This article shares tips on how to improve the end-user experience of your product and business to exceed customer expectations.
Improving the quality of your product or business starts with developing a deep understanding of what your users need, value or want and how these users perceive your business in order to always present the right information that is usable, accessible and credible to them. Often as designers, we suppose we get everything right with designing a product for the target users.
However during usability tests, they may perceive the product in a way that it was not intended to. Which then forms fresh insights or feedback on which the product can be iterated.
As brands work to optimize their digital experiences, the goal of every business is to deliver exceptionally on their product and business offerings in order to keep their existing users, acquire more customers and penetrate new markets.
To sustain this goal and eliminate all bottlenecks of poor user experience, businesses must prioritize listening to their customers and improving on their product’s end-user experience through customer feedback.
What is end-user experience?
End-user experience describes the value that brands deliver to their customers in the digital world through their products and services. This UX value helps to increase brand trust, loyalty and also impacts on the ROI of the business.
A product’s user experience can be improved by accurately examining all UX risks, the usability of their visual and navigational design as well as the various ways in which the product can be improved upon to build trust and safety.
Good end-user experience is achieved through constantly gathering user feedback so that a business can keep up with its user’s expectations.
The Importance of User Experience
When customers make purchases, the visual aesthetics of a product is their first encounter, which either attracts or repels them.
However, today, it is not enough to just have a beautiful UI. Customers now have different expectations for the product and its ease of use. They are demanding integration of their core values, needs and wants. Understanding this user trend is paramount for a product to deliver on its intended experience to customers and new users.
UX is important because its job revolves around fulfilling user’s needs. It aims to provide flawless interactions that keep users loyal to the product or business. Furthermore, good user experience allows users to have a smooth customer journey across all digital platforms (web, mobile, tablet) which is crucial to business success.
Kathryn Stracquatanio, a senior UX engineering manager at Comcast,
What exceeds customer’s expectations in products is whether it’s useful to them, whether it solves problems, brings entertainment or relieves stress from their interactions across all channels.
Let’s take a look at 6 things you can do today to improve the end-user experience of your product.
6 tips to improve your end-user experience
How can you ensure you’re meeting your users’ needs in the channels that are most convenient to them, while helping them achieve their goals? Here are our top 6 tips on how to improve and maintain the end-user experience of your products and services.
1. Design for ease of use
Your product should be able to take a user from point A to point B seamlessly without friction and confusion. Good usability helps users find what they need faster and lies in the foundation of positive user experience.
You can test the usability of your designs with the help of online usability testing tools. This will help you ensure your digital product is intuitive and simple enough for the users.
Always remember that they do not have the time or patience to try to figure out how to navigate the interface to accomplish tasks.
Ensure that your product meets the five usability quality components established by the NNGroup which has now become an industry standard and it includes:
- Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they encounter the design?
- Efficiency: How quickly users can perform a task
- Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they reestablish proficiency?
- Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors?
- Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?
Meeting and exceeding customer expectations should be the goal for your product as you design for usability.
2. Be consistent and accessible
To establish brand and product loyalty among your users, you need to make sure that your product’s branding and visual design is in line with their core values, needs and wants. To give your user a delightful experience as they navigate through your various digital channels,you need to establish consistency in brand images, language, text, identity and color.
This helps to create a holistic experience and keep users aware that they are still interacting with the same product. Thanks to this effect, users can seamlessly navigate from your web to mobile across your products while maintaining a smooth and positive experience.
The benefits of consistency according to NNGroup impact the end-user experience of the product in more ways than just one:
- Familiarity and Confidence: A consistent experience sets expectations for future interactions with your business and builds user confidence.
- Learnability: Consistent experiences are easier to learn for users who have interacted with your solutions on various other channels.
- Efficiency: When designs and features are consistent, customers can complete tasks faster and more efficiently on the channel of their choice in the context of their everyday lives.
- Trust: Users crave consistency and businesses that can provide consistent experiences across channels will quickly earn customer loyalty and build credibility.
Consistency can also be established in a product’s visual design by creating brand guidelines that cater to typography, identity, brand image, language, and a color scheme or even emojis your brand uses.
Do not forget to implement consistency and repetitions in all of your communication across all your channels to keep a product consistent in look and feel. For example, you can use specific well-known emojis from the constantly growing library of emojis to pick the ones that represent your brand and use them across all your social media profiles. This will help you to tap into a sense of familiarity and also provide a fun element to your communication.
3. Establish credibility with content and social proof (blog posts and testimonials)
Improve the UX of your product by sharing content in the form of blog posts, guides, checklists and Q&A’s. The most important part of any good content is to make sure it solves your target customer’s problem for free, bringing value so that eventually they will consider trying out your product or service.
