The Beginner’s Guide to Creating a Positive User Experience

Everyone talks about user experience these days, and rightly so.

Any product or service, however small, has to have a positive user experience for it to be successful in the competitive market.

User Experience is a sum total of all aspects of a product and the satisfaction that it provides for all its users. It is about the design and development of digital products that meet the users’ expectations while also engaging them pleasingly.

What makes a positive user experience? How do you ensure that your product or service design is engaging your audience?

Let us try to answer these questions.

Here are a few things that you must do to make sure that the experience you design is positive and conversion inducing.

Design for the User

As Elon Musk says – “Any product that needs a manual to work is broken.”

One of the most basic principles of positive user experience is to always design for the user.

A user comes to your product or service looking for a solution to a problem. Your design should lead them to find that solution easily.

The rule is to not complicate.

Your product experience should not be more complicated than the problem itself.

In order to simplify your user’s problems, you need to think of your design from your user’s perspective. Think about their preferences and needs. About what the users want to do when they land on your product page.  Then design the experience in a way that helps them complete the actions in the most intuitive manner possible.

As a UI/UX designer, it’s pretty easy to think from a designer’s perspective. But what really sets user experience apart is building the product from a user’s point of view.

Conversations

A positive user experience cannot be achieved singularly.

You need to be talking – to everyone and about everything. You will need to have informed conversations with your client. Ask questions. A lot of them.

You need to research the industry, talk to experts, talk to potential users and understand every need. Read every bit of documentation there is and take notes.

The other part of important communications is to analyze the competition. You need to research what the competition in the same space is doing, what other innovators have done and what mistakes the competition might have made that you should avoid.

Consume every bit of content there is and make sure to accommodate your client’s wishes.

Think User Types

Creating user personas is a known process in user experience design. However, there is one area that most designers fail to care about. More often than not, there is more than a single user type for any product.

Which means, the user persona you created for your product is not enough. You have to create multiple user personas to include all user types for your product.

Think about all possible user types and how they would feel while interacting with the product interface. Consider your experience design from the perspective of all user groups. Good product design is one that offers a positive experience to all user bases.

Design user Flow

Designing a user action flow or user journey is another crucial aspect of good design experience. All your user personas perform certain steps to reach the desired action your product want them to take.

Good experience design is when each user action is no greater than five steps. Remember, though, that one step doesn’t necessarily mean one click.

Say, adding a product to the cart is one user action. A five-step flow for the action can be something like this:

Land on the homepage

Go to the products section

Select a product

Add to Cart

Good user experience is when all the steps leading to a user action is simple and intuitive.

List down the action. Make sticky notes for the steps. A certain user action can have multiple paths leading to it. Ensure that each step is clear and simple while designing your product.

Less Is More

When it comes to positive user experience, complicated is not the word we are looking for.

One of the most important principles of good user experience is to keep your design clutter free. Less is always more when it comes to good UI/UX.

For positive user experience, your user should have to perform minimum tasks. The tasks and steps should be clean and highly clear.

Don’t make the user think. Good user experience ensures that a user finds what they need to, finds it without worry and finds it fast.

Evoke emotions

Each user action on your product page has to evoke a user emotion.

From curiosity to delight and satisfaction, a good experience is one where the user is continually feeling a positive emotion.

Design plays a vital role in inducing user emotions. You can use a combination of shapes, color, content, sound, and elements to bring out user emotions. Good user experience is one that encourages desired user action by invoking positive emotions.

Conclusion

Great user experience is science. Designing a visually appealing product is easy but designing a product that can bring joy and user satisfaction requires time, effort and empathy.  In the end, your product is as good as the user emotion it induces.