User experience (UX) is vital to a digital product’s success or failure in the market. Whether your website or mobile app generates traffic and downloads and the subsequent value depends on the user experience. It is as important as the service you are offering or the goods you’re selling.
UX entails having a deep understanding of your product users, what they need, their value, abilities, and limitations. It also details the business goals and objectives of the group managing the project. The best experience is when those goals are aligned with what your users want and are enjoying on your product.
User experience has grown to accommodate more than usability, and it is important to pay attention to all facets of the user experience to deliver successful products to the market. Below are factors that influence UX by Peter Morville, a pioneer in the UX field who is an author and advises many Fortune 500 companies on UX.
- Make it useful
Your product has to be useful and serve a purpose for you to bring it to the market. It has to be original and fulfill a need; otherwise, it won’t compete in the market full of purposeful and useful products. Note that ‘useful’ is in the eye of the beholder, and products can be considered ‘useful’ if they deliver non-practical benefits like fun and appeal.
- Make it findable
Your product must be easy to find, and in the case of digital and information products, the content within them must be easy to find too. Findability is very important to the user experience of products. If you picked a magazine and all the stories within are allocated page space at random rather than organized into sections such as sport, business, etc., you would find that experience rather disappointing.
Case in point? Your content should be navigable and locatable onsite and offsite
- Make it usable
Your content should be enabling consumers to effectively and efficiently achieve their end objective with your product. However, note that products can succeed if they are not usable but are less likely to do so. Most products fail due to poor usability with the first generation of the product.
Remember, the first generation of MP3 players lost their market to the more usable iPod when launched. iPod became the first truly usable MP3 player. So, you should ensure that your content is easy to use.
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- Make it desirable
Toyota and Porsche are both car manufacturers. They are useful, usable, findable, and accessible, but Porsche is more desirable than Toyota. Toyota has sold many cars under its brand but given a choice between a new Toyota or Porsche for free, most people would go for the Porsche.
Desirability is conveyed in design through branding, image, identity, aesthetics, and emotional designs. These designs evoke emotions and appreciation. The more desirable a product is, the more the user will brag it to their friends and create desire.
- Make it accessible
Your company should provide an experience that can be accessed by users of a full range of abilities, including the partially disabled. Most companies have the impression that people with disabilities make up a small percent of the population; hence see it as a waste of money.
Do not neglect accessibility in user experience. When you design for accessibility, you will find that you create easier products for everyone to use, not just those with disabilities.
- Make it credible
Credibility correlates to the ability of the user to trust the product that you have provided. This includes the information provided with it is accurate and fit for purpose. It is almost impossible to provide user experience if the user thinks the product creator is a lying clown with bad intentions. They will take their business elsewhere instead.
There are plenty of options in almost every field for them to choose a credible product provider. So, your users must trust and believe what you tell them.
- Make it valuable
Your product should also deliver value to the business, creating it and the consumer who uses it. Without value, the initial success of the product will be greatly undermined. The value of a product is one of the key influences on purchasing decisions.
I hope these factors will aid you in building traffic to your website and downloads for your apps. These factors are part of the formula behind the most successful websites and mobile apps on the internet. Note that these considerations only complement a problem-solving digital product. You start from the basics of product development.
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