How to improve user experience?

User experience refers to how a user interacts with your product and how smooth that experience is. Users’ experience with your product starts the minute they hear your brand and continues with every touch point that they interact with you.

Improving your user experience reduces friction between your product and your target audience. As a result, you will have more satisfied users which leads to more loyal customers and better conversion rates.

Sounds good right? So, here are 4 tips for improving your user’s experience:

Do Your Research

Research is the most basic and fundamental step of the process, whether you are at the beginning of an idea or you have an ongoing business/project.

If you already have a business that is running, keep doing research on your field and competitors. Always be aware of the market. But most importantly always evaluate your product. Creating a product and just letting it go wherever does not result in success.

We will go into detail about how to do this, later in this article.

If you are only starting with your idea, you should study your brand and your mission. What are your core values? What is the purpose behind your idea? What is the current state of the market for your idea, are there any competitors? What are the opportunities and threats that will come with your idea? Once you understand where your business will stand by identifying these questions, you will have a better understanding of your target customers.

Get to Know Your Users

You can design the most beautiful interfaces, write the most appealing content and have the best marketing team. But unless they meet your target audience’s needs, you most probably won’t get the result that you are hoping and working hard for.

Adopting a user-centered approach is very important for a better experience. You have to understand your customers and target audience to know who you are designing for.

Once you know your users, you should dig deeper to understand them. Look at how their demographics affect their habits, research their needs and behaviors, and motives for using your products.

Think Holistic

Most people think user experience is only about an interface but that is just the tip of the iceberg, it is more than that. It is not just about a screen or content, it is a whole journey with different touch points.

Brand identity is probably the first step in the user’s journey, it is the step where potential customers learn about you first so the first step should be impressive and on point. Your brand should represent your business.

Your design should be user-friendly, after all, usability is what makes users connect to your product. When users interact with your product they should encounter ease of use, intuitive interfaces, clear content, and smooth flows.

You should regularly receive feedback from users and hear their voices. Conduct polls and surveys, ask them their thoughts, and answer their complaints. Your customer relations should be positive and constructive and aim to fix your user’s problems. And remember, fixing issues is not a one-time job.

There are a lot of other stops to make when thinking holistically. Just do not underestimate your user’s experience to only a small section, see the bigger picture and care about the whole relationship your customer has with your brand.

Test and Analyze

The product development process does not finish once the product is launched, it actually starts there. Keep evaluating your live product by analyzing your internal data and making adjustments based on those.

There are a lot of ways of analyzing your product’s improvement.

Conduct usability tests and other user research methods, and learn what drives your users to interact with your product and how they interact. See their results and make sense of them. Check your revenues, user counts, funnel rates, and other elements that are important to your business goals. When you find an element that doesn’t reach your expectations, look for ways of fixing that feature with data-driven solutions and make modifications.

Conclusion

Improving user experience is a never-ending process. You should always be aware of your user’s needs and behaviors and improve your product to meet those needs.

After all, happy users, happy businesses.

Zeynep Mutlu, UX Designer @4PLAY

Linkedin: 4PLAY Mobile Creative People

Instagram: @4play_people

Twitter: @4play_people