Whether you are hiring a professional mobile app or website designer and developer or are a designer yourself, it is important that you approach your next redesign with the goal of solving problems.
All too often, businesses and even professional designers approach projects with the goal of creating something “fantastic” looking without stopping to think what problems are they solving or how they are helping the end users.
Approach your next redesign with the goal of solving problems
This is natural because we all want our website or mobile app to look great. However, without first considering how you will help the intended users, you may totally miss the mark with your next design and not be properly serving your users.
Start out the project by becoming an investigator. By starting out with an open-minded investigative approach you can determine how your users use your site and what problems they are attempting to solve when they are there. Keep in mind, there will be many different perspectives and developing an understanding for these will allow you to better serve all parties involved. If you don’t take the time to do this research, you may miss the mark completely or solve only for a few of the reasons that users visit your website or mobile app.
Proper research will allow you to consider the user experience holistically. You will be able to make connections between users and their goals. This will allow you to generate a truly powerful design that solves problems for your user base.
Think about designing your next website or mobile app like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Doing research is similar to getting all the pieces together before assembling the puzzle. The information you gather will serve as a baseline for your project helping you understand correlations and constraints.
One of the most important parts of preparing for a website or mobile app development project is communicating with your partners. Talk with internal stakeholders about what they need and want from the new release. The more in sync you are with their needs the more you can make adjustments to better serve them.
Make sure you take the time to have conversations with some of your customers. Find out what they like about your current website and find out what they don’t. Look at analytics and determine why they are currently coming to your site and what they are doing when they are there.
As you learn more about what different stakeholders want and the problems that they have or are trying to solve, you may realize that those issues overlap and by making good decisions during the design phase you can help everyone involved.
Once you understand the issues, you can figure out how to balance this information, or at a minimum, you can pass it on to the designer you have hired and it will help them create something that will better serve your needs. This information should not be considered as constraints. This information will empower you with the ability to create something that solves problems and helps relevant stakeholders. By following this process it will help you streamline and improve key processes.
Develop an understanding of the short term and long term goals for the project. What outcomes are you expecting to see after the project is completed? This will help you understand what changes need to be made so that you can achieve those goals. If you design a new site only having the goal of having something more modern looking you are missing a tremendous opportunity to create something that really benefits you and your users. Are you trying to generate more raw leads? Are you trying to generate more sales? Are you trying to make information easier to find? Its hard to have a successful redesign if you don’t know what you are trying to accomplish.
Think about what has already been attempted. What has worked & what has not are important to know. It’s immensely valuable to identify what hasn’t worked and the reasons behind it. Try to look beyond the details and consider why something worked or didn’t work. Dig in and understand the background context to empower you to make the right decisions going forward.
While you don’t need to code if you are having a website or mobile app built, but you should have a basic understanding of the technical constraints of the project. This will help you understand timelines as well as help you know when and where you can come up with creative solutions to obstacles that occur along the way. If you don’t have a basic understanding of the process and the parts involved you will be at a serious disadvantage while your project is underway.
Pay careful attention to you intended go-live date and make sure you are able to set reasonable milestones to make sure you are able to go live when you want to do so. Setting key milestones and understanding the work needed to reach each is important for staying on schedule. Pay attention to what parts of the project are most relevant and have the biggest impact. If you don’t know what areas those are make sure you talk to the designers and developers you are working with to make sure you have a proper understanding. Otherwise, if you start to miss deadlines and don’t have a proper idea of how long it will take to reach each milestone you may find yourself way behind and not able to make up time. Pay attention to tasks that need to be completed before other work that is to follow, it’s essential that early components are completed on time if timetables are to be met. If you have tight timelines, determine if you need to strip back some features from the initial release and focus on an MVP version.
Image: Wall Boat (Flikr) http://bit.ly/2U1zK9x
To create user interfaces that really capture the attention of users it is important that you pay attention to details.
One of the details that maybe doesn’t seem worth spending time on but definitely is worth rolling up your sleeves and digging into is micro-interactions. Micro-interactions are the little actions that happen before, during, and after a user engages with a website or mobile app and should be a part of your website or mobile app development process.
Micro-interactions help the user feel rewarded for taking an action.
Micro-interactions help guide users when they are using your interface by offering noticeable responses to behaviors confirming that the system has received their input. To summarize a micro-interaction, when a user takes an action, the interface responds in a pleasing way that engages the user.
Use micro-interactions to improve user engagement
Well thought out micro-interactions improve user engagement on websites, mobile apps and other products.
Take the time to consider the experience a person has with your website or mobile app, what do they see, feel and think while utilizing your user interface? Is it a joy to use? Are they excited? Do they want to tell their friends about it?
Often nuances such as micro-interactions are overlooked in the rush to get your website or mobile app live. But if you think about it, the user interfaces that you really enjoy using and that you tell your friends about are the ones where somebody took the time to sweat the small stuff.
Have you ever been on a mobile app or web site and thought to yourself “Wow! That is cool” when you were surprised by an unexpected detail? These are the kind of things that make an interface a joy to use and keep users coming back.
If you are not familiar with micro-interactions, here are a few basic examples that you might be familiar with:
Usability
Usability is one of the key factors of great interface design. Great usability often includes micro-interactions. Micro-interactions encourage engagement and help users understand how an interface works.
These small details may seem insignificant, but from a user experience standpoint, they genuinely make a huge difference between an interface that is just ok and an interface that is exceptional. These micro-interactions help the user feel rewarded for taking an action and can help teach them how to use the interface in a pleasant way.
Image: Fouquier (Flikr) http://bit.ly/2QVLFUF
Frequently when a designer sites down to work on a web site design, they think they know all about web users and what they are looking for from a web site. Unfortunately, all too often designers do nothing to check those assumptions. If they did, they would most likely find out that they are off the mark with their conjecture.
Web site designs that are not rooted in a solid understanding of a brand’s users along with their needs are destined to under perform. If you don’t understand what a user wants or needs from a site you can’t possibly know what to offer or how to offer it.
It is important that before you begin designing that you not only understand the site’s users’ requirements but also develop a sound understanding of their thought process, purchase journey, constraints and the environment in which they view the web site. User experience designers rely on this information and by leveraging it are able to create web sites that have far superior results. In fact, IBM believes the benefit of user experience design can be up to 100 times what is invested in it.
Spend the time to develop an understanding about your users. After you have done that, create personas based on the information you have learned. Make sure you consider user demographics, wants and needs, and other relevant factors when creating your persona. You will find that personas are not etched in stone; they should evolve as you learn more about your users. From there you can create designs that satisfy the needs of your personas.
While working on your designs you want to make sure you don’t forget who the target audience is. Good design is a product of good research. While designing make sure you consider user interactions; think about the functionality of the website and design a site that will help users complete their intended tasks smoothly and efficiently. You need a good understanding of what your base is looking for and from there; you should help them to find it easily.
The quality of a web site’s design relates directly to conversion rates. Things like complicated navigation, slow load times, and hard-to-read type turn users away. Seek instead for your design to focus on clarity and simplicity. Clear, intuitive designs make conversions much more likely. Your site should feature simple, logical and intuitive controls
Another factor that is important to good design is having your information prioritized in a hierarchy that makes sense to your users. Graphics can be used to help define this hierarchy and set a clear path for site visitors to follow. Visually appeal is important as well. You will want your home page and every page on your website to be attractive. Your website is the public face of your brand.
Pic: Tibor Kovacs (Flikr) http://bit.ly/2cG6pe7