Make sure that the content you publish is accessible, easy to comprehend and optimized for SEO.
Before publishing any content on your website, you need to make sure that:
- Headings and content are driven by what a customer needs. Include keywords in your title to make sure that your users find your content in their search engine.
- Include relevant keywords in subheadings to make it easier for users to find what they need.
- All pages should have a meta-description and relevant keywords in titles. This will encourage users to click on them and again and help with SEO.
- The ‘alternative text’ field can be used to tag your images with relevant text which also helps to fix accessibility issues for your website in the long run.
- Blog posts should have links to external sources of authority that you reference while writing blog articles as it helps to demonstrate value and establish expertise.
- Posts should be updated frequently with new industry lingo and trends so that users can remain engaged while reading your website’s blog.This can be done by adding extras like videos, expert quotes, ebooks and guides etc.
- Include testimonials of businesses and individuals who have used your product in the past. This helps to show social proof.
4. Pay attention to feedback
If you want to aim for improvement, you need people who give you constant feedback. Your users are a valuable resource for catching errors and other usability issues.
Your customer success team should be the pipeline where you draw in all valuable and useful feedback. From user recommendations for product features to complaints and frustrations, they are all signals that help a business identify patterns in the customer journey. These signals, when analyzed and distilled can be helpful in improving the end-user experience of your product.
Conduct user surveys to find out how your product is perceived and received by users. A well-crafted survey can tell you more about your site’s usability and identify patterns where customers struggle when using your product. Paying attention to feedback helps to keep your product alive and your business healthy and profitable.
5. Ensure friction free navigation
Navigation design cannot be easy when you have lots of content you want your audience to access. However, knowing which information is most important for the customer to consume as they use your product is crucial.
For almost seven years, studies have shown the same user behavior: users look straight at the content and ignore the navigation areas when they scan a new page. They almost always scan — they rarely read carefully online. Navigation should not only show users where they can go but also where they are now.
Each page on a website could be the first page your product user’s see, so it’s important to convey enough context so that users can proceed immediately towards their goals. As they need to understand your online content and consume it quickly, it’s essential that you deliver it in a clear and concise way.
Research tools like card sorting and tree testing can help you evaluate your website’s navigation, find out how to categorize the content in an intuitive way and come up with suitable information architecture.
A few tips to help keep your product’s navigation well-structured and simple:
- Conduct card sorting for your website’s content to figure out how to categorize it
- Test navigation with a tree testing tool to find and eliminate issues
- Avoid complicated menus that will make users feel overwhelmed. Create a secondary navigation menu for additional pages that will be important for users to see.
- Put main category entries on the website’s homepage so that users can jump directly to the desired content.
- Eliminate unnecessary interactions and animations that are not important to your user’s experience in order to improve the load time of your website and avoid distractions.
- Get rid of any 404 error pages on your app or website by setting up Google Webmaster tools to check for any crawl errors.
- Fix broken links on your pages and allow an onsite search functionality to enable users to find information faster.
Meet customer expectations with your product by starting with a clearly defined information architecture that simulates how users will navigate through your app or website.
6. Test and analyze to improve user experience
To continually improve the user experience of your product, you must continue to test and iterate on the product as users continue to interact with it. Staying on top of user behavior means learning about what is still working and what does not work anymore for your users on your product.
Carrying out UX research and usability testing will help you to consistently meet the needs of your users.
More helpful options can include:
- Conducting moderated or unmoderated tests to find out how users interact with your product and what roadblocks they encounter. You can also use the results from initial moderated or unmoderated tests to further segment users into categories so you could develop specific campaigns that target their specific needs.
- Collecting feedback through surveys, chatbots or online polls from your various social media channels in order to learn about how your product is perceived by users (old & new). This type of feedback could help you decide on any new features or products so that you could add further value to your product and improve the end-user experience.
- Adopting A/B testing in core technical and business decisions like CTA button size, CTA headline text, length of content on a page or contact form fields.
- Using a user testing software like UXtweak to test and improve your website’s UX.
Give users the best experience by making your product or service more user-centric by focusing on the users journey, core tasks and eliminate all friction along their journey.
Improve product UX to exceed customer expectations
User behavior describes how users interact with digital products. If you’re aligned with your users right from the start, understanding these behaviors and the paths users need to take to navigate through workflows becomes a breeze which is essential to optimizing your product’s user experience.
To create a memorable and excellent user experience, businesses must learn to establish great product performance metrics with an understanding of their users. Keep your customers and users loyal to your brand and build credibility by improving on your product’s experience as often as possible.
For that, create a free UXtweak account and start testing today!
