What makes a good user experience?

Have you ever considered how your product experiences make people feel? Do users find a value in what you provide to them? Does your product solve their problems? Is it easy to use, or maybe makes them feel confused?

 

By keeping your users feelings in mind, you can design a good and strong user experience that help users to do what they need when interacting with your business, website, mobile app or other services, and finally to build relationships. Sounds like there are many things and situations (ex. different user stories, different personas) to consider, however nowadays, focusing on the user is essential in process of every product and every business strategy.

If so, what aspects to consider in order to assume a good quality of user experience?

 

Usability

Ease of use is a necessary step to achieve a good user experience. This is what makes the interface looking simple and functional. It’s main assumption is to minimize user effort when solving problems and using your product. That’s why before implementing any actions, you should try to answer a few questions, such as:

1. Who are the product users?

2. What needs do they have?

3. What are their values?

4. What problems do they have?

5. Which of their problems is my product trying to solve?

Answering these questions, doing some researches, or even interviewing your prospective users, will put you one step closer to meet your user needs and expectations, and help you create a fully useful and usable product. But - although usability is essential, it's still not sufficient to achieve a good user experience.

 

Satisfaction

Users want to be satisfied when interacting with your product - and this feeling accompanies when something meets, or even exceeds their needs and expectations in a good way. Once they see something makes them happy, they are more willing to share it with the world. That’s why, by keeping user satisfaction in your mind when designing, you can create a product which can go beyond being visually attractive to delivering a good quality user experience.

For example, when using an app, user swipes to remove an item and that item immediately disappears - user gets an instant feedback making him satisfied.

The Interface

The role of UI (User Interface) is much more than just elements making the product looking nice and visual attractive. The UI refers to all of the visual elements of your product, including screens, icons, text and so on, to enhance usability and support the quality of user experience. Interface design creates the user’s first impression about your product. Well designed UI can also embody your values and create emotional connections between users and the product.

 

Conclusion

By considering a holistic UX design in the product process, you can greatly improve the quality of the user experience. Not only visually attractive interfaces, but also intuitive design - that meets users needs and solves their problems - is a key to make users feel comfortable - and leads to better business results and also user outcomes.