Asking users to make unnecessary choices often results in frustration with what should be a usable website.
6. Think Mobile
Mobile is an important component to consider tying in with your Web initiatives, but it needs thoughtful consideration. A Harris Interactive study commissioned by EffectiveUI in October 2010 found the majority of mobile phone users who downloaded and used applications choose to download those apps based on recommendations and good user experience, rather than the company or organization that released it. In fact, 69 percent agreed that if a brand name mobile app was not helpful or easy to use, it left a negative perception about the brand.
We’ve witnessed for quite a while now that, as companies rush their mobile strategies, they are actually hurting their brands. Don’t rush your mobile app. Focus on the experience and design for your customer with your business needs in mind. In mobile, brand recognition only gets you so far. If you implement with usability and user insights in mind, the app will go everywhere.
7. Plan for Frequent Updates
Most successful apps have an avid audience because they created a great user experience first, and followed with great updates and improvements. You’ll build fans and evangelists by showing responsiveness to customer feedback once the application is launched.
8. Beware of Social
Just because you can add social media to your application doesn’t mean you should. I personally have always been a little skeptical of social strategies that go beyond listening to your customers’ feedback. Not every organization needs a Facebook strategy, and your customers may not want to include you in their social spheres—in fact, they might think negatively of your brand for even asking. If there is a compelling reason for the user to be connected to Facebook through your app, then by all means go with it. But it must be compelling enough for them to invite you there.
9. Rigid Plans Fail
This is the best practice broken most frequently and the area where we see the most failure. Web design and development projects are predictably unpredictable. Focusing on the end user means you have to plan to be flexible. Create interfaces, test them with users and expect to throw away half of what you create in the name of meeting their needs.
It’s possible, though, to swing the pendulum too far the other way and over-plan, leaving little room for input and feedback, or unforeseen issues. Iteration as you’re building a Web application is key: It’s too difficult to strategize the entire project ahead of time. Understand enough to get started, and then gather and act upon user feedback along the way.
Creating engaging user experiences results in increased customer lifetime value. The better the engagement, the harder it will be for customers to switch to your competitors. Their experiences will differentiate your business and increase the value of your brand, and the user experience factor will ultimately increase conversions.
Anthony Franco is president and co-founder of Denver-based EffectiveUI, a user-centered application developer. Reach him on his blog at http://anthonyfranco.wordpress.com or via Twitter @anthonyfranco.
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