What Does Great UX Design Look Like
Tags: Usability, Information Architecture, Charisol, UX Design, Product Strategy

Source — Daniel Korpai/Unsplash

If great UX design isn’t part of your product strategy in 2021, it’s safe to say you haven’t been following the news lately. Great UX Design has now become the minimum standard for every successful digital product, and not paying attention or investing serious resources into the exceptional design of your digital experiences is in some ways a leak in your business model, and will in most cases open the gates for your competition to take a bite from your market share.

The disadvantages of a horrible user experience are numerous, and considering the fact that you may have a number of competitors in your space, having a horrible user experience may just be your competition’s best growth strategy (look at that last sentence again and let it sink in).

In one of our most recent articles, we shared about the importance of great user experience and what it could mean for the bottom-line of your business. However, in this piece, we’ve decided to do something different and answer a more pertinent question — what does great UX design look like?

Great UX design

A well designed digital product/experience is a product that has taken into account certain factors and components into its design and formulation. These factors when brought together and executed effectively will usually lead to a properly designed user experience. Without further ado, here are four factors that influence great user experience design.

Factors that Influence Great User Experience Design

Information Architecture

If you’ve ever walked into a poorly designed mall, you’ll know exactly what I mean. Imagine walking into a mall and having to ask almost everyone you meet on every aisle where so, so and so is, that is exactly what poor information architecture looks like.

Unlike a mall where you can ask questions, on a website or a mobile application, there are not very many people to ask questions, and when users eventually get frustrated because they can’t find stuff, the next best thing to do is to look for someone else who offers the same service and patronize them.

Information Architecture determines the arrangement of content on your site or application. The core goal of information architecture is to make things easy to find. Information architecture will usually embrace a lot of cognitive research to enable designers make decisions based on the appropriate mental models that fit their target audiences. Poor information architecture has the capacity to completely ruin the user experience of an end user as not being able to readily find/locate information when necessary or spending too much time looking for certain things is a horrible user experience in itself, and may encourage a user to adopt or patronize a competitor if the barrier to exit is low enough.

Visual Design

The next most important part of an exceptional user experience is Visual design. Visual design determines how a good product should look, and what kind of look resonates the most with your target audience.

Visual design is largely focused on the more aesthetically inclined features of a product. Visual design has a positive effect on the overall user experience of a product and is responsible for determining the product themes and color orientation, button sizes and shapes and a host of other features that come together to influence the visual representation of the product in question.

Interaction Design

Interaction design is responsible for influencing a large part of the human to computer interactions that users undergo. Interaction design based on research determines how a certain product feature can and should be interacted with. This could mean the kind of micro interactions design elements undergo; like when you click on the menu button, how does it unfold, or how do pages open when you click on them, or what kind of interactions occur when you click on certain buttons, like a CTA button etc. Interaction design defines how those interactions occur and what kind of interactions would be appropriate for such processes and models.

The importance of interaction design cannot be overemphasized as the micro interactions that occur while a user is navigating through a website will play a large role in the users perception of the user experience of that product.

Usability

In the end, after all is said and done, the usability of a product matters a lot. Regardless of how good a product is, if people cannot use it effectively for the core purpose it was intended for, it isn’t a great product, and will likely not meet up to its KPI.

Usability is strongly focused on navigation; how easy it is for a user to get from one place to another on your website/product, error prevention; making it difficult for people to make wrong decisions that impede their progress and choices while they interact with your product, feedback; how quickly and easily does the system give feedback when actions are taken, consistency; how consistent is the design language of the solution, visual clarity, familiarity and flexibility are the other key focal points of a system trying to aim and achieve high usability.

The usability of a product is extremely important, and is one of the key features designers measure throughout the development process, from wireframes to the final deliverable, to ensure maximum usability.

Conclusion

Building a digital product and incorporating great UX design into it for its formation may not be a walk in the park for everyone, but it is definitely not rocket science. Understanding and making the most of the points aligned above may just be keys to incorporating great UX design into your digital products